OK, here is this Sunday's sermon. This was an odd one to produce for some reason. Just couldn't focus well enough for this one. Too many things on my mind this time, I guess. And each of the three readings could be the basis for several different sermons - a lot of options are possible, which doesn't help when one can't focus - and so this time I am not content with my own work and I was really tempted to just recycle and old sermon for you guys. However, the readings do dove tail, and old Dr. Hoefler at LTSS would have insisted that a truely good sermon touches on all of the readings (which I don't often do.) May this one be helpful to you. I will post some side notes in a day or two. Fred has a good question that no one has ever asked before, and I promised to have an answer soon!
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
3-8-2009, Lent 2B
Salem-Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, TN
Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
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Abram didn't expect a visit from his God, Yahweh. He really should have known better.
Abram followed a really strange God. Sometimes it was as if this odd ball God was just following Abram because he had nothing better to do, almost like some strange homeless person wandering about in the desert who had attached himself to Abram. He was a strange God who came and went with the desert wind, who didn’t have a decent home like the other, more respectable gods of Mesopotamia and Canaan and Egypt, didn’t have an image to bow down before, didn’t have a temple to live in, didn’t even have a decent name: he only said his name was Yahweh. I think a lot of professional commentators don’t respect the name enough to do more than give it a superficial and shallow meaning, usually something like “I am.” Actually it’s more like: “He-Who-Was--He-Who-Is,” and that has some really profound implications about God. Linguistically I can tell you why that is so, but you don’t want a boring lesson in linguistics, do you? One of my professors once commented that it’s a strange name in any language; it’s a strange name for a strange God and I think Abram’s relationship with God must have felt pretty strange at times.
I mean, how would you feel if you thought you had some invisible presence following you around, and in some way it speaks to you and it says it’s One-Who-Was--One-Who-Is, it pops in at the most inconvenient moments, it says and does some of the most incredible things, and then it just flitters away as if it’d never been there. You try to tell your friends about it, but they don’t believe you. Are you feeling OK? Is something bothering you? What’s wrong with you? You need to go to church more often, get some real religion, make a right decision to invite a real god into your life, believe in a true prophet, accept a true savior, stop making this stuff up, you really ought to see a shrink, you might have mental problems.
You wonder about poor old Abram and how he coped with this. He had enough problems as it was. He didn’t have any children of his own. True, he led a large group of nomads, his own household; everywhere he went a small ten city popped up around him. He was even able to lead his own group of over 300 armed men on one occasion to rescue his nephew Lot. (Gen. 14:14, 318 men actually, “his trained men, born in his house…”) He had servants, Eliezer and Hagar among them (Gen. 15:2-3; 16:1), he had one servant whose sole job was to manage his money (his steward was Eliezer), he seemed to be financially well off, the wealthy son of a wealthy merchant back in Ur with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. (Gen 13:2.) He was highly respected. His whole huge household called him Abram, “Exalted Father.”
But Abram and Sarai had no children of their own, and Ishmael, if you recall the story of Abram and Hagar, was not legitimate. (Gen. 16)
It must have weighed heavy on Abram, back at a time when they said if you lived to be 99 then you must be favored by the gods, but if you had no heirs then you must be cursed by the gods because without heirs you have no future. All of those gods were gods Abram had forsaken for that weird invisible presence that seemed at turns to follow him around and then to lead him on and tell him where to go next. And look where it got him. All of his servants and armed men and money and cattle and ancestry meant nothing. He had no legitimate heir. He had no future. He had no hope. In desperation Abram was ready to name his slave Eliezer as his heir.
Then one day Abram’s strange God Yahweh just sort of popped in unannounced in his usual fashion, just seemed to breeze in with the desert wind, and without any explanation at all old Yahweh just sort of casually made the most grandiose claim, "I am God almighty."
As you read it in Hebrew you get the impression of someone who just sort of shows up at Abram’s side and smiles and talks like the cat who just caught the canary. God knows a great big secret, and God is even amused by it all, and now God is going to share it with Abram. The best way to capture the sense of the reading here is to picture Gene Wilder in the 1960’s movie Willy Wonka: big wild eyes, a wild deliriously happy expression that verges on being manic, everything about his demeanor tells you he knows something really, really big and he’s about to drop it on you and he absolutely delights in doing this. That is God as God talks to Abram here.
God says more, "Walk before me, and be blameless, and I will make my covenant between me and you, and I will make you exceedingly numerous."
And now Abram has had enough. This takes the cake. This is too much! This is just too much! Abram fell face down on the ground. [Plunk!]
That didn't faze God in the least, makes no difference to God whether Abram‘s standing before
him or flat on his face. God just kept right on talking and said, "You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, “Exalted Father,” but your name shall be Abraham, “Father of a Multitude” for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. … I will establish my covenant between me and you, and all your descendants, to be God forever to you and all your descendants.”
From the beginning there has been no law to obey to make God's promise come about. This is why the Apostle Paul talks in Romans the way he does: “…the promise that he would inherit did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, then faith is null and the promise is void.“
Legalisms and litmus tests and decisions and invitations and vows and declarations and devotions and all the other fine points of the Law just don’t cut it when dealing with God. The fine print in the deal says human faith does not exist and God’s promise is void if it depends on Law. The only way to deal with God is to simply trust, which is to have faith in God who, out of sheer good will toward Abram and toward all humanity just casually says, "I am God almighty, walk before me." And when God says, "walk before me and be blameless," God isn't telling Abram to be blameless by following a bunch of laws, by making a decision to follow a God who has already decided to chose Abram as his own, or by inviting God into his life when God clearly did not wait for an invitation to begin with, but invites himself into Abraham’s life and invites Abraham into the kingdom. When God says, “Walk before me and be blameless,“ God is saying, "see what I can do for you." This is the good news that comes to us through Genesis.
Have you ever felt like Abraham? Have you ever been 19, or 39, or 59, and have felt like you're 99? Nothing new is going to happen, everything good that could happen is in the past, life today is boring, you have no prospects, no future. The present doesn't look so good, the future looks worse. And you don't expect visits from God. That happens only in the Bible, not here, not now, not to me.
Then one day, out of nowhere, God pops in unexpectedly and just casually gets the message across to you in some way that is unmistakable to you:
"I am God almighty."
Maybe, like Abraham, you would fall on your face. [Plunk!]
One day, many a year after Abraham God finally appeared for all of us in the person of Jesus.
Jesus taught that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and scribes, and then be killed, and then after 3 days rise again. He said all this very openly and when Jesus began teaching them this they were horrified. Surely he isn’t going to be that kind of messiah! Surely not! NO! Better if Jesus weren’t a messiah at all if he believes he has to suffer and die!
So Peter yanked him aside, I mean just grabbed him with both hands and hauled him off to the side and began to argue with him. Bible waters down the text for our modern ears. If you read this in Greek or even better, if you read the Aramaic New Testament that they use today in parts of the Middle East, then you’ll see this isn’t just a calm disagreement. Peter was in Jesus’ face and he was yelling at Jesus.
But that didn't faze Jesus in the least. Jesus is going to say these things anyway. Jesus is fulfilling God's promise, a promise first made to Abraham, a promise for all people, and Jesus is going to do what he says he will do. As far as he is concerned, this is what God wants to happen; this is the will of God.
So Jesus said to Peter, "Get behind me Satan!" You might say Jesus resorted to name calling here. This isn't some invisible horned devil with a pitchfork Jesus is talking to. This is Peter the disciple. Jesus has just called him his accuser, his adversary, his enemy. There is no stronger way for Jesus to say that Peter is standing in the way of what God wants to do. Jesus tells him "You aren't setting your mind on God's things, what God wants, and God‘s way of doing things. You are thinking about human things, what people want, and the human way of doing things."
I guess those disciples must have felt like falling on their face. Jesus told them how God would redeem them, and they didn't trust what Jesus said, so Jesus took the good news of God straight to the crowd.
Jesus called the crowd and said to them: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." "Be my disciple," Jesus said. And see what he can do for you:
Jesus was going to undergo great suffering and was going to be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and would be killed on the cross, and after three days would rise again. Jesus did this for us. He didn't do this for us because we obeyed the Law. He didn't do this for us because we were good enough to deserve it or because we earned it.
He did this for us because we have not obeyed those laws in the Bible, because we aren't good
enough, haven't deserved it, haven't earned it. He did this for us because God keeps promises. When God said to Abram, "I will make a promise between us, between you and me and between me and your descendants, that your descendants will have a place to live where I will be their God," that was a promise God meant to keep, even if it meant giving God's only Son, the Son of Man, Jesus, so that all who believe in him can live in God's kingdom.
It will not be popular. It is not what Peter wants. It will defy the Pharisees and their obedience to Law for salvation. It will defy the priests and their sacrifices for salvation in the temple. It will defy the Roman Empire and all its power over every single person in the land. And it will defy the enemy of God, evil and death and sin.
Jesus knows he will not take over the world, but he will do something greater, something better. He will set the world free from the power of evil, sin, and death and so he will defeat the enemy of God. He will make the way of salvation for many, and open the gates of the real kingdom of God for all people.
And even as he did this for Peter, his hot headed, loud-mouthed, emotionally unstable number one disciple who became his enemy for a day because he did not understand, so too he has done it for us.
Abraham knew. God is strange. God is strange because God delights in doing things that benefit undeserving people, things that go against common wisdom and defy convention, things like giving Abraham and Sarah a son. God does whatever God wants, regardless of what people think. And what God wants to do is the most incredible thing:
God wants to be our God for all time.
The gates of the kingdom now stand open for us. The gift of salvation has been handed to us. The bonds of sin have been stricken from us, and now we are free people in the sight of God.
All that remains now is for us to accept our freedom and to live as the people of God. Trust this strange God who makes promises, follow Jesus who makes the promise come alive, and just see what he can do for you.
Peace be with you.
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