Proper 8 A

The tension in the Abraham and Isaac story (Genesis 22.1-9) is intensified by the spareness of the narrative. Abraham gives no word of consent to God’s command that he slaughter his son. Abraham gives no acknowledgement, neither yes nor no. He simply saddles his ass and prepares for the three day journey to Mount Moria. Abraham’s silence is only broken by his instructions to the two servants who have accompanied him. Wait here, he tells them. He and Isaac will shortly return. But Abraham believes he will return alone. He thinks he is keeping the servants from knowing the whole picture. We know that it is Abraham who doesn’t know the whole picture.

As Abraham and Isaac walk off together up the mountain, the silence is broken once again, this time by Isaac. Where is the sheep for the sacrifice, he asks his father. Again Abraham hides what he knows. God will provide, he says. And again, it is Abraham who doesn’t know.

Abraham prepares an altar, ties up his son, lays him across the firewood and reaches for his knife. Curiously, all this again happens in silence. The narrative is not interested in what Isaacx may be “feeling” or whether or not he is crying out. This is a story about Abraham. Abraham alone is the focus.

An angel of Yahweh calls his name, Abraham! Abraham! Abraham answers as he had to the voice of God in the beginning. Here I am. Yes. Abraham is told to lay down the knife, for God has seen how dedicated he is. A ram is provided for the sacrifice, and Abraham is promised once again that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the skies and the sands of the seashore.

This bare, skeletal narrative of the Abraham and Isaac story won’t allow us to ask the kind of questions today’s reader might like to ask, questions about the horrors of such blind, unquestioning obedience, for instance. This is no psychological novel.

We need to look elsewhere for meaning. This is the Abraham who proved his faith by leaving family behind in Mesopotamia in order to become the father of a new family. The definition of his life is gripped in paradox. Accordingly, here, the son who embodies this promise of countless descendents in future generations is being taken up to Mount Moria to be sacrificed. Again, Abraham must prove he is the one who will be blessed by offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky by his willingness to sacrifice his “only” son. To make an analogy with the gospel, those who seek to gain their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Those who lose them for his sake will gain them. This is the mystery we are confronting on Mount Moria. Despite the vividness of this narrative, it is not a psychological thriller, but the explication of a paradox as old as the hills. Those who die will live. Those who, like Abraham, empty themselves in selfless hospitality gain. Those who withhold hospitality (the sin of Sodom) lose. The meaning of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice the single means of God’s promise coming true for him is the same meaning we saw in his selfless hospitality. Here we meet the paradox in its starkest form, and in the paradoxical journey away from family to become a family.

The gospel (Matthew 10) has said that anyone who subordinates the demands of discipleship to family is “not worthy” of Jesus. Likewise, in the reading for this Sunday disciples who are willing to risk rejection, hatred, even death in order to bring the truth of Christ to the ends of the world are welcomed not for themselves but for this Jesus who sent them; and, ultimately, they welcome the presence of the one who sent Jesus. The mystery is the same: those who die will live. Our discipleship makes our lives transparent to the presence of God. That is life. When our lives become opaque, that is death. But through baptism we have moved from death to life.

When Paul says (Romans 6.23) that the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, he picks up this paradox. Death, here, is something you have to work for, a life of burdens, slavery to weariness. Life, on the other hand, is liberating and free. The real death Jesus died was a death to sin (Romans 6.10). We are invited to see ourselves, in our discipleship, as dead to sin and alive to Christ (Romans 6.11). Eternal life is what the Gospel of John says it is: knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ, whom he has sent (John 17.3). It has to do with hospitality, the capacity to empty ourselves in imitation of Christ, discipleship. The invitation is to a way of living, not to pie in the sky when you die, as the song says.

Proper 7 A

Genesis 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39.

This is Refugee Week. Sarah, jealous for Isaac of Abraham’s son by the Egyptian slave Hagar, demands that Hagar and the child be banished. Abraham obeys, even while he is full of regret. In Islamic tradition, all this comes as a command from God, not Sarah, by the way. Hagar and her son Ishmael (Ismael in Arabic) go out into the wilderness of Be’er Sheva to die.

One agenda excludes another. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t come bringing peace, but conflict. His agenda must have priority, and so it is with the promise to Abraham and Sarah. So the story of Hagar’s exile informs not only the stories told by the many displaced people seeking asylum in our world today and their vulnerability. It also informs what is perhaps the primary conflict of our time, the conflict between the sons of Abraham, the Jewish/Christian community and the Moslem East. Ismael is the father of the Arabs.

The story is concrete and contemporary. I thought of Ismael’s exile the other day when I was speaking with an Iraqi man we know, a failed asylum seeker living in destitution, shunned by the people he is living among because his story is not their story. When he came to this country nine years ago asylum seekers were allowed to work, and he had landed a job with Royal Mail working in a local post office. But then the immigration authorities changed the rules. He was no longer allowed to work, and had to live instead on the meagre allowance given to those who were seeking asylum. But even that support has been exhausted, and as he awaits an appeal of his failed petition, he lives off the good will of friends and acquaintances, the Refugee Council and our church. I thought he was beginning to look quite emaciated. We arranged to give him a lift to Birmingham, where someone he knows may have a place for him to live as he awaits the appeal. We gave him a fiver—all we had—and he wept. Here is the living Ismael, exiled to the wilderness because there is no room for his story in the mainstream story the rest of us were living by.

The meaning of the Genesis story is that God’s concerns are always bigger than ours. No matter how you interpret the inheritance of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it’s still a tribal thing, a story that excludes, something by nature partial and incomplete. The author of what we are reading is deeply aware of this, and shows God’s care for the excluded. God brings water to the wilderness for Hagar and her son, and promises that the child will become the father of a great nation. There is a tension between tribalism and universalism here that runs like a bright thread throughout Israel’s troubled history. Israel’s literature is acutely aware of the larger narrative, and acutely aware of its own ambivalent position (even though the same cannot always be said about the Zionist ideology of Israel as a modern state). Today at a conference called "Fear, Democracy and Religion" (the third in a series here in Wales bringing Christian and Muslim leaders together in dialogue), Robin Morrison, Church and Society advisor for the Church in Wales (Anglican), said "My trust in God ends when I think I can erect the boundaries of my faith and police them." My trust needs to be in a God that is bigger than anything I believe. If I erect doctrinal limits to God, I am in sin. And yet I cannot avoid speaking of God in language that is limited and culture specific. The Abraham and Hagar story teaches us the pain of this paradox.

The gospel reading from Matthew 10 provides profound commentary on this Genesis story. This conclusion to the discourse on sending the twelve brings home the central good news in Matthew that the sending of the twelve into the world parallels the sending of Christ into the world, a mission to those in peril by one who himself began life as a refugee, a mission to the lost, the harassed, to those whose spirits have been crushed, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The concern is no longer tribal. It reaches back to Israel’s incipient self-critical universalism to become a mission to “the ends of the earth”, with a God that is the God of both Isaac and Ismael.

We recall last week’s reading, in which Jesus (the Lamb of God) sees his own harassed people as sheep without a shepherd, and sends the twelve to them as sheep among the sheep, as lambs as vulnerable to the menace of the wolves as those they are sent to. Jesus himself has pioneered the way, “numbered among the transgressors”, as Isaiah said. The twelve should not think of themselves as immune from the kind of suffering Jesus endured. Those who read the Gospel of Matthew already know the basic story, of course, and here the cross is mentioned for the first time in this gospel. The path of discipleship is the way of the cross. If Jesus was called the devil incarnate, they will be, too. It’s no easy street, but Jesus says don’t let them get to you. Peacemakers must learn to immerse themselves in the conflict their vision of justice for the dispossessed generates among those wed to the status quo. No truth worth telling is without conflict, and it must be spoken openly and courageously.

The mystery behind the sending of the twelve as unprotected lambs in the midst of such conflict is the mystery of the incarnation itself. What the incarnation attempts to teach through symbolic narrative, “myth”, if you will, is just this sense of being “sent” into a world of conflict, born into a world where Herod’s soldiers are out to get you, or, as Luke would have it, where there is no hospitality at the inn. The incarnation is a metaphor of our own vocation as disciples to put flesh on the Word of God through action and engagement among the excluded. The mission to the “ends of the earth” undertaken at the end of this gospel is not to be understood as expansionist empire building in the way monotheistic religions can too often operate, as if all the values pursued throughout this gospel were suddenly thrown away at the end, but a going out in solidarity with the lost sheep and with those like Ismael who find themselves in exile, or to those who are crushed in spirit, those who mourn, the anawim of the Beatitudes. This is the way of the cross, the new life into which we who have died with Christ are reborn in our baptism.

Proper 6 A

Genesis 18.1-15, Matthew 9.35-10.23. The mysteries behind our lessons for this Sunday are almost unbearably deep. First of all, the three visitors receiving the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 are also God in some strange and ambiguous way. They are addressed in verse 3 as “my Lord” (adonai), a word with neither gender nor number, which is either a term for God or a general term of respect. Later in the story, “the Lord” appears to be one of the three, as the other two travel off on their own to visit Lot in Sodom. The three certainly constitute a divine presence—and we remember our favourite Orthodox icon of the Trinity depicting these three. In any case, God in Hebrew thinking seems to have had a plural dimension.

We can imagine, in the light of the Matthew story, these three visitors sent to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. They are bringing news of an unexpected inbreaking future. The hospitality factor is crucial. The hospitality is a present reality revealing and anticipating the promised future. In India they have this popular yet profound saying, that “the guest is God”. In Calvinism we have a different saying, “letting God be God”, which has to do with God’s sovereign authority. The Hindu saying is much more relevant to this Sunday’s lessons. The godness of God is somehow connected to the hospitality of the host, which, in a sense, allows God to happen. God is more of a verb than a noun, more of a relationship at least than a something. For the Calvinist the godness of God happens when the believer becomes open to conversion, but such moments of conversion are never genuine unless that include concrete acts of hospitality to ordinary others, both stranger and neighbour. The guest is God. Calvin himself would have understood this. For him the foundation of all theology was an understanding of God unavailable apart from the understanding of self, and the self could never be understood without understanding God. Scholastic Calvinism post-Synod of Dort loses this tension, as do the Barthian neo-orthodox, who put too much weight on God and lose the human dimension altogether. God becomes so removed and abstracted from human experience that he becomes an irrelevant cipher, the sort of thing people like Don Cupit and the God-is-dead movement people used to enjoy writing about. I think the Arminians, defeated at Dort, came closer to maintaining that original tension between God and human experience. Oh dear, I fear I am getting much too academic here. Let's go back to the readings.

The link between the Matthew reading and the Genesis reading is not hospitality as such but failed hospitality. Matthew 10.15 warns that for those who refuse hospitality to the twelve the judgement will be worse than for Sodom and Gomorrah, the story immediately following the Abraham and Sarah episode. You will remember that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the inhospitable reception of the two men who had come to visit Lot, a story that is basically the same story we read in the story of the Levite and his concubine at the end of Judges. Current scholarly opinion is that the Judges story is the earlier of the two. Both stories show that the culture of hospitality so deep seated in the Near East even today is no final virtue. As the Levite gives the crowd his concubine to gang rape, so Lot offers his two (betrothed!) virgin daughters, only to be held back from doing so by the heavenly visitors, who then obliterate Sodom and Gomorrah. Hospitality can be problematic. The promise needs to be bigger than ordinary human convention.

In Matthew of course the story of failed hospitality seems to reflect the trials and persecutions experienced by the early Christian community that constituted his readership. Jesus sends the twelve out as sheep among wolves. Augustine comments that this is a brilliant move. The common strategy is to send out wolves among sheep and, indeed, the well-meaning predatory manipulation of a vulnerable public that passes for evangelical strategy in today’s world tells us what Augustine is talking about. Don’t leave conversions to accident, the professional evangelists say. It is amazing how so many consultants in church growth have adopted the theories and methods of modern marketing. They ought to read Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda. Ellul's chilling account of how we communicate and how churches have adopted the communication strategies of the business community warns that you cannot adopt the media of communication without adopting the predatory ideology. It comes as a package, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can separate the two. Most contemporary evangelism operates as wolves among sheep. Jesus wants us to throw off the power evangelism and operate as sheep among wolves.

The twelve are sent empty handed and without resources, vulnerable enough to evoke a spirit of hospitality in anyone with any human sensitivity, and thus enable the God-event to happen. Their unaccomodated journey is stripped not only of its survival kit but of the trappings of office and authority abandoned in the very journey of incarnation, an existential emptiness that, as in King Lear, enables us to touch the deepest dimension of being human, and, so, open to the hospitality of others. This, at the end of the day, is mission in reverse. We allow those we meet to enable the God-event to happen through their hospitality and our capacity to be guests in their presence. Thus the good news, so unexpected and so miraculous that it brought laughter to old Sarah, is experienced when the missionary is able to listen and so confer dignity and authority upon the host. The genius is to be sent as sheep among wolves. This is the way of the cross. It can change the world.

It is interesting to observe that "sheep" occur three times in this reading. First, Jesus describes the harassed and helpless crowd as being "like sheep without a shepherd" (9.36). Second, the twelve are sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10.6), to those Jesus has observed in their harassed and helpless state, but specifically to their particular socio-political situation--not to just anyone, as if the good news had some kind of bland, generic applicability to just anyone. And third, the twelve themselves are to contextualize themselves in the very harassed, helpless world of those who will become their hosts. They are to go"like sheep" into the midst of wolves (10.16). They will have no more protection, no more status than those they are being sent to. This is the gospel narrative in little, isn't it? It also repeats the narrative of the Exodus, in which Yahweh sees the oppression of the Hebrews and sends Moses to deliver them. The same promise, "I will be with you", is repeated in this story: "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me" (10.40). The guest is God. Christ 'R' Us.