Sermons from the Pulpit
Getting With the Program
Preached to Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ on the second Sunday in Lent, March 19, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-19; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:27-38
Avram, Avraham, Abraham, whatever we call him, is the father of us all, says the apostle Paul to the Romans and to us - not biologically, unless we happen to be Jewish, but our father in faith, our father by faith, the father of our faith. Paul so elevates Abraham that Abraham overshadows everyone in the Bible, overshadows even Moses the lawgiver, everyone except the Messiah himself. And the reason why Paul makes so much of Abraham is: Paul believes Abraham is the man of perfect faith. Abraham trusted God extravagantly. He believed what God told him and did what God called upon him to do even when there was no evidence to support his doing so, even when it contradicted all evidence and experience and probability and even morality.
Yet here is a puzzle: Paul does not even mention how Abraham laughed, fell down and rolled around on the floor laughing, when God made him this bizarre promise that in the hundredth year of his age, and the ninetieth year of his wife's, Sarah's, age, they would conceive and she would give birth to a baby boy. Now Paul knew his Torah, knew it inside out: He had to know what it says here in Genesis about Abraham's laughter, and Sarah's too, for that matter, since she also got a giggle out of the good news.
But Paul evidently does not count this against the faith of Abraham or Sarah. He does not count it as unfaith, even though I always thought God sounded slightly offended by it. Maybe I was reading that in. Maybe God has no problem with Abraham's and Sarah's laughter. After all, it is God who tells them to name the boy Yitzhak, Isaac, he laughs. That does suggest that God gets the joke, perhaps even that it is God's joke.
Now God was not kidding, since God actually delivered Isaac, so to speak. But God also delivered comedy. These two old crocks, "as good as dead," getting in the family way. If it happened to you, you'd either laugh or you'd die of self-pity. This is how God makes good on promises. This is how God operates. God is deadly serious, yes, but God is also something of a prankster. And Abraham and Sarah are laughing not from disbelief, as we generally assume, but from sheer delight not only at the end result, the birth of the boy Isaac, but also at the process, at the way God plays gotcha. They understand that they are players in a comedy, the comedy called life.
According to Professor Eliezer Segal of the University of Calgary, that's in Alberta, "A long-standing Jewish tradition sees the career of Abraham as a sequence of trials, commencing with his call to leave his homeland for an unidentified destination, and culminating in the command to sacrifice his son. Perhaps we are justified in seeing the present episode as a trial of a different sort: Had Abraham and Sarah not reacted to God's promise with irrepressible laughter, then they would have failed the test! They would have been declared unworthy bearers of God's covenant."
Twice in this story we read that Abraham "fell on his face." The first time is at the beginning, when God appears and announces, "I am God Shaddai" - literally the god of the wilderness mountains, which is what the patriarchs called God before the days of Moses. Abraham falls on his face in awe and reverence. It is the way he worships, the way he prays, the way he behaves in the presence of God.
We are different. We do not fall on our faces before God. We bow our heads. Not too much. Just a bit. We want to show the proper degree of reverence and humility, but we don't want to get silly about it. Abraham and Sarah belong to a time and a place, a culture, which apparently has no such inhibitions.
Or maybe it's not all a matter of cultural differences: maybe Abraham's behavioral extravagance is the key to the extravagance of his faith. He does not hold back in any way. He throws himself into these things. He plunges into them. Hook, line and sinker, the whole nine yards. He is not a halfway sort of guy.
That's why I like this new translation of Genesis by Everett Fox, according to which God says to Abraham, "Walk in my presence! And be wholehearted!" Wholeheartedness is the opposite of ambivalence. Wholehearted means unhesitating, unfaltering, unqualified, unquestioning. So Abraham falls on his face twice before God, first in worship, then in laughter. And maybe the two are not that far apart.
And then we have poor Peter, who is anything but wholehearted. "Who do you say that I am?" Jesus asks them, and Peter, sounding like the very model of a man of faith, blurts out, "You're the Messiah!" But then he feels compelled to contradict the very next thing his Messiah says, and rebuke him for it.
Myself, I'm sympathetic to Peter and I want to cut him a little slack here. The Messiah was supposed to be another Moses, setting God's people free. The Messiah was supposed to be another King David, overcoming the people's enemies, leading them to victory. The Messiah wasn't supposed to "undergo great suffering, and be rejected, and be killed." That wasn't in the program. How could Peter have been expected to absorb it? How was he supposed to figure out that it was part of the deal?
Ah, but you see, that's exactly the point about Abraham and Sarah! If they are heroes and exemplars of faith, as Paul says and as the whole church has agreed for two thousand years, then faith does not need to figure things out. And Paul would say to Peter, maybe Paul actually did say to Peter at some point in the days of the apostolic church, he said, "Peter, get with the program. Either he's the Messiah or he isn't. Either you follow him or you don't. Nobody forced you to call him the Messiah. If your heart causes your voice to blurt out that that's who he is, then you go with him wherever he goes. All right, so you don't understand how suffering and being rejected and killed could be part of the deal. So you don't have to understand it! Nobody understands it. Just be quiet."
Well, I don't know if Paul ever had occasion to say that to Peter. More likely by the time Paul came along, Peter didn't need to be told anymore. It was long after Easter by the time those two were likely to be talking to each other.
But certainly Jesus took the opportunity, right here, to straighten Peter out. "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." That's harsh, isn't it? But it boils down to the same thing: Shut up and get with the program. The name "Satan" means "adversary." - the one who is against us, or against God, or from Jesus' perspective, against both. And he doesn't say, "Get out of my sight," although we tend to read it that way." "Get behind me" means literally what it says: Get back in line, Peter. Back me up, follow me. I'm the Messiah. You're the disciple. The Messiah doesn't conform to your specifications, but God's. Get used to it. If it strikes you as ridiculous, you don't have to protest. You can do what Abraham did in similar circumstances: You can laugh instead.
"Deny yourself," Jesus said. "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." As if our selves had no value, nothing worth keeping. We rebel against that negation of ourselves, it seems to go against our very instinct for survival. But if we take that attitude we are just repeating Peter's protest, rebuking Jesus still and again after all these years.
Mind you, the self which we are called upon to deny, the sinful self, the self that is cut off from God, is not necessarily some towering bundle of Satanic arrogance and egotism. The sinful self takes as many forms as there are humans. For some of us the self that needs to be denied is egotistical and arrogant. For others the self that needs to be denied is a perpetual, hapless victim, taking responsibility for nothing, convinced that there is no point in trying to change anything. For others still the interior Satan is despair or hopelessness. Which Satan is yours? Which Satan is ours collectively? Good questions, and for us as for Peter, Christ is ready and willing to answer them if we dare to ask, and to listen for the answer.
Let me finish with a theological vocabulary lesson. When it comes to dealing with the sinful self, God has two basic approaches. The first is justification, and this is how justification works: if your faith is like Abraham's, and if it is that is not an accomplishment but a gift from God - if your faith is like Abraham's, then God's steadfastness toward you is so powerful and so real to you that no matter how badly or how often you fall into sin and turn away from God, every next moment is like a rising from the water of baptism, forgiven and free and alive.
But God's second and equally important way of dealing with the sinful self is sanctification, and this is how sanctification works: God's steadfastness towards you not only frees you from whatever sin has been yours, it saves you from falling back into it again. It transforms you. It changes you. If you will, it turns you from Peter into Abraham, or it sets free the Abraham who lives, unrecognized and unfulfilled, in the soul of every Peter. And that is what I pray for wholeheartedly, with all my heart, for you and for me and for all the other children of Abraham. Walk in my presence! And be wholehearted!
Amen.
Walk in my presence! And be wholehearted!-Genesis 17:1 (Everett Fox translation)