Makeover.

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16.

I.

            Back at the beginning of chapter 12, God calls Abraham to leave his home and journey to Canaan, where God promises to make of his descendants a great nation.  Abraham is 75 years old.  They sojourn in Canaan for many years.  God keeps repeating the promise.  Abraham and Sarah keep getting older.  Sarah has long since reached the age where childbearing is possible. 

            Tired of waiting, in chapter 16 they have this brainstorm that “God helps those who help themselves.”  They take matters into their own hands and choose interpret God’s promise in terms of what is possible.  They figure God must mean that Abraham will children by Hagar, Sarah’s slavegirl.  Then, according to legal standards of the time, Sarah could adopt that child and it would be as if it were her own.

            This plan doesn’t work.  So, Hagar does bear Abraham a child, named Ishmael.  But this approach is not God’s intention for them.  That was not what the promise meant. 

            God insists that Abraham will have children by Sarah.  Sarah is an indispensable and equal part of the covenant.  Her motherhood is just as important as Abraham’s fatherhood.  Abraham may have as many children as he can, by whatever women.  But these offspring will not represent or fulfill God’s promise.  Their perhaps well-meaning scheme to help God’s promise along a bit, fails.

            In spite of their self-serving creativity in interpreting God’s words, God still comes back to Abraham here in chapter 17 and reiterates the promise.  Abraham doesn’t get punished for trying to force the matter.  God appears to be used to human disobedience by now, and pays it no mind, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of God’s larger plan.  God realizes that people, even his chosen and faithful servants, are going to be self-centered jerks no matter what. 

            God just kind of rolls his eyes and says, basically: “Are you done?  I mean, you just sired the Ishmaelites, and I will make a great, blessed, faithful, and powerful nation out of them, because I who made lemons can readily make lemonade therefrom, because no amount of your faithlessness or cluelessness will cause me to be unfaithful.  Congratulations.  Can we get back to my program now, which is after all the only program that matters?”

            God calls upon Abraham to “walk before me and be blameless.”  In other words, Abraham knows he will be living his life ever in the sight of God, and that God will always see us as God created us: blessed and good.  To walk before God is to be the people God sees us as.  It is to be forgiven.  

            To which Abraham responds in the only way possible: he falls on his face.  God says walk: Abraham falls down.  His response is abject humility.  He realizes that this God is way bigger than he is.

II.  

            God addresses Abraham and repeats: “I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’”  “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations….  I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.”  God repeats the part about descendants three times, in both past and future tenses.  It will happen; it has already happened.  Which is to say that if God says something will happen, then it might as well have happened already.

            God also changes Abraham’s name.  His name had been Abram up until now.  But God adds to Abram’s name a letter from God’s own name, a Hebrew letter called a He, which is basically our H, to the middle of Abram’s name, so that he becomes AbraHam.  “Abraham” sort of sounds like the Hebrew term for “father of many nations.”

            And this, of course, is very questionable, to name a very elderly man who has a very elderly wife, and who has been unable to have children with her, the “father of many nations.”  It sounds like something people would call Abraham if they wanted to mock him.  “Yo, check it out, here comes old Abraham, the ‘father of many nations,’ like that’s ever going to happen.”  It sounds like a joke, a cruel joke at that, for God to give this particular man that particular name.

            Then, for some reasons, the lectionary asks us to skip over verses 8 through 14, which are all about a somewhat uncomfortable topic, especially for men: circumcision.

            But these verses are important because of what Abraham and Sarah’s problem is, which is procreation.  God is prescribing an operation that has to do with just that.  And as soon as Abraham does this, bang, the promise is immediately fulfilled in chapter 18!  God has been talking about giving Abraham and Sarah descendants for 24 years!  But as soon as Abraham is circumcised, Sarah conceives.   

            God refers to circumcision as “a sign of the covenant between me and you.”  Last week we read about the rainbow as the sign of the covenant between God and all creation.  Now the covenant is with Abraham and the sign is circumcision.  Like the rainbow, circumcision is a reminder to both God and the people.  In this case what is to be remembered is that this family has been chosen, specially set aside for a special vocation.

            These, by the way, are signs of God’s blessing.  They are not God’s blessing in themselves.  So by the time of the early church actual, physical circumcision is considered by Paul to be a distraction from what is really important which is having a “circumcised” – which is to say a dedicated, equipped, remade, undistracted, single-minded, unemcumbered – heart. 

III.

            So once Abraham has this reminder literally cut into his flesh, he is finally ready to be the father of many nations as his new name indicates.  And, just so we don’t lose sight of her as an essential element of the covenant, Sarah gets a new name as well.  She apparently needs no extra reminder in terms of any physical operation.  Sarah, as I noted before, is more essential even than Abraham as far as the covenant is concerned.  It is her offspring that carry the covenant forward.  It is Abraham who needs to be modified before he is deemed able to participate with her in the covenant.

            With their new names, and Abraham’s new body, this elderly couple is now finally, fully equipped to bear God’s impossible promise into the future.  And in a few verses God will send emissaries to announce that she will bear a son named Isaac. 

            For Abraham to move forward into the promise, it required a change in his body.  For us to move forward into God’s promise it also requires a change in our bodies.  And the change that is required in our bodies is that we reshape, retool, reform, remake – “make-over” if you will – our bodies in the sense of reorienting and regrounding our actions, what we do with our bodies.  Paul talks about offering our bodies as a living sacrifice; not in merely and superficially cutting off a piece as a sign of our devotion to God, but making our devotion to God apparent and visible and tangible and actual in the things we do.  People should be able to look at the things we do, and clearly see that we are people of God.

            What they ought to see is that we are relying on God’s promises as an invisible means of support.  Our actions need to reflect and express our conviction that God is doing amazing, miraculous, spectacular, and magnificent things.  God is in the process of turning our world upside down.  People notice: God’s people do not suck up to the powerful; they cast their lot with the needy, the sick, the possessed, the broken, the alien, the barren, the losers, and the ridiculous. 

            We do this because we know who inherits the earth!  According to Jesus it is the gentle and the grieving and the persecuted and the peacemakers.  Not the violent, rich, powerful, protected, and well-off.  We follow and obey a God who takes a childless elderly couple of foreigners and turns them into the ancestors of a great nation.  We follow and obey a God who takes a band of beaten slaves, and liberates them and gives them a law and a land.  We trust in this upside-down future that God is making, and we reveal that trust by our commitments now.

IV.   

             God is going to do what God is going to do.  And what God is going to do is wonderful!  God makes the barren fruitful.  God makes aliens into kings.  God takes things we dismiss as impossible, but, when they happen, we look back and say they couldn’t have happened any other way. 

            And the One who makes us see this, the One in whom we trust because he first called us, by God’s amazing grace, is Jesus.  This is our story because of him.  Because he welcomes us into it.  It is his story!  He is the one who has scattered the proud, brought down the powerful, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry, and sent the rich away empty.  He is the One who turns the world’s order upside down.

            And he is the One who changes us and gives us a future.  In him we acquire circumcised hearts; that is, our hearts are cleansed and restored and renewed and reshaped.  And in him we turn our hearts, our whole selves, to the God whose love is always present and working to save and to heal and to free us. 

III.

            In this journey of faithfulness, the evolution of their learning to trust in God, Abraham and Sarah have to move from self-sufficiency and trying to figure things out on their own, as we see in the Hagar and Ishmael story, to a more radical and absolute obedience and trust.  The normal, self-centered, rational way of doing things is always a habit we repeatedly fall into if we are not constantly vigilant.  We require ever-present reminders of whose we are and who we are called to be.

            If we are going to bear God’s impossible promises into our future, we too need constant reminders.  It doesn’t have to be something literally carved into the flesh of your body.  Jesus and Paul both recognize that this aspect of the law is easily abused to subvert the inner meaning of the law.  People use the letter of the law, in this case to the point of cutting their own flesh, and think that is sufficient, even commendable, in itself.  But if they don’t thereby realize the loyalty, trust, and obedience that the outward sign points to, it is meaningless and even detrimental exercise. 

            But it does have to be something that touches your heart.  Paul says it happens by faith, that is, it is a matter of trusting in and obeying God.

            We are Abraham and Sarah’s descendants… by adoption.  We are not distracted by the possibility of resting on our literal, physical descent from them.  We are who we are purely by God’s grace in rescuing us from our Gentile nature and grafting us onto Abraham and Sarah’s family by our trust in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus.  That’s why we are reading this story today.  That’s why Abraham and Sarah’s story is our story.

“Toto too?”

Genesis 9:8-17

I.

            Our God is a God of blessing.  No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much destruction people bring down upon themselves by their idolatry and injustice, no matter how much violence we do to each other, causing God to turn away from us, God’s last word is always blessing.  God’s final act is always to save, to deliver, to redeem, to heal, and to liberate.  God’s love always wins in the end.

            In this particular story, God makes a covenant with the whole creation, “every living creature.”  This covenant is not just with one particular nation, or race, or ethnicity, or family.  It is not even with just human beings, as if it were just all about us.  No.  God declares this covenant to be with all of Noah’s descendants, which is the entire human race.  And it is with all the animals as well, “as many as came out of the ark.” 

            This covenant is the conclusion of a much longer story of the Great Flood.  The world had gotten so out of balance, so twisted and corrupt, and so thoroughly wicked that human thoughts were “only evil continually.”  Human beings had very quickly invented murder and revenge.

            So God decides to cash the whole place in and start over.  He selects Noah to build a boat and collect all the animals of the earth.  And then God opens the floodgates of heaven and inundates the entire earth in a flood.

            After the water began to subside and the boat rested on dry ground again, all the animals were released.  And God gives one basic commandment to Noah which applies to the whole human race.  It is a prohibition of bloodshed.  This is the condition that God attaches to the gift of the renewed planet to Noah and his descendants.  No violence.  No shedding of blood.  For blood is life and life belongs especially to God.  Not only are the people not to shed human blood, but they are not even to eat the blood of the animals they are allowed to eat for food.

            This prohibition is extended even into the New Testament, by the way.  The Apostles, when deciding to accept Gentiles into the church, did not require them to keep the entire system of the biblical kosher laws; but they did insist that this law that God gives to Noah, and hence to all humanity, the law against the shedding of blood, be kept.

            So we see that God does not establish this covenant with people alone, but with all animals.  I’m reminded of Psalm 36:6, which praises God for saving “humans and animals alike.”  It is a fundamental brake against all theologies and practices that would make human beings the only life-forms God cares about.  God created humans and animals on the same day of creation, day six.  And for all the special calling that humans have to be stewards of creation, God clearly sees humans as partners with the animals in blessing.

II.

            In this God is working with us.  In the first creation, God only gave plants to humans for food.  But the humans basically quickly disobeyed God and started killing and eating animals.  All this blood soaking the ground was surely one of the reasons for the Flood.  In the second creation, God allows humans to eat animals, but applies a regulation: “Just don’t eat the blood.  Give the blood back to me in sacrifice.”

            In other words, this is an example of God changing the approach in response to what humans can handle.  God chooses regulation over prohibition.  Thus God does not create intolerable, either/or situations.  Instead of saying absolutely not, God says, okay, but within these boundaries.  As long as you are conscious of and recognize and affirm whose creation this is, you may enjoy it.

            And then God makes a monumental promise not to destroy the creation again.  Earlier in chapter 8, God noted that, even though the human heart is incurably evil, God will nevertheless not wreck creation again.  Here this is repeated with reference to a flood: “Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”  God says, that no matter how much evil you all manage to do to each other and my world, at least you don’t have this to worry about.  I am not going to cash the whole place in again.  There is an eternal limit to God’s wrath.  God takes destroying the planet off the table.

            It is an act of absolute grace.  God knows that human nature has not changed one millimeter.  No sooner do Noah and his family settle down on dry land than there is this sordid incident of Noah getting blind drunk on wine, and some mysterious sexual sin involving his son, Ham.  So it’s not like the Flood made people perfect.  They start sinning before the water has even totally receded.  But God does say that God will not destroy the creation again anyway… probably because he knew it would be impractical to impose a global flood every few weeks as human sin continued.

            But God also gives himself a reminder of this promise.  Every time things get bad and God is ready to declare another flood, so that it even starts to rain, God has the rainbow appear in the sky.  It is to remind God of this promise.  “Oh, right, I said I wasn’t going to kill you.”

            God decides to make this version of creation work.  In spite of the people, God chooses patience and mercy and compassion.  God chooses forgiveness as God’s mode of operating, while still retaining an arsenal of less catastrophic events.  People and whole nations might still be destroyed, but God is not going to make the whole creation suffer again for our misdeeds.

III.

            The rainbow is a sign of God’s choice to forgive and forebear.  It is in the shape of a bow, as in what people use to shoot arrows.  And the bow is loaded, stretched, bent tight and ready to propel a deadly arrow.  But the point is that it is aimed away from the earth.  This reminds God that he has promised not to shoot global destruction at the earth.  But the bow in the clouds is aimed away from it.  Indeed, as we see in Jesus, God will even receive the shot himself!

            Now, this idea that God will not destroy the earth appears to rub some people the wrong way.  They seem to get a lot of mileage out of the idea that God hates the creation and will in the end destroy it, and they prefer this happen sooner rather than later.  And they will point to other texts in which they say that God is predicted to destroy the earth in rather spectacular terms.  There is the book of Revelation, for instance.

            But Revelation and other examples of apocalyptic literature do not depict the destruction, annihilation, or wiping out of creation.  What Revelation reveals or discloses is the true nature of creation, and all the graphic violence in that book is actually the comprehensive wiping away of the accrued human corruption and sin that had bound and crippled the good and blessed creation.  In the end there is a renewed heaven and a renewed earth, as these shine forth in all their divinely created glory.

            In the meantime God deals with human sin as with something that is winding down and exhausting itself, collapsing and being reduced to the nothingness it is.  In the process of sin being broken down and emptied of its power, God is always there to redeem, heal, and save.  God refuses to use again the ultimate option of global destruction.  Instead of starting over, God pulls us through.

            The idea that God is going to destroy the planet while rescuing believers is nonsense and unbiblical.  If we know anything from Scripture it is that believers do not get rescued; they endure, they come through, they are redeemed, ransomed, restored, and healed.  This may happen on this side or the other side of death.  But it always happens.  Believers are not exempt from suffering; they just realize that suffering is not the end but a way through this collapsing order of the world.

           

IV.

            In this story God covenants to work with us.  God promises to pull us through.  God affirms this relationship with us and with creation and has decided to walk together with us through life.

            This decision is made most obvious and visible and powerful when God actually chooses to walk together with us, as one of us, in Jesus Christ.  “Here is my Son,” says God, “he will show you what your true humanity is.  He will show you, not just by words but by actions, how you need to live in this creation together.  He will show you my holy way of love, which was from the beginning what I intended for you and made you for.”

            In the gospel for today Jesus is baptized and comes among us, facing first the temptations of Satan.  The text says “He was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.”  There’s those animals again!  It doesn’t say that Jesus was in any way threatened by them, just that he was with them.  As if Jesus has animal companions when he goes forth to confront Satan.  As if Jesus’ is explicitly representing in this contest the whole of life, not just humans. 

            The covenant between God and creation, made with Noah after the Flood, is with everyone who came out of the ark, all the animals.  And here we see animals accompanying Jesus as he meets Satan in what was really a battle for the fate and soul of creation.  Because if Jesus caves on any of those three temptations, the planet is ruined.

            You have to look in Matthew and Luke because Mark doesn’t give us the specific temptations.  But they are about wealth, fame, and power.  If Jesus decides that any one of these is more important than obedience to God, it’s all over.  There is no story.  The world would not be saved in him.

            But the world is saved.  Jesus doesn’t succumb to Satan and trade in his calling for any of these three things.  We are the ones who are continually and perpetually doing that.  And in so doing bringing down disaster on our own heads.  Disaster through which God is continually and perpetually pulling us.

            In a sense, Jesus is the embodiment of the rainbow.  He is the rainbow come to life as a person.  Because when God looks at us, God sees not so much our sins and violence, as Jesus, the true human.  God looks down and loves us all the more, for Jesus’ sake.

            When Jesus saves, he is with the wild beasts.  When Jesus saves, he saves every living species that came out of the ark.  We are all in this together, we creatures of the sixth day, and we will come through together.  In the end God asks us to please refrain from violence and remember whose we are.  Remember who is the Lord of all of life.  And remember who is loving us and saving us and healing us and delivering us, all of us, for all time.

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Fasting/Conservation/Justice

Isaiah 58:1-12

I.

            Traditionally, the season of Lent has been a time of fasting.  In agricultural societies this was more than a spiritual discipline; it was often a matter of survival.  This is hard for us to understand.  We have things like refrigeration and a global transportation network that brings us food from all over the world, all year long.  But for ancient people, by the time February rolled around, communities were running low on the food that had been stored since the harvest. 

            They might not have had much meat left that had been killed and preserved the previous fall, and they couldn’t slaughter more because they needed the rest of the animals for the future.  Eggs couldn’t be eaten because they needed them to become new chickens.  Milk was for new calves and lambs, so they couldn’t drink that either.  So, in late winter and early spring, it was necessary for agricultural peoples to refrain from eating meat, eggs, and dairy products.  And neither could they eat any of the grain that was saved to plant in the spring, or to feed animals.  We, of course, know nothing about such calculations; but this was life-and-death for our forebears.

            It so happens that Jesus was crucified and resurrected at Passover, which is always around spring equinox.  Ancient people were fasting anyway; now the church added a new interpretation to the fast.  It was a time of spiritual preparation for the celebration of Easter.  My friend who is a Russian Orthodox priest still doesn’t eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, or oil during the 40 days of Lent.  Roman Catholics used to abstain from meat at the same time.

            The spiritual benefits of fasting have to do with the fact that fasting stresses your body.  On the one hand, this makes you more amenable to spiritual experience.  Jesus fasted prior to his temptation by the devil.  Native Americans fast prior to embarking upon a “vision quest.”  The Torah has laws about fasting, mainly for the Day of Atonement.  People have known for millennia that not eating for a while clears your mind and facilitates different states of consciousness.  On the other hand, nothing makes you more consciously aware of your own mortality and your connectedness to the earth than fasting.  When you’re fasting you can harbor no illusions that you are a disembodied spirit.  No.  It is very clear that you are a body with biological needs.

            The point of fasting is literally reducing your consumption, or not consuming at all.  When we do this we are made viscerally aware of our own dependence on the earth, and on the Creator.  When we fast we reduce our footprint, as it were, so that the earth has time to recover and be regenerated for the future.  At the same time, the spiritual benefit of fasting makes us more focused and appreciative.  We are better able to say “thank you” and receive new experiences.      

II.

            The problem is that, by the time of Isaiah, people figured out how to technically keep the rules of religious fasting, while not inconveniencing themselves much at all.  Perhaps they just compensated for what they were not eating by eating more of other things.  We know that they used their visible fasting as a way to make themselves look good and be admired by others, and even justify gaining power over them.  Isaiah says that wealthy people were using their fasting as a way to oppress poor workers, perhaps by driving down the wages of farm workers by reducing demand, thus pocketing more money.   

            Fasting can easily degenerate into a religious work you do for show, or for other equally bad reasons.  And Isaiah is well aware that this happens.  He hears God say to the people, “You serve your own interests on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.  You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.”  In other words, you fast as if it was all about you.

            What Isaiah urges is not self-centered abnegation, which, as Jesus points out, is more often to draw attention to yourself.  Fasting is not self-punishment or some feat of ascetic achievement we can all admire.  It is not about paying your dues to earn some benefit or status.

            No.  Isaiah famously reports God saying: “Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” 
”If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,” then that will be a real fast, one that God appreciates and rewards.

            In other words, God insists that fasting must not be separated from justice.  Fasting has to be about setting people free from oppression, violence, inequality, exploitation, hunger, and illness.

            We can see how the careful response to the shortages of resources in late winter had a justice component.  If we simply consumed everything to our heart’s content there would be nothing left.  The whole community would die out.  There would be no animals to bear new animals, and no grain to feed them, and no seeds to plant.  The earth needs room and time to regenerate.  We need to invest something of what we have now so that we will have a future.

III.

            What we don’t see is how our economic regime that depends on and positively demands consumption is what generates injustice.  We don’t see it because we are at or near the top of the food chain.  We don’t see what it costs in terms of labor, wealth, heartbreak, suffering, and disease to keep us in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.  We do occasionally see what our consumption is costing us, in terms of expanded waistlines, clogged cardiac arteries, diabetes, asthma, and various forms of cancer.  We do sometimes see that this system is spawning mental illnesses like depression, that it is putting intolerable stress on families, and breaking up communities.  We might perceive the polluted air, soil, and water that is an inevitable cost of unchecked consumption.  But mostly we either don’t want to know or realize that trying to change it would be too costly.

            But Scriptural mandates like the Sabbath, and Christian traditions like the Lenten fast, do change this system.  In these disciplines we are encouraged to carve out some time and some space that is not dedicated to consuming as precipitously and as voluminously as possible all the resources of the earth.  In these we decide to opt out, even if only for a few days and weeks here and there, of a system based on the exploitation of other people’s labor.

            For that agricultural reality of late winter, when it was clear that conservation was an imperative, and that without it the people would be foreclosing on their future existence, is something we need to understand right now.  Only now it’s not our farm or our farming village that is at stake, but the whole planet.  The whole creation is at risk from our overconsumption.  We are in a late winter of our own making, and it pertains to the earth itself.  Conservation is an imperative now, and it is a matter of justice.

            Jesus’ fast brought him into direct conflict with the devil.  It offended the devil, who feeds on our waste and consumption.  So he tempts Jesus with three tests that appeal to Jesus’ self-centeredness: bread for his belly, fame for his soul, and power for his altruistic spirit.  All of which Jesus categorically rejects.  He refuses to be a bread-maker, an entertainer, or a politician.  He refuses to have it be all about what he can consume in terms of food, fame, or power.  It is not about him but always God… which proves that he is God-with-us.

            Jesus comes to fulfill what Isaiah says about what a real fast is.  It’s about justice, equality, healing, liberation, sharing, hospitality, and satisfying the needs of the afflicted.

 IV.

            I am convinced that if we do not start to follow Jesus – not just affirm or worship or make theological statements about him but actually follow him by living the kind of life he lived – that we are doomed.  Not to follow Jesus is to attract the wrath of God, who cares more for the good and blessed creation than for our sins of greed, gluttony, avarice, envy, anger, and so forth.

            Our seasons of fasting need to resolve into lives of conservation, stewardship, protection, healing, and justice.  We have to start walking lightly on the earth, as Jesus did.

            And one place to start is in Lent.  We Presbyterians don’t have any rules about Lent.  There is no tradition or hierarchy telling us what not to consume.  We get to use our judgment. 

            Most of the time we judge not to bother.  But I hope we learn to witness to God’s goodness by reducing our consumption significantly, and redirecting our resources to helping, healing, and liberating people.

            Then we will be able to relate to the promises of Isaiah:

“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. 
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.  Then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday. 
The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.”

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