| Scriptures: | Genesis 22:1-2, 9-14 Mark 8:31-38 |
These are two tough texts we have for our lectionary readings today. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love…and offer him there as a burnt offering…..” “Get behind me, Satan!... If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” No pretty picture postcards here; no easy sayings, these. It’s almost as if God with Abraham and Jesus with Peter are purposely setting it up so that it’s impossible to follow.
As many of you know by now, one of my favorite theological mentors is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was martyred in Hitler’s Germany, but who left behind quite a collection of very insightful writings. Probably the book he is best known for (it’s often used as a study guide during Lent by church groups) is The Cost of Discipleship. In it Bonhoeffer talks about the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace”. “Cheap grace” is forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without discipline, communion without confession. It is to believe that God is saying to you something like this: “Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and simply enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.”
Now, this is not an easy thing for me to hear, and it wasn’t when I first read this book in seminary. I like to preach a gospel of forgiveness; it has always seemed to me that guilt-tripping is one of the worst things that the church has done over the centuries. To feel deep in your heart that you are forgiven and then to be able to forgive yourself is central to my understanding of why God came to us in Christ to offer Godself to the world. So, what’s going on here?
Bonhoeffer is not saying here that forgiveness and baptism and communion are not part of a Christian’s life. What he goes on to say in contrasting “costly grace” to “cheap grace” is that to experience costly grace is to make a conscious decision to follow Christ – and then to live out all the implications of what that means; in a word: to become a disciple. Here’s how Bonhoeffer puts it in words that should lift our spirits: “costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus; it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels [someone] to submit to the yoke of Christ and to follow him; it is grace because Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”
Last week we said that our Lenten journeys involve discovering both the demands and the promises of God. That’s going to be the theme that runs through these sermons as we cast our God-spell over one another and seek out what it means to be disciples.
The story of Abraham and the potential sacrifice of Isaac is an excellent example of both demands and promises. In times of war we say that to go into battle and offer our life is to offer the “ultimate sacrifice”. But I can’t think of anything more “ultimate” than to be told to kill your only son. We read this story backwards – knowing what the outcome will be – and so it’s hard to imagine the stark horror with which Abraham must have heard this demand. And there really isn’t any good reason given – this is simply a time in religious history when burnt offerings, including human sacrifice, were the norm – although in other parts of the Hebrew scriptures it is made clear that God does not want child sacrifice.
God is not tempting Abraham to perform an abhorrent act; rather, God is testing Abraham. The point was for Abraham to demonstrate that he trusted God completely and placed God above all else, even his own son. There is a resonance here with that passage in Matthew where Jesus tells his disciples, “Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37) – another Bible verse that we have a very hard time hearing. Though God, of course, already knew that Abraham had faith in him, it was necessary for Abraham to prove it through action. That’s the first lesson for us to take from this story: it is not enough just to have faith and believe in our hearts; we need also to demonstrate that faith through how we behave and what we do. That’s what Bonhoeffer is saying when he talks about following Christ and becoming disciples. That is acting on God’s demands.
But the second point of the story has to do with the promise. In this case it is the promise that God will provide. The ram will be there, caught in a thicket, and it will be available to us. God will provide whatever is needful in our quest to become disciples of Jesus the Christ.
Some later Christian commentators saw this story as a parallel to the Passion Week events – which is in part why it has become a Lenten lectionary passage – with God’s willingness to sacrifice God’s own Son on the cross as comparable to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, and the ram then becomes the substitute sacrifice, just as Jesus’ sacrifice is a substitute for all humanity. I’m suspicious of trying to read Christian themes back into Hebrew scripture texts; however, in this case it is helpful, I think, for us to see Abraham’s faithfulness in obedience as a good parallel to Jesus’ faithful submission to the will of his God – even all the way to the cross.
Jesus is thinking about that path to the cross as our text from Mark begins: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering…and be killed…..” Now, he goes on in the same sentence to say, “and after three days rise again.” But I suspect that the disciples weren’t really hearing that part. They were too frightened by hearing him predict his own death. Wouldn’t you be scared, too, if you had been there? Again, we tend to read this story backward through our knowledge of the resurrection and 2,000 years of Christian history. But for Peter and James and John and the others it was real and imminent and scary stuff.
And so they try to talk him out of it. Especially Peter. “And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Peter is rebuking Jesus! Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? But there’s an interesting sub-text to this passage that is worth exploring for a moment. Lillian Daniel, Senior Minister of First Congregational Church, UCC, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, puts it this way:
“I love this argumentative interchange between Peter and Jesus. It reminds me that they had a real relationship and argued, as close friends do. There’s a distinct intimacy in their exchange. They cared about each other enough to call each other out….. Love entails caring enough to struggle, to ask hard questions and to occasionally rebuke.”
Here’s another case where demands and promises are all wrapped up together. Real friendship makes demands on those who offer their friendship. You sometimes hear people say about a friend, “Oh, I can tell her anything and she never judges me.” There is a place for this kind of unconditional acceptance between friends, but it can also come perilously close to what Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace”. There is also a time when a friend needs to be challenged, to be called out, and this is something most of us would usually prefer not to do. It isn’t easy to tell someone when we think they are way off the mark, and it can often lead to arguments – as it does with Peter and Jesus.
But the flip side is just as important – a friend is someone who does not go away no matter what. Here is where unconditional love comes in. The promise of real friendship is that I am going to push back at you, just as you will push back at me really hard, and we may have some tremendous fights…..but I am not going away no matter how intense those fights may be. Peter nearly disavows this part of friendship when he denies Jesus three times. But in the end he remains faithful, and he becomes the disciple on which Jesus can build his church.
Martin Marty had an article in last week’s The Christian Century in which he called for us to re-introduce the idea of friendship back into the theological dictionary. This must be done cautiously, because the idea of being “friends” with God or Jesus can much too easily become sentimentalized – as happens from time-to-time with our evangelical co-religionists. You can’t imagine Abraham in our story about being asked to sacrifice Isaac as thinking about God as his friend, now can you? Yet, as Martin Marty concludes, “In realistic and sustained friendships, there can be elements of wrath born of frustration, disappointment and rejection. But it is finally love of a particular kind, a kind that comes from God, that endures in friendship and hence enriches life.”
On the strength of that kind of friendship Jesus is able to turn to the crowd with his disciples – his friends – around him and make the hard demand: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” But right there along with the demand is the promise: “and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” This is what it means to be a disciple – to participate in the costly grace that is the only kind worth having. We are back to the beginning of Mark’s gospel again – to that verse around which the whole gospel has been written: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Repent, and believe in the good news. Another way to say this, as the song from Godspell does is to turn back – forswear your foolish ways. The writers of Godspell turned this old hymn into a vamping kind of song as a way of emphasizing the temptations that Jesus – along with all human beings – was facing. But the lyrics of that first verse contradict the vamping, seductive tone: turn back, give up the ways that are holding you back, hear the God inside you telling you to follow – in a word, repent,
And once again, along with the demand comes the promise. In a sweet voice that is contrapuntal to the harsh vamp Jesus offers his vision: “Earth shall be fair and all her people one; Not till that hour will God’s whole will be done. Now, even now, once more from earth to sky, Peals forth in joy our old undaunted cry: ‘Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!’”
This is the second Sunday in Lent. We are still a long way from Easter. Yet, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes, "We do not head straight to Easter from the spa or the shopping mall. Instead, we are invited to spend forty days examining the nature of our own covenant with God. Upon what does that relationship depend? What do we trust to give us life? What concrete practices allow us to become bodily involved with God?" She goes on to invite us to “live in the meantime” -- "to live reverently, deliberately, and fully awake: that is what it means to live in the promise, where the wait itself is as rich as its end. All it takes are some regular reminders, because as long as the promise is renewed, the promise is alive, as vivid as a rainbow, as real as the million stars overhead."
Lent is a time for repentance -- for facing the ways we are broken and have broken others and the world – for turning back and forswearing foolish ways. But Lent is also a time for living in the promise and for discovering how the cost of discipleship leads to the joy of following – which leads to the hope that in losing our lives to Jesus we have found them all over again.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 8, 2009