An Eye-Opening Sacrifice

Genesis 22:1-14

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So, if you think last week’s look at Abraham’s treatment of Hagar and Ishmael was a bitter pill to swallow, things aren’t going to be much better this week.  Here, God puts Abraham’s motives for faithfulness to the test by asking him to do what other kings in the area do to make themselves great: child sacrifice.  It was typical of the kings of some of the surrounding pagan nations to sacrifice their own children to certain gods in order to get divine favour and gain power, so God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a whole burnt offering. 

Oh, but wait a minute.  Those kings had many sons by many wives and many concubines and could spare a child every now and then for such a purpose.  But Abraham had only one son, Isaac, the child of the promise.  If Abraham were to sacrifice Isaac, then what would become of God’s promise to make Abraham’s descendants a numerous people and a great nation through which all the nations of the world will be blessed?  Why would God himself put the promise into jeopardy after giving Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age after decades of childlessness?   

Oh, but wait a minute.  Isaac isn’t Abraham’s only son.  There’s still Ishmael; Abraham’s first born son by Sarah’s slave Hagar; the child born because Sarah and Abraham were trying to play God and make God’s promise to Abraham come about because Sarah was barren and had become too old to have children; Ishmael, the child whom Abraham in a great display of “privilege” just disowned and cast out into the wilderness with his mother; the child who would by now be dead from exposure if it weren’t for God’s compassion and awesome ability to make lemonade from raw sewage.  (Please forgive me for putting it that way, but Abraham really did wrong by them.)

Let’s dive in.  There are two noteworthy phrases to mention.  Our passage begins with the simple phrase, “after these things”, which means that what God is asking Abraham to do to Isaac is somehow a consequence of all that had happened before.  Also, God keeps referring to Isaac as “your son, your only son” to Abraham.  Well, we know that Isaac isn’t the only son.  This inclines me to say that what God has asked Abraham to do here to Isaac is a consequence of what Abraham did to Ishmael and Hagar…and a few other things.  So, God wants to test Abraham’s motive for being faithful.  Just like in the Book of Job where Satan makes the accusation that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him, so God seems to want to know if Abraham is being faithful because God has promised to bless him or because Abraham is devoted to him. You see, so far, Abraham has been acting like he’s simply being faithful for what he can get out of the promise.  

God’s case against Abraham is pretty strong.  Ever since God called him, Abraham has acted like a wily, wheeler-dealer skilled at saving his own neck and had done so by means unbecoming of the promise.  If God had promised to give Abraham a land and numerous descendants who would become a great nation, one would think that God would protect and provide for him.  It seems that Abraham doesn’t really trust God to provide.  Here’s the case.

It begins with Abraham’s treatment of Sarah.  Sarah was a very beautiful woman and she was also his half-sister, the daughter of his father by a different mother.  As God’s promise to Abraham required that they leave the security of Abraham’s father’s household and go out on their own, Abraham got Sarah to promise him that wherever they went she would tell everybody that she was his sister and not his wife so that no one would kill Abraham in order to take her.  If Sarah’s simply his sister, they would more likely just take her and maybe even pay a dowry.  

Well, this agreement between Sarah and Abraham soon comes into play.  Not long after God called Abraham, he and Sarah and nephew Lot go to the land and settle at Mamre and a famine broke out.  So they decided to go to Egypt for food.  When they got there Abraham of course lied and told the Egyptians that Sarah is his sister and not his wife.  Well, it is Pharaoh who wound up taking Sarah to be his wife and he treated Abraham very well by giving him lots of livestock and slaves thinking he was paying her brother a dowry.  God didn’t like that and so he plagued Pharaoh and his household.  Pharaoh soon figured out Sarah was the reason and he sent her back to Abraham and sent them out of Egypt letting Abraham keep the wealth he had accrued so long as Abraham prayed for Pharaoh’s healing.  Abraham did and they returned to the land of Canaan a wealthy family.

A couple of years later, they went south to the area of Gerar in the land of the Philistines where a man named Abimelech is the primary king.  There, Abraham did the same thing.  He told everybody that Sarah was his sister.  King Abimelech wound up taking her to be his wife, but before they consummated things God appeared to him in a dream and threatened his life with a deadly disease if he didn’t give her back.  So, Abimelech gives Sarah back to Abraham with a big accusation against Abraham’s lying and the harm it could do their relationship.  Yet, to appease Abraham’s God he gave a generous gift of livestock and slaves to Abraham and lets them live wherever they want.  They are now a very wealthy family.  

So twice, to protect his own life, Abraham put Sarah at great risk.  Where’s his trust in God to protect and provide for them?  Moreover, everybody knew back then that if you went into a land and had a beautiful sister somebody was going to want to marry her and that somebody would pay generously to do it.  It seems that Abraham, for lack of a better word, pimped his wife to save his life and it made him a wealthy and powerful man with the appearance of being blessed.  If it weren’t for God protecting Sarah’s dignity and the sanctity of their marriage, things would not have gone well for her.  She would have wound up being just another wife in the harem to somebody and being unable to bear children really jeopardized her.  Abraham treated his wife as if she were expendable and got wealthy.  That’s called patriarchy and male privilege, not faithfulness to God.

Moving on in the case against Abraham.  Last week we discussed how Abraham and Sarah dealt with the promise being jeopardized because Sarah was not able to have children.  You remember how Sarah told Abraham to have his way with her personal slave and by their customs the resulting child would be considered Sarah’s own.  But then God made Sarah conceive and gave them the miracle baby Isaac.  Realizing Isaac’s inheritance might be in jeopardy, Sarah orders Ishmael and Hagar expulsed from the family so that Ishmael has no claim to the promise God made to Abraham.  You remember Abraham emancipated them and disclaimed Ishmael and cast them off into the wilderness of Paran, which was a death sentence.  Nothing lives there.  But God saved them.  He opened Hagar’s eyes to see a well that mysteriously had just appeared in the desert. 

Abraham and Sarah disregarded the basic human dignity of their slaves and regarded them as expendable.  That’s called slave-owner privilege, the privilege of wealth, there was even the privilege of saying God is for us and so it doesn’t matter what we do.  That’s not faithfulness to God.

God seems to have had to clean up a lot of messes that Abraham created because Abraham didn’t really seem to trust God to make the promise come about and so he has wheeled-and-dealed and acted according to privilege to make the promise seem to come true.  Abraham just didn’t seem to be able to simply go to the land and let God give him numerous descendants to make him into a great nation.  He went but he’s not quite “standing on the promises”.  Abraham keeps trying to make God’s promise come about by his own deceitful and “privileged” efforts and the results are huge messes that only God can clean up. 

So, God puts Abraham to the test.  God calls to Abraham in a language formula very similar to how he first called him.  God’s initial call to Abraham was: “Go, (Hebrew lek-lekah) from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  This time God calls him saying: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go (Hebrew lek-lekah) to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  

In both cases God tells him to “go” (Lek-lekah).  In the first one it is to a land God would show him and in the second, as he was living in the land, it was to a particular mountain that God would show him.  In the first call God promised to give him descendants, and now God asks him to offer his only descendant as a whole burnt offering like pagan kings do.  And, the fact that God keeps referring to Isaac as “your son, your only son” in the wake of the injustice Abraham just did to Ishmael due to “slave-owner privilege” or what I call “promise privilege” just adds a sense that God is calling Abraham to account for his actions.  

So, what’s the test?  If Abraham does not sacrifice Isaac, then he is deliberately disobeying God hoping to protect the promise for himself out of self-interest.  But, if he does sacrifice Isaac, then the promise is void unless God makes another miracle baby like Isaac even though God has promised that it would be through Isaac that Abraham’s descendants would be named.  Abraham is in a predicament.  What is Abraham to do?  

Abraham has to consider who this God is.  This God to whom he has aligned himself has suddenly by this new command started to act like he is just one of the god’s – you know, cruel, fickle, self-interested, humans are simply toys for his amusement.  The God has Abraham has thus far experienced has proved himself impeccably faithful to Abraham and has kept his promise.  This God has even cleaned up the messes Abraham created by his own unfaithfulness.  Abraham could have lost Sarah to Pharaoh and to Abimelech.  He could have murdered his own firstborn son, Ishmael, had not God saved Ishmael and his mother.  This God had cleaned up Abraham’s messes when Abraham had acted faithless and even done evil and in the wake of those messes everyone ended up blessed.  The gods don’t do that.  They tend to just let the powerful do injustice and ignore the misfortune that ensues, but Abraham’s God keeps putting things to right for Abraham…and yet, this is also the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.  This God is not to be toyed with.

Abraham decides to go ahead with what God was calling him to do, to sacrifice his child to gain divine power in order to be a great king.  It didn’t make sense, but he knew he needed to follow it through.  Maybe, he’s realized that he did not deserve God’s blessing on him, that the promise wasn’t a privilege for his own gain, and that God had every right to end the relationship.  

They set out to the mountain.  I could spend some time going into the horror of what the next few days of his life were like for Abraham and the two men with him and especially for the young Isaac.  Isaac keeps wondering where the lamb for the sacrifice is.  Abraham hoping against hope lies to him, “God will provide the lamb.”  God makes Abraham take it right up to the moment of bringing the knife down on Isaac to kill him and then stops him.  A ram shows up stuck in a thicket in the same way the well showed up in the wilderness for Hagar and Ishmael.  Point made.  This child is not expendable.  Children are not expendable.  This God is not like the other gods.  This promise and its ensuing blessing are not to be Abraham’s ‘privileged” vehicle to make himself great like the kings of the land.  The promise was God’s vehicle to bring Abraham to faith.  Humbly doing what this God asks is how this God will put the world to rights not the means for Abraham to make himself a king in the land like all the other kings.

Normally, when we interpret the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac we explain away the horror of it by pulling out the Jesus card and saying that this horrible story points forward to how God is saving the world through Jesus and his death and resurrection; of how God sacrificed his own son to defeat sin and death; of how Jesus is the lamb who dies in our place.  We’ve heard all that.  But, you know, when we too quickly try to Christianize the Old Testament especially when difficult stories are involved, we too often miss the message that was originally there.  I think this story tells us that we should not be self-serving with God’s promise to be our God and us his people.  

Abraham’s track record was to make God’s promise about what he could get out of it in his own lifetime, not about what God was doing through him to save the world, the results of which he would not see in his own lifetime.  All God wanted Abraham to do was to go to the land he would show him and have a descendant and from that descendant his descendants would become a great nation.  God would provide and bless.

Abraham seems to have misinterpreted and taken advantage of that promise.  He was looking through the eyes of “it’s all about me” and so attempted to make himself a great king in his own lifetime.  That pursuit led him down a road of acting according to privilege and treating others as expendable.  Those efforts could have cost him his wife and made him a murderer of children had it not been for God stepping in and cleaning up his messes.

But here in the end, God opened Abraham’s selfish eyes to see the faithfulness of God, a ram stuck in a thicket to offer instead of Isaac just like God opened Hagar’s eyes in the desert to see a well.  When we see the present through the eyes of “it’s all about me” we will start acting according to privilege and treat others as if they are expendable, especially those closest to us, and we will make terrible messes.  Yet, when we humbly and simply do what God asks of us our eyes will be open to God’s working through us to put this world to rights.  

The Abraham story leaves me with a question: what would have happened if Abraham humbly and simply did as God asked rather than sought his own gain by it?  So also, what would this world look like if people humbly and simply did what God asked rather than seek their own gain?  So also, what would our own lives be like if we humbly and simply did as God asked rather than seek our own gain?  I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect there would be a lot less of our messes in this world that only God can clean up.  Amen.

Promise Does Not Mean Privilege

Genesis 21:1-21

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There are stories in the Bible that are quite troubling, stories in which no one, not even God walks away with clean hands.  This story of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael from the family of Abraham is one of them.  It is a way too true-to-life story of the aftermath of a family gathering that blew over an inheritance.  In the end, the only person who appears remotely innocent is the young boy Ishmael whose only offence was to laugh during the weaning party of his younger half-brother, Isaac, whose name happens to mean “laughter”.  Bear with me a little while and have a look the people and the dynamics at play here.

Let’s start with Father Abraham.  There’s a lot rolled up in him.  As you know, Abraham is the father of the faith so to speak.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share him as their root in history.  

Abraham is pivotal to the story of the Bible.  The Bible can be divided into two parts that are best distinguished not the way we usually do as Old Testament and New Testament.  But rather as Genesis 1-11 and then everything that follows.  Genesis 1-11 describes what’s wrong or gone wrong with God’s good creation: and the second, the rest of the Bible which tells how God is setting and will set things to right in his good creation.  Genesis 1-11 tells how humanity, whom God created in his image to be the caretakers of his good creation instead act like gods in our own right and mess things up badly.  Part two begins at Genesis 12 with God summonsing Abraham to leave the security of his father and family and go to a land God would show him.  God would give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  The Bible then goes on to testify how God keeps this promise to Abraham and his descendants and how through these people God will put things right in his creation.

From time to time God’s promise to Abraham comes into jeopardy like when Sarah and Abraham are 40-50 years beyond a healthy childbearing age and are still childless.  Abraham cannot have the promised descendants if Sarah cannot have children.  Typically, in these moments when the promise seems jeopardized, either Abraham or Sarah took matters out of God’s hands and into their own.  This is where Hagar and Ishmael enter the story.  

Sarah took the issue of her childlessness into her own hands through a strange custom they had back then.  They did this thing where if a woman could not have children, she could send one of her slaves to get pregnant by her husband.  Then while the child was being born, the woman would position herself above the slave in such a way as to make it appear as if the child were coming from her own womb and then the child would be considered her own.  That is what Sarah and Abraham did with Hagar and thus was born Ishmael.  His name incidentally means “God has heard”.  That will factor in later.

Please take a moment here to fathom if you can the complete disregard that Sarah and Abraham showed for the life of Hagar, their slave.  How they considered Hagar and her body and her human dignity to be expendable matters of property to be used however they, the slave-owners, saw fit.

Well, Ishmael enters this odd extended family that was privileged with a promise from God that included the grand inheritance of a land and becoming a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations. Abraham is pleased to have a son.  He loves Ishmael.  But Sarah, the unforeseen consequences of her acting on “privilege” is that Hagar noticeably despises Sarah for taking her child away and Sarah herself becomes insanely jealous of Hagar and her son and she makes a point of mistreating her.  After all, Hagar is now Abraham’s wife too.  Why does Sarah have this “privilege” and not Hagar too?

Well, in the meantime, God gets around to being God and begins to keep his seemingly impossible to fulfill promise.  The Lord visits Abraham and Sarah and tells them that within a year they will have a son.  At this point, Abraham was 99 and Sarah, 86.  Sarah laughed rather dismissively at this “ridiculous” prospect.  But indeed, within a year, God being the God who makes possible the impossible, Sarah bore a son.  They named him Isaac, which means “laughter”.

At this moment in the story, the matter of Hagar and Ishmael becomes gravely complicated.  They, the expendable slave/concubine/wife and her son, become a threat to the people who believe themselves “privileged” with God’s promise.  Ishmael is in fact Abraham’s oldest son and would be for all shapes and purposes by custom and law entitled firstly to the inheritance God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  This entitlement would have been unquestionably Isaac’s had not Sarah played God and tried to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham when it appeared threatened by her own childlessness.  So now, Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar and Ishmael becomes deadly as she perceives that her and Isaac’s “promise-privilege”, I’ll call it, to be in jeopardy due to the very existence of Ishmael and his rights as first born.

Our reading this morning picks up here.  Isaac is old enough to be weaned so Abraham has a celebration for him.  At some point during the festivities she hears Ishmael laugh.  Many translations over the years have tried to excuse Sarah’s ensuing actions by blaming the victim, blaming Ishmael, by saying he was laughing at or mocking Isaac.  But, the Hebrew text simply says he laughed, apparently an expression of joy during the weaning party of his little half-brother whose name happens to mean “laughter”.  

Suddenly, Sarah really perceives that Isaac’s “promise privilege”, his right to the inheritance, was very much in jeopardy.  So she goes to Abraham and tells him to cast out the slave woman and her son, which in essence was a death sentence.  She tells Abraham to send them packing, a young mother and a preteen boy, out into the desert wilderness, where there is no hope for survival.

The Hebrew text says that Abraham was distressed in himself.  Let’s consider that word “distressed”.  In Hebrew, it is what you feel when you know you are being asked to do something evil and your choices are limited.  Abraham does not want to do this evil thing to his firstborn son whom he loves, so he prays.  And God, God tells him to not be distressed and rather do whatever Sarah tells him to do, because “it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named to you”.  Then, God makes lemonade out of lemons by promising to also make a great nation of Ishmael because he too is Abraham’s son.  Even though God makes that promise, we know it’s not going to be as good for Ishmael as it’s going to be for Isaac and for Abraham’s descendants through Isaac.  Ishmael won’t enjoy the same “privilege” that Isaac has.

The next morning old Abe gets up early, so nobody can see, and walks Hagar and Ishmael to the edge of the camp.  He gives her a loaf of bread and a canteen of water to drape of one shoulder.  Then, I imagine him then taking a still sleepy Ishmael and putting him in his mother’s arms to rest his head over her other shoulder and he sends them off.  This was all a symbolic gesture that he had “divorced” her and given them their “freedom”.  Hagar and Ismael are “emancipated” now and Abraham is no longer responsible for the child.  He’s surpassed his obligation to them by providing them with a loaf of bread and canteen of water for their trek in the desert wilderness.  The only thing missing from this story is a few “Jim Crow” laws!

Let’s just step back here for a moment.  If you have ever been the victim of somebody else’s “privilege”; whether it be white privilege, male privilege, the privilege of wealth, the privilege of power, etcetera – then you, like me, are going to have some serious questions about the God of Abraham’s sense of justice.  God just told Abraham to do an evil thing; to treat two human beings whom he, Abraham, and God care about as expendables simply because of this “promise privilege” thing and God promises to make lemonade out of it and that is supposed to make it better.  God does not walk away from this mess looking good.  In hindsight, we know Ishmael winds up living and becoming a great nation and from his descendants comes the Arab peoples and Islam and so many good things throughout history, but it’s just not the same as the promise that plays out through the descendants of Isaac.  If this were a court case, it would be like God settled out of what could have been a pretty nasty lawsuit involving Abraham and Sarah.  The one who should have judged and held Abraham and Sarah accountable for their abuse of privilege instead actually pays the settlement to try to make it all go away.

I need to wind this down, but before doing that I need to say that even Hagar isn’t a brave hero either.  She winds up abandoning Ishmael so that she doesn’t have to watch him die.  She cries and God answers her, but God’s answer isn’t, “Hagar, I hear your cries for justice.” Rather, it is that he has heard the cries of Ishmael and is answering for his sake.  Remember, Ishmael means “God has heard”.  God opens her eyes and shows her a well.  They will live another day.  From then on, the Bible says, God was with Ishmael.  He does indeed go on to become a great nation.  The next we hear of him, is that it is to a tribe of Ishmaelites that Isaac’s grandsons sell their brother Joseph to be taken to Egypt, where Hagar came from, to be sold as a slave there.  Some might call that “poetic justice” but…is it putting things to right when the descendants of the slave woman Hagar and her son became slave traders?

Winding down, as I said this story is troubling and I apologize for troubling you with it.  A mature faith does not Polly-Anna-ize these troubling stories away, but rather wrestles with them.  This story reveals a side of God that truly threatens our Sunday School notions of the love of God.  God lives in a real world, ours, and the fact is: God gets his hands dirty when it comes to dealing with us humans, who, though made in the image of God, try to be God.  Sadly, very sadly, God’s hands don’t always wash clean when he sets about cleaning up our messes.  If there is a take away from this story, it’s that assuming privilege and treating others as expendable is never a good thing.  It is evil, so evil that it even stains the hands of God when he has to step in and clean it up.  Amen.  

Compassion for the Crowds

Matthew 9:35-10:8

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I’ve been in some big crowds in my life.  The most memorable ones were from back in my thirties when I used to run marathons. The biggest race crowd for me was the Disney Marathon with over 16,000 on the starting line.  Next in line were the two times I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. with crowds verging on 13,000.  That’s a lot of people and crowds are destructive Like letting a herd of Cattle tear through your downtown.

The Marine Corps Marathon is an interesting experience.  It’s hosted by the United States Marine Corps in the nation’s capitol.  The route takes you by all the monuments and so forth in D.C.  The hospitality that the Marines extend is outstanding.  They are polite and extremely helpful.  The water and medical stations are well supported.  All along the course there are even Marines in dress blues standing at attention, one hand extended, and palm full of Vaseline so that runner’s could grab a dab and lube the places that are starting to chafe.  But, there’s one oversight.  For a crowd that big there is just no way you can provide enough portable potty support.  So, racers just start going along the course wherever they can get behind a bush.  All modesty just disappears.  It’s ironic that at the invitation of the USMC a massive crowd of people converges on the nation’s capitol and literally lays waste to it.  Someone needs to rethink that.  We all know what Main St. looks like after a horse parade.  It’s worse when its humans.

Speaking more personally, I have to tell you I’m not a big fan of crowds.  Some people can go to concerts and crowded things like that and just have the best time in the world; not me.  I become what they call hyper-vigilant.  I’m always on watch for something to go insanely wrong.  I have this predisposition to believe that people can and will do stupid dangerous stuff and when a crowd of people gathers the stupid dangerous factor increases.  Therefore, Mr. Hyper-vigilance here becomes the extra security guard duty.  I can’t relax in a crowd and so crowded events are not enjoyable for me.

Crowds are an especially touchy subject now in the midst of this pandemic.  People should not be gathering in large crowds due to the high probability of a mass outbreak resulting from unknowing, asymptomatic carriers.  A few weeks ago on the first really warm day of the year a huge crowd of people formed in Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto.  Many would agree that was stupid dangerous behaviour and would ask was that afternoon in the park worth the possibility of people you care about becoming gravely ill or worse.  Well, no need for guilt trips now.  People are people and as a good friend of mine used to say, “There’s nothing stranger than people.”

In the passed week and a bit, crowd-gathering has become a totally different matter.  It’s no longer a matter Spring Fever and isolation fatigue.  Crowds are gathering to protest racism and to say that Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer as other officers watched and did nothing.  The murder of Mr. Floyd became the straw that broke the camel’s back and people are risking life to gather in crowds to protest.  In the States many of these protests have become full blown riots.  

Canadians have been gathering to protest too.  In Montreal the protests have been heated. Here in Owen Sound, this past Wednesday a university student organized a Black Lives Matter march.  It was well attended.  The mayor and the police chief both attended and took a knee at the Black History Cairn in Harrison Park.  As you folks know, Owen Sound was one of the furthest stops north on the Underground Railroad, the network that African-Americans used to escape slavery in the United States.  Even with that high note in our past, there is still racism in this area.  It has reared its ugly head over that past couple of years with the arrival of many Newcomers from the Middle East and Africa.

During this pandemic, many similar events like Pride Parades have been postponed or cancelled this year.  Yet, crowds are gathering to passionately say Black Lives Matter and that racism needs to end at the personal level and especially at the systemic level.  Racism is embedded in our political and economic systems as much as sexism is.  

People of all colours are crowding up for these protests.  The reaction to them has been all over the spectrum from spontaneously joining in to taunting the protestors.  In some places civic officials have joined while in others they have sent the police out in riot gear.  Added to all that, there’s anger and righteous indignation at the disregard for the pandemic risk.  It’s a tense matter. 

I had a difficult time deciding what to preach on this week.  I wanted to revisit the story of Abraham and Sarah and the impossible birth of Isaac.  I wanted to talk about God being a promise-keeping God and how God makes possible the impossible. I thought I could preach on that yet again with the message that even though as congregations we are old and lack the energy for anything new, God is still the God who makes possible the impossible.  So, we have to still be on the lookout for new life in our midst.  I could have preached on that, but as I read the lectionary passage from Matthew a verse stuck out that wouldn’t let go of me; verse 36 which reads: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  So, I went with the crowds.

Looking at that passage, wherever Jesus went crowds gathered around him.  They came for many reasons but at the heart of it all was that they were deeply dissatisfied with life the way it was.  The Romans were there like a corrupt police force with oppression in hand.  Their political leaders were corrupted pawns. The religious leaders either served the establishment or were hypocritical legalists.  Many revolutionaries had risen up and been put down claiming to be the Messiah, the Spirit of God anointed king that God had promised to send at the end of the age to set up the Kingdom of Heaven.  So, people crowded around Jesus wondering who was this teacher who teaches with authority the religious leaders didn’t seem to have, who heals the sick and casts out demons, who cries out for justice proclaiming that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand?  Could he be the one?

Matthew says that Jesus could see that they were like sheep without a shepherd.  That’s a biblically-based, highly politically charged accusation against the leaders of the Jewish people in that day.  Many of the prophets condemned the leaders of the people as impotent, unfaithful, and self-serving by referring to them as shepherds who had abandoned their responsibilities to serve God and his people in order to embellish themselves.

Jesus saw the crowd and Matthew says had compassion for them.  The Hebrew/Greek way of thinking about compassion is pretty deep.  The Greek word for compassion literally means “moved in the bowel”.  That’s when something troubles you so much that in your gut is where you’re feeling it.  Something troubles you to the point of you know you got to do something about it.  Have you ever had a concern just churn in your gut? Well, Jesus saw this crowd and he was deeply moved in his gut by by them, felt compelled to do something for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.  He had an overwhelming concern for them for they were oppressed and hopeless, without solid leadership, and losing faith.

His response to the crowd wasn’t to judge and condemn them for their liberal political desires to be free and to enjoy justice, peace, and equity.  He didn’t dismiss them by saying all lives matter when they just wanted their lives to matter rather than being expendable economic slaves undergirding the Roman imperial economy by doing the things the Romans wouldn’t do for themselves.

Jesus instead empowered his disciples to go to these particular lost sheep and do the things they needed done to restore their human worth and dignity.  Jesus sent his followers into the crowd to proclaim and to embody the reality that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

Now, as I said, this verse really spoke to me.  We are in a moment when crowds are gathering and they are gathering over a matter that should have gone away several decades ago: racism and white privilege are still with us.  Racism is a learned behaviour.  Children are not born racist.  They learn it from adults.  It persists because the dominant white culture is afraid of losing its privilege. 

When I moved to Canada I was taught that when it comes to racial differences Canada is different than the States and this is true.  The States handles racial difference like a “melting pot”.  If you throw a bunch of different colours of cheese into a pot and melt them, they will all become one colour.  The unspoken assumption then is that the final colour will be white.  So that, the “whiter” people of colour become, the better things go for them.  In Canada we use the analogy of the “Salad Bowl”.  All the different ingredients make up a unique and enjoyable salad.  That’s a good ideal and it is noticeable that Canadians strive for that.  But…there’s still white privilege and racist attitudes at play especially towards the First Nations.

People are crowding together like sheep without a shepherd and whether they know it or not they are looking for the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus comes to bring.  He has compassion for the crowds.  As his body, we should too.  As white Christians, we have to be honest and own up to why people are crowding up today.  The biggest thing we have to do is listen to our brothers and sisters of colour.  Right now there is a wealth of church services on YouTube.  Find a couple of black preachers to listen to and hear what they are saying about what its like to be Black in Canada.  Listening with compassion is a good place to start.  Well, I’ve gotten long winded here.  So, I just want to say crowds are gathering. Jesus is moved with compassion.  Can we, his disciples, say the same?  Amen.

I Don't Believe in god Almighty

2 Corinthians 2:13:11-13

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It is no surprise that people do not see things the same way.  Several months ago at our house we repainted some dining room chairs.  Dana said the previous colour was light blue.  I said it was light green.  I knew better than to push the issue…so I asked the kids.  Alice also said light blue and William said light green.  There may be a difference in the way women and men see colours; regardless, we were looking at the same chair and seeing two different colours.  

Two people can behold the same sunset but not perceive its beauty the same way…and so it is with the way we regard God.  Some people will boldly say, “I experience God to be like this…”.  Another person will say, “I have had no experience of God.  How can we know there is a God?”  One person will say, “This is what I believe about God.”  While another will say, “That’s nice, I believe this.”  While another will say, “You believe the wrong things about God.  My beliefs are right.  Believe like I do and God won’t get you.”

People understand God differently and so it is not a stretch to say that what a person believes about God will have an affect on how that person treats other people.  Let me ask a rhetorical question.  How will I treat people if I believe that God is the Almighty Creator who gave order to his creation by putting in place rules that must be heeded or the consequences are grave; that the rules are revealed in the Bible and, therefore, people owe it to the Almighty God who made them to study the Bible; and that as part of God’s ordering of his creation he endowed civil authorities with the power of the sword to keep order and therefore civil authority must be obeyed – how will I treat people if that is what I believe about God?  How will I treat people if those are my beliefs about God?  Many of you may be saying, “That’s what I believe.”  I grew up believing that.

Here’s an example from history and I apologize for bringing him up.  Adolf Hitler readily made references to god Almighty in his speeches.  He seems to have believed what I just outlined.  The majority of German churches supported him.  Then, he added to these beliefs that as part of God’s ordering of his creation God made a superior race of people, the Arian race, whom all other races must serve.  The majority of German churches apparently accepted his thoughts on that as well and stood blindly by as he systematically exterminated the Jewish people in Europe. 

Nazi Germany teaches us a hideous lesson: It is incredibly easy to get good people – good, church-going people – to do atrocious things by appealing to belief in god Almighty.  Moreover, they will do those atrocious things believing that they are serving that god Almighty’s purposes by doing what civil authorities ask them to do believing that serving a god Almighty makes a nation great.  

I want to go on record as saying that I don’t believe in god Almighty.  Yes, there are occasional references in the Bible to God being almighty and one of the Old Testament names for God is El Shaddai which many Hebrew scholars say we mistranslate as God Almighty.  El means God.  Shaddai most likely means “of the mountain”.  Jewish rabbi’s have traditionally taken it to mean “sufficient in oneself” to make it correspond to the name God gave Moses to call him by; Yahweh, which means “I am who I am, I will be who I will be.”  The word “Shaddai” has nothing to do with power the way we seem to understand power: “the capacity to get others to do what I want.”  

If we want to stick with the word almighty to describe God then we need to check our definition of power with God’s definition of power as the power of the love he showed in the weakness of Jesus dying on the cross once and for all.  Jesus could have called down the armies of heaven to annihilate his enemies and set up the Kingdom of God…but he didn’t.  He died and from death he was raised and by that death and resurrection God defeated all of the so-called powers that make claims to be almighty.

Let me tell you the God I do believe in.  I believe in God the Trinity.  I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  I know it is more difficult to conceive of God as Trinity – Three-in-One, One-in-Three – than to just go the easy route of believing in god Almighty. But, hey, scientists tell us that our universe basically consists of energy and matter.  Oddly, we can only see 1% of the energy that’s in our universe meaning that what we presume to be empty space is full of something called dark energy that’s causing everything to accelerate away from everything else.  They also tell us that we see only about 8% of the matter in the universe meaning that what we think of as empty space is also full of stuff we can’t see or interact with.  That’s weird and incomprehensible. So, should we expect that the God who created this universe out of nothing should be any easier to understand?  Just asking.  Thinking about God requires work.

As the Bible attests, God revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth who died on a cross.  From that self-revelation we garner that Jesus called God in heaven, Father.  This God in heaven called Jesus ‘my Beloved Son’ and poured the Holy Spirit upon him, and the Holy Spirit remains present with us now as God we know and encounter.  These three separate persons are somehow (and we will never understand how) all the same God.  They are the same stuff whatever God-stuff is. So, to say that God is Trinity is to say God is not a single individual with all power.  Rather it is to say that God is essentially a relationship of three persons who are the same God-stuff.  God is relational in himself as opposed to simply being individual.  

Looking at ourselves, to say that we humans are created in God’s image does not mean that at the core of our human nature we are autonomous, rational, decision making individuals patterned after god Almighty.  When we go behaving like that we do monstrous damage to ourselves and to each other.  Rather, being made in God’s image means we too are relational beings.  We need to have relationships with God, with others, with the creation, with ourselves even to know who and what we are.  We do not exist apart from relationships.  We are relational beings whom God made in the image of God’s own relational self.

I know that’s some thick theology and I apologize for taxing your brains.   But, we need to start perceiving God as Trinity, as relationship rather than as this individual god Almighty.  My belief in God as Trinity culminates in understanding God as the communion of the Three co-equal Persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another so completely in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are One.  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another in the same way that Jesus loved us on the cross: an unconditional and sacrificial giving of oneself for the good of others.  In and as this love The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is One.

Back to my basic assumption that our beliefs about God will affect how we treat other people.  If a person believes that God is the loving communion of the co-equal persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love so completely that they are one, how will that person treat other people?  Well, as we are all made equally in the image of God, there is no room for societal structures that allow one person or one group of people to oppress another.  There is no room for racism, for bigotry, for poverty, for extravagant wealth, for weapons, for abuse of power.  People who believe that God is Trinity and love as Jesus loved will give themselves to others so completely in love that through them God will heal humanity of these evil blemishes.  These people will stand against these abuses and selflessly involve themselves in the Trinity’s work to overcome these energies of darkness that pervade human relationships and communities. What we believe about God matters and these beliefs will become evident in the way we relate with others.  

Being an American abroad I too have watched in horror and consternation at the events of the past week with a very sad heart at what my homeland has reverted to.  I firmly believe that what is going on down there is the direct consequence of pervasive cultural belief in god Almighty.  It reared itself as the idol of civil authority declared himself the emblem of law and order and then cleared a path through a peaceful protest with rubber bullets, flash grenades, and chemical control devices just so that he could walk from the people’s house to a boarded up house of God where he stood in front of that boarded up house of God with a Bible in hand for a photo op all after having previously made speeches about calling down the power of the military on American citizens and calling the governors of the states weak and foolish for not arresting people en masse for protesting against racism.  Did he not realize that the God who revealed himself in that Bible he was waving around liberated slaves, stood on the side of the poor and oppressed, demanded justice for widows, orphans and immigrants, healed the sick, ate with sinners, said the love of money is the root of all evil, spoke the Truth, and demonstrated his power by emptying himself of power and dying in weakness on a cross accused of being an insurrectionist?

Church, God is not god Almighty.  God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves so completely to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are one.  Who we believe God is has dire consequences…dire consequences… particularly for us people of faith.  We are the ones the Triune God of grace, mercy, love, peace, and justice has summonsed to come and faithfully serve him and be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.  We need to ask ourselves whether we serve the God who’s power is self-emptying love or are we simply in league with the raw, coercive power of god Almighty?  Who is your God?  Amen.