To Weed or Not to Weed

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Matthew 13:24-43

I've often wondered why grass is the preferred ground cover for a lawn.  In the first place it is a food source but not for us, for livestock.  Cows eat grass.  Horses eat grass.  Sheep eat grass.  But, we don’t let them live so close to the house.  They give us parasites.  Actually, if we are so insistent on a food source growing right outside the door, we should consider the dandelion.  It suits us humans much better not only as a food source, but also for wine and herbal medication – everything our anxiety ridden North American lifestyles need; eat, drink, and medicate.  Down south we always said that a mess of greens three times a year kept the pipes clean.  I’m can attest that dandelion greens work well for that.  Dandelion root tea (possibly the nastiest thing you’ll ever drink) makes the liver very happy.  They are also a richer source of Vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron than is spinach.  Sorry Popeye.  Even the milky juice of the dandelion is useful as bug repellent and wart remover.  It would seem to make more sense for us to fill our lawns with dandelions than grass, but we just can’t tolerate a weed. 

I have thought long and hard on this matter and I think I have figured out why we prefer grass in our yards: a well-manicured lawn of grass meets some deep psychological need in us to show that our wheat fields are plentiful.  After all, grass is just a miniature, ornamental form of wheat.  A weed-free lawn would mean that we are very successful.  Therefore, a weed in the yard is a deep-seated psychological insult to what we call prosperity and we can’t have that.

So much for lawns, weeds in food crops are an entirely different matter.  Weeds didn't become weeds until humanity became agriculturally based.  Before that, weeds were simply plants in the flora that could be food or a remedy for whatever ails you.  So, we let them be.  Yet in a field of wheat or in a garden, weeds can wreak havoc on food production.  There was a study that showed that weeds and food plants could co-exist up to three weeks in a plot of soil without encroaching upon one another's water and nutrients.  But, if a weed goes four weeks, crop production can be reduced as much as 50% depending on the plants involved.  When it comes to actual food production weeds aren’t just an insult to our vain need to appear prosperous.  They are harmful and need to be removed. 

So, looking at Jesus’ Parable of the Weeds we should be surprised that the sower tells his servants to let the wheat and the weeds grow together.  That's preposterous.  But the sower gives his reason and it’s a good one.  If they were to pull up the weeds, they would also uproot the wheat and destroy the whole crop.  Hmm...How can that be?  Well, you have to know that there is a somewhat poisonous weed present particularly in Israel and Syria called the darnel.  When it is sprouting it looks like wheat and you can't tell the two apart until it is too late.  While sprouting the darnel will intertwine its roots with the surrounding plants so that if you try to pull it up you will destroy the roots of its neighbours.  The only way to deal with darnel is to let it grow along with the wheat until harvest time when it happens that the wheat stalks will bow over in worship because of the weight of the seed while the darnel, which has a nearly hollow seed, will stand straight up.  Then, you go through the field and remove the darnel and then harvest the wheat.

Jesus uses this parable to describe the kingdom of heaven.  The kingdom is being sown into the world as individuals who have been made alive by God in Christ through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Yet, there are also weeds sown by Satan that look like the children of the kingdom but are evil imitations.  The only way to tell them apart is at harvest time when the children of the kingdom are bowing over from the weight of the fruits they have born, a gesture of humble worship, and the children of the evil one are standing straight up, their empty fruits bearing no weight as if to say “Pick me first.  I'm fruitful.”  A life of true, heartfelt worship and compassion is what tells the wheat from the weeds.

Well, if we were to look at the world today, the field, we would not be too far afield to say that it looks like there was way more evil seed sown than good.  There is a great deal of evil in the world and indeed we all are infected with it.  Truly, one thing we must remember when talking about evil is that it has infected everyone and everything, so that there is no way anyone of us can point the finger of judgement at somebody else without first pointing it at ourselves.  We each have done evil things even when at the time it seemed like the right thing to do.  We have all done and continue to do evil and if we want God or government to go on an evil-cleansing tirade, then we have to be prepared to let that tirade start with us each.  No one is innocent in a world where even our best intentions can wind up being the cause of evil and where evil can be used to do good.  In this world that bears the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not good or evil, we have to be careful not to look at others as if they are simply weeds needing to be removed.  It’s way more complicated than that.

So, in this world of wheat and weeds it is better that we deal with our own weediness.  We, like the slaves in this parable, have a unique vantage point – it has been given to us to be able to distinguish between what is wheat and what is weed.  Therefore, we must look at ourselves.  One of the signs of true Christian faith is that we come to realize the evil in our own hearts and our powerlessness over it; that of our own accord we cannot just step up and be evil free like the wheat.  That’s what the darnel tries to do.  Instead, we must humbly accept that there is no way out for us other than the Triune God of grace acting to save us, free us, and heal us of it.  The wheat will entrust their lives to God’s will and care and be grateful and bow in worship before a God who as Jesus of Nazareth become one of us just as we are in our twisted brokenness and lived faithfully that we might truly have life.  He suffered evil in order to do away with evil.  He died in order to put an end to death.  He was raised from death bringing into being a new humanity reconciled to God that is filled with his very life to live under his life-giving reign.  He brings us each into this new for of human being by the free gift of the Holy Spirit. 

The weeds, on the other hand, will continue to go it on their own.  They say they believe in Jesus or God or in just being a good person.  They are even for the most part most of the time very good people who do mostly good things.  But their hearts are weedy.  Instead of taking that long disturbing look deep into their hearts to see who they truly are as persons created in the image of the God of love and grace they step back, shirking that responsibility for this very essential human task and let it ride with that insidious cover-up, “Nobody’s perfect.  But I’ve done my best to be a good and successful person.  Just look at my front yard.  By gummit, I’ve worked hard and it’s weed-free.”  The weed seed keeps us from seeing ourselves in light of God's will and care for us; from seeing in all honesty that we can say nothing other than “I” am unable and have been unable to do anything other than fail on most to all points considered when it comes to being a human being created in the image of God who is steadfastly loving and faithful in all he does towards us.  True wheat will look at the weed and humbly admit, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  Wheat doesn’t strive to be a good and successful person; rather wheat tries to make reparation for the hurt it’s caused and strives to be gracious and healing in all its ways.

With this parable Jesus has stated the truth that it is God's business to rid the creation of evil, not humanity's.  Jesus says, “Let them both grow together.”  The word for “let” in the Greek language of the New Testament just happens to be the same word for “forgive” and our English translations really do not capture the depth of the meaning of that Greek word.  Simple permission, simply letting evil to grow in our midst is not what we are to glean from this parable.  In the very least the word in Greek means tolerate, tolerate the evil in our midst.  Toleration requires active participation from us not just permission to be.  Toleration in the very least requires that we be able to recognize what is evil in this world and in ourselves.  Toleration means we struggle and suffer to learn how to live with something in our lives that we don't want there and can't get rid of.  

If we pull in the Old Testament Hebrew word and idea for forgiveness our understanding will ripen.  The Hebrew word we translate as forgive, nasah, means to lift up and carry.   We do forgiveness in this world of wheat and weeds just like the four friends who lifted up and carried their paralytic friend to Jesus who could heal him pushing through the mob and busting through the roof of a house to get him there.  Jesus looked at them and then said to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven. Take up your mat and go home.” And he did.  

The way we, the slaves of Jesus who share his vantage point on the field of wheat and tares, go about letting the two grow together is by living as Jesus did in our midst - by getting compassionately, graciously, and non-judgementally into the nitty-gritty of the lives of the people around us lifting up and carrying with them their joys and sorrows, their brokenness; listening and hearing their hurts and regrets and offering God’s forgiveness.  Being the truest of friends to everyone in our lives no matter who they are or what they’ve done.  Looking like Jesus so that they will know him when he makes himself known to them as the One who is compassionate, gracious, and non-judgemental towards them and the One who has always been with them in the nitty-gritty of their lives and the One who will now give them His very life.  

So, let’s not get caught up in the weediness of other people.  Let Jesus deal with our own weeds and the gracious and life-giving bluntly honest way he is with us, let us be that way with everybody we meet. Amen.  

 

To the Captive Remnant

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Isaiah 55:1-13

These words were spoken to the people of Israel towards the end of the Babylonian captivity.  They are a message of hope expressing confidence in God’s ability to do what he says he’ll do.  Just as sure as the rain will make the crops grow, so the word God spoke to his people in captivity will accomplish their purpose.  In the previous chapters, the Prophet Isaiah boldly proclaimed to these captives in Babylon that God would soon be returning them to the Promised Land where they would rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple and people from all over would flock to their Land after seeing what God had done for them.  

Of course, this word sounded great to these captives…or so we would think.  How could these captives resist this irresistible invitation from God to return home?  Well, they did.  In the end, apparently only a handful of people, just a few thousand returned.  Believe it or not, until the Middle Ages the largest population of Jews in the world was not in the Holy Lands (even in the days of Jesus) but in Babylon, near modern day Baghdad in Iraq.  It turns out that captivity wasn’t so bad.  In Babylon, the people of Israel thrived.  They built homes, farms, and businesses and became quite comfortable…so comfortable that most chose to stay in the land of their captivity rather than return to the Land that God had promised them.  

Now, about those few who returned.  They were a very small remnant who despised their captivity in Babylon because it kept them from being the people God had meant them to be.  God did not bring their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt for them to become comfortable captives in Babylon.  Rather, God had freed them from slavery in Egypt and established them in the Land to be his own people so that through them God could show the world that He is the one true God and there is no other.  But time and again the Israelites refused to be God’s people and time and again they chose to live like the nations around them.  They were supposed to be a nation that looked after their poor and practiced justice in a way that would emanate peace to the nations around them.  But instead, they in time began to abuse the poor for profit.  Their justice system became corrupt and favoured the rich.  They even began sacrificing their own children to pagan gods in the belief that doing so would give them power and success.  Those were the reasons reasons that in 586 BC God raised up the Babylonians against them to destroy them as a nation, destroy the Temple, and take them off the Land into captivity in Babylon.  

While in captivity, there was a small remnant who realized why God had kicked them off the land.  They decided they wanted to preserve their heritage of faithfulness.  So, they began to put together most of the Old Testament as we know it today.  They did this because they wanted their children to hear the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the Judges, David, and Solomon.  Instead of sacrificing their children to the false gods of the false securities of wealth and power, they wanted their children to know who they were as a people, that they were God’s people, and so that they could be the people God had set them free from slavery in Egypt to be.  

It was to this faithful remnant that God spoke through Isaiah the word that we hear in the weeks before Christmas, “Comfort, O Comfort my people…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”  Make a highway in the desert so that the Lord could come and get his people to take them home.  That word, the word that they were going home, going back to the Land to rebuild, that word is the one that was as sure to be fulfilled as the rain and snow watering the ground causes seeds to sprout to give food.  For an unimaginable and incomprehensible reason God had forgiven his people of their betrayal, idolatry, greed, and of their abuse of their own people and was coming to take them home.  God’s thoughts and ways are not like ours.  What God had to offer was his presence with them and a blessing of joy and peace free of charge like buying wine and milk without money and without price.  

This word was good news to the remnant among the captives who hungered and thirsted for the Lord and to be his people but for those other captives, the comfortable captives, that word might as well of never been spoken.  They didn’t care.  Babylon wasn’t so bad.  They likely felt blessed to be there like we do when we look at how good we’ve got it and call ourselves blessed.  To these captives of comfort God had a question, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” God was offering to them his blessing, his sure love, contentment and joyful peace and most importantly his presence with them.  Why were they spending their lives to simply be comfortable captives in Babylon?  

Isaiah’s invitation to these comfortable captives was, “Seek the Lord while he may be found.  Call upon him while he is near.” Another way of saying that would be, “Come, now while the time is right.  Turn from your self-serving comfort and come home.  God will be with you.”  But as I said earlier, the largest concentration of Jews in the world up through the Middle Ages was in Babylon.  God’s word for the most part fell on deaf ears.  The majority of God’s people there in captivity were so comfortable that they no longer realized they were in captivity and just spending their lives on things that cannot feed the deep-down hungers and thirsts of life.  They probably even considered themselves blessed.

When I was in seminary, I took a class on the prophets and we read a book by one of today’s brightest interpreters of the Prophets, Walter Brueggemann.  It was titled The Hopeful Imagination.  Brueggemann’s point was that preaching to the church today is not much different than preaching to those captives in Babylon because we are indeed captives to comfort who have compromised our freedom to be God’s people for the sake of living as the gods of our culture say we ought to live.  We are quite content with our wealth and privilege to the extent that we would consider ourselves blessed because we have it.  If this were Canada Day, I might pontificate a bit more on that, on how we are indeed captives to the comfort our freedoms afford.

Brueggemann wrote that book in 1986, at the beginning of the period which I would call the last heyday of the church in North America.  If you are in your seventies and eighties now you were in your thirties and forties then and just getting established with career and a young family.  The economy would soon begin to turn sharply up and the temptation was to become very comfortable in Babylon with a Christian faith that was very geared towards health, wealth and individual success.  

Well, that was 30-40 years ago.  I was ordained in 1997.  The church has changed dramatically in the 26 years since.  The church is majoratively no longer the church geared to serving young families with education and outreach programs.   Most congregations today have a lot more in common with that small faithful remnant that persisted during the Babylonian Captivity than with the comfortable captives of Babylon because for the most part the comfortable captives today have left the church.  They say "we're done with it" or "spiritual but not religious".  

We, the remnant, would love to hear God speak the word that he is taking us home, back to the Promised Land of churches filled with families that have thriving ministries geared towards raising children in the faith and serving the community around us.  We would love to hear that word, but frankly I don’t believe that is word that God is speaking today.  I think it’s our wanting to hear that particular word that is keeping us from hearing the word of hope that God actually is speaking today, the word, the effectual word, that will accomplish what God spoke and won’t return to him empty.

 To clear this spiritual build up in our ears so that we can hear God’s word for today we must take Isaiah’s invitation to the Comfortable Captives seriously.  We, the Remnant, need to seek the Lord while he may be found, turn from our comfortableness in trying to continue to do church the way we’ve always done it, and turn to a more personal, prayerful relationship with God in which we grow more and more aware of God’s felt presence with us.  Our personal, devotional lives matter.  Gathering together to pray and study the Scriptures matter especially when we also take the time to eat together.  I suppose that if Jesus did do all that walking around, he would like have been quite heavy for all the meals, indeed feasts, he shared with people or should I say that people shared with him.

We must also work to build a faithful community founded on God’s love, hope, healing and forgiveness as shown to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and experienced in us by the indwelling of God’s Spirit.  Building that community requires that we, ourselves, the Remnant, also turn from the security and the comfort that hold us captive - our prejudices, our judgementalism, our fear of people who are different.  

More than that, we must above consider ourselves dead to life as we want to live it even now in our later years of retirement after we’ve worked all our lives to have life the way we want it.  Each one of us individually has got to want more than anything else to be recreated anew into the image of Jesus.  Paul said, "I was crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me."  We are dead, but Jesus is living in us and through us.  We have got to want more than anything else that God reflect his love through our lives.  We have got to be the faithful remnant who want nothing more than to be God’s people.  Amen.

A Family Plan

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Genesis 24:1-28,50-51,57-67

This story of Abraham’s servant going to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac and everything happening so according to plan, if I can say it that way, it just seems so right out of the movies.  It starts with what appears to be the makings of a very old school arranged marriage that’s not fair to anybody, especially the woman.  Arranged marriages always leave you asking “what’s love got to do with it?”  But surprisingly Rebekah is given the choice and it’s a choice remarkably like the one Abraham made in responding to God’s promise.  Like Abraham, Rebekah had to leave her native land and her father’s house to go to a land she’d never seen, but a land that would become hers and her offspring will become a great nation.  Like Abraham she goes.  If Abraham is called the father of faith, Rebekah rather than Sarah should be called the mother of faith.  She arrives and is immediately struck with, smitten by Isaac whom she finds doing a prayer walk in a field.  The story ends with the words, “and he loved her.”  This is the only place in the Bible that I am aware of where a husband’s love for his wife is actually noted.  Also, their marriage is one of only a handful that’s not complicated by other wives and concubines.  

Probably the most astonishing thing of all in this story is the role God has in bringing them together.  Abraham sends his head servant off on a fool’s errand – “Go find a wife for my son from among my people.  These Canaanite women just ain’t like us.”  The servant loads up a small caravan of ten or more camels and goes to roughly the area Abraham came from.  He goes to the local watering hole, the well, where the local shepherds like to watch the young women come to draw water from the well.  There must have been something oddly “vah-vah-voom” about that.  Expecting that there will be women coming, he prays and basically tells God what to make it happen to make it clear to him who is the right woman for Isaac.  It will be the woman who gives him water and waters his camels too.  As soon as he opens his eyes, there’s Rebekah.  She fills the bill.  Gives him water – check.  Waters the camels – check.  Related to Abraham – check.  A match made in heaven.  Pray, faith, wait, God comes through….umm….hmmm….It does happen, you know.  I don’t know if you have ever had your jaw dropped by God when you asked for a sign, a specific sign, and you got it.  I have.  It happens.

Well anyway, the idea that God can play matchmaker and that a marriage can be life-long and monogamous are ideas that challenge us these days.  There are all kinds of views out there these days on love, marriage, and family.  Just to pop off a few, there’s the idea that we are not complete or whole without a significant love relationship.  You may remember the iconic moment in the vintage 90’s film Jerry McGuire when Jerry, played by Tom Cruise, says to Dorothy, played by Renee Zellweger, “I love you…you complete me.”  That one turned up all kinds of red flags in the world of relationship advisors saying, “You should be complete in yourself.  You shouldn’t need another person to complete you.”  Well, yeah.  If you’re saying that to someone you just recently met, red flags should be flying.  That’s just your body pumping some feel good hormones at you.  Even in the long run we cannot make another person responsible for making me feel complete.  That’s a huge burden for one person to bear.  

But…there’s the other side of that coin.  We do need relationships, significant relationships with significant others to be complete…if there is such a thing as completeness in this life.  We are not independent, autonomous, rational, decision-making individual beings who can do and be what we want to do and be with no consequences to others.  We are relational beings.  Sure, there’s some “unique to me” stuff floating around in us, but for the most part, I don’t know who I am apart from the relationships (not just love relationships) I have and have had and some relationships are more foundational to who I am than others so that without those people in my life I am very incomplete and, in some cases, freaking devastated.  

Then there’s also the idea that there isn’t just one person you’d make a good fit for.  Danny DeVito’s character, Eddie, in the recent movie Jumanji: The Next Level voices this in some advice he gives to his grandson, Spencer.  Spencer is a bit broken up over a relationship that is on the outs with a girl with whom he was well fit.  I couldn’t find the quote exactly but DeVito says something like “Don’t get too bent up over one girl. If I was your age, I’d just go ride the subway. There are all kinds of girls there to meet and one in five of them I’d marry.”  When it comes to mates fit for us, there is more than one person with whom you could make it work, but is there that one person we are meant to be with.  It depends on who you ask.

Then there’s what’s vogue today in popular relationship psychology.  Some will say monogamy and marriage are unrealistic expectations only meant to cause us shame and guilt.  They say we are living longer now and people change and grow and you can’t expect life-long commitments.  So, grow as a person all you can with the person you’re with now and there’s no shame in moving on to someone else.  We should all be mature adults and able to let go of people when they or we need/want to move on.  It only hurts if you hold on to those unrealistic expectations.  They also make the argument Evolutionarily speaking we are not wired for monogamy.  It’s better for the species if we have more than one partner.  To that I say, in every culture that has endured those evolutionary urges have always had to be curbed.  Stable communities require relationships based in trust and for some reason, the evolutionary urge to have more than one partner does a world of hurt in the trust department.  

Then there’s the biblical perspective.  Well, honestly, it’s all over the place and you have to say that the role of Scripture at times is to show us that some things are wrong, for lack of a better word, by making them look accepted and even right; things like polygamy and giving a slave to your husband as a wife to bear children for you.  These things are wrong.  Just because it’s a seemingly accepted practice in the Bible doesn’t make it right.  If you pay attention to how in the biblical stories having multiple spouses plays out you find it leads to a world of hurt.  

King Solomon is probably the worst example of them all.  He was the wisest and richest of all of Israel’s kings but he had the habit of marrying to form alliances with other kings.  He had over 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines.  Nowhere is love mentioned in these relationships.  These women were simply treaty trophies to him, but they were real women, real persons, certainly not property.  I bet he didn’t get to know a one of them.  He spent all his time collecting proverbs and plants for his garden.  Solomon’s marrying for political reasons in the end led to him putting shrines to other gods in the Temple so that they could worship their own gods…in the Temple…and he did it with them.  Polygamy damaged his relationship to God…we can only imagine the damage it did to the women.

To the other extreme, the New Testament would seem to offer celibate singleness as the way to go, but with the advice that if you can’t control your urges, it’s better to marry than to burn with passion or to be untoward to another.  But the singleness thing was simply the bias of the Apostle Paul whose opinions were skewed by his own ability and preference to live single and probably more so by his very urgent expectation that Jesus would return at any moment and that, to him, was more important than love, marriage, and pushing a baby carriage.  That noted, there is for sure in the New Testament the overall bias that monogamous, life-long marriage is the best way for women and men to partner up.  We also find that marriage should be rooted in love, a love that grows and blossoms to resemble the way that Jesus loves the church and the church loves Jesus – unconditionally and selflessly, full of hospitality, generosity, patience, kindness, and forgiveness.  Serving, not demanding to be served.    

Turning back to our reading here about Isaac and Rebekah, there’s a couple of things to notice.  First, in God’s plan for healing his very good creation from evil, sin, and death through a people of faith, marriage and family are central.  Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is the story of marriages and families who are trying to be faithful.  It’s not the stories of faithful individuals.  Moreover, even Jesus was born and raised within the context of the marriage and family of Mary and Joseph.  Solid societies are built on solid families not on individuals seeking self-fulfillment.  

Second, one could make the argument that yes, there is that one certain somebody that God would have us to be with.  But we need to acknowledge that if God does indeed bring two people together, those two people need to keep God in the relationship, acknowledge that the relationship is a gift from God not to be taken for granted, and in times of trouble we must always let God and the relationship take precedence over me, myself, and I.  God has a purpose for our marriages, for our families.  The best way to keep things healthy is to together seek that higher purpose. 

To close, I think I need to say that this sermon is not meant to be part of the ongoing debates of who can and cannot be married due to sexual orientation and what constitutes a family.  As far as I’m concerned, the love of Christ will and should always surprise and challenge us in its scope.  God’s heart will always be bigger than our own and God’s arms open wider than our own.  It’s best we learn to live with that reality.  I’m simply trying to say that in God’s plan to heal this hurting creation, particularly the aspect of wounded human community, the roles of marriage and family are vital.  Amen.

A Family Calling

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Genesis 22:1-19  

My father and I had some pretty good times together when I was a young.  Dad taught me all kinds of things.  I remember him trying to teach me to play guitar one Christmas morning when I was four or five.  He taught me how to use a hammer and a saw, even a circular saw.  How to frame in a wall and paint a house.  How to mow grass and trim bushes.  He left it to Granddaddy to show me how to butcher a chicken.  Dad taught me how to plant and tend a garden.  He taught me how to fish and the basics of hunting.  

About hunting, the last time we went hunting together became an odd adventure.  I was fifteen.  We did the normal thing.  Before sunrise we drove to Dan’s Camp and walked up the trail on a ridge.  He told me to stand by this tree.  He walked on a way’s further to stand under another tree.  We stood and watched and waited and froze and as was typical for us, the sun came up but the deer didn’t.  Once the trees were glistening in the sunlight he came back and we walked down the ridge trail to get in the car.  We started putting the guns safely back into the car. He took the shell out of the chamber of his shotgun, but forgot to unload the magazine.  When he closed the gun back up a shell unknowingly loaded into the chamber.  With the gun pointed at the ground between us, he pulled the trigger to uncock it and kaboom.  A round of buckshot hit the ground about ten inches in front of my feet.  How I didn’t catch the ricochet is a mystery.  I think we both lost our nerve for hunting that morning.  I did go out a few times with my brother when I was in my thirties.  That was just in case he shot something I could help him drag it back.  But Dad never hunted again after that.    

My father was also a man of faith; though it took losing nearly everything for Dad to come to faith in Christ.  I was probably eleven or twelve when God touched him.  My parent’s divorce had finalized and his work made it so he had to live in another town about a half hour away.  He sold insurance and surprisingly he was able to build his agency up from scratch during separation and divorce and to do so in such a way as to be recognized as one of the most successful agents in the company.  Unfortunately, for something I’ll call a personality conflict with his regional supervisor, they let him go.  He had to start over from scratch with another company.  He was a beaten man.  He told me of a time in the midst of that painful transition with all the feelings of failure, rejection, financial stress, and dysphoria of how he was out for a drive one day and he took a friend’s advice and began to pray.  He said the next thing he knew the warmest feeling of peace he’d ever felt just washed over him and he knew Jesus was real and everything would be okay.  He came to faith.

Looking towards our reading, I don’t want to compare my dad to Abraham and say he had the faith of Abraham or anything like that.  But I will say, and it may not make sense, Dad did not withhold his youngest son, me, from the Lord.  He had faith talks with all four of us, his children.  But with me, he rather strongly encouraged me to pursue what it was that Jesus was calling me to and in my case, it was pastoral ministry.  I guess he saw something in this shy kid with esteem problems that nobody else saw.  He wanted me to do what God wanted me to do because he knew it would be best for me for I would find life, purpose, and hope.

Looking at our reading, Abraham and Isaac, father and son, took a difficult walk one day.  Part of the purpose of the walk, in the end I think, was for God through Abraham to pass on to Isaac the live or die nature of faith that was incumbent in the promise that God had made to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations.  The faith of Abraham must become Isaac’s too.  The promise God made to Abraham must be owned by Isaac too.  Yet, this promise was not something for Abraham or his descendants to take into their own hands to make happen.  They must let God provide.  That walk was a horrific venture. If it would have happened today, most likely the two young men that accompanied them would have contacted Children's Aid who would have come and removed Isaac from the care of Abraham and Sarah.  Then, once the whole incident hit the papers they would have been branded as delusional religious fanatics and shamed into reclusion. 

But Abraham wasn't delusional.  God had really spoken to him, directly.  It happens people.  God had called Abraham by name and asked him to do something really horrific, sacrifice his own son.  Why?  Was it just a test Abraham's faithfulness?  But then for Abraham to carry through with it.  Just try to imagine how utterly terrified Isaac must have been; Abraham too.  Why was God demanding this obscenely horrible thing?  Why was God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the one through whom the Promise God had made to him would be fulfilled?

That’s a big question to which we must in the end step back and scratch our heads.  Regardless, there was a point being made here, particularly with Abraham.  Abraham and Sarah had a problem with God’s promise.  The problem was they didn’t trust God to make it happen and rather tried to make it happen themselves.  When they did this, they truly made a mess of things.  Just a couple of examples.  Abraham and his family were nomadic in the land that God was giving them and God hadn’t given it to him just yet.  He had a policy that when they passed into the land of another king of telling the king they told everybody that Sarah was his sister instead of his wife.  He did this so that the king wouldn’t kill him and take Sarah as his own.  If the king believed she was his sister he might still take her as his own, but at least they wouldn’t kill Abraham.  Abraham time and again evidenced that he didn’t trust God to protect him from other kings.  There was also Ishmael.  Sarah, being too old to bear children, didn’t believe God could give them a child through her so she gave her slave, Hagar, to Abraham to bear children in her name.  Thus, Ismael.  

This lack of trusting God comes to a head here with God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  To Abraham God keeps calling Isaac, “your son, your only son”, which Isaac was not.  Ishmael was still Abraham’s son, his firstborn son actually, whom he had just sent him away with Hagar into the desert wilderness where there was the very high risk of them dying from exposure.  Though it is not noted in the story, there is something to be aware of; Canaanite kings had a practice of sacrificing their firstborn son to one of their gods believing it would make themselves to be powerful kings.  When Abraham sent Ismael off into the wilderness to die of exposure, it was, in a sense, a way for Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn as did those other powerful Canaanite kings who lived in the Land God was promising to give him.  Abraham could make himself a great and powerful king by sacrificing his firstborn and that would make his descendants more likely to become a great nation as God had promised.  

To correct that horrible lack of faith God has Abraham put Isaac on the block.  He takes Isaac on a walk to the place where the Jerusalem Temple would one day stand accompanied by two other men for the purpose of sacrificing Isaac.  Yet, all Isaac and the two men know is that they are going to make a sacrifice.  They are going to worship, but where’s the sacrifice?  In the end, after much obscene horror everybody learns “The Lord will provide.”  Isaac learned his father would have killed him to stay faithful to his God.  He and Abraham both learned that Isaac is the child of God’s promise and God will let no harm come to him.  And, in the very least the way to becoming a great king of a great nation is not sacrificing your children but through faithfulness to God.  I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s all I got.

Back to my father and me.  When I was sixteen, I went to spend a weekend with my father and for some strange reason he decided to talk to me about the Lord.  In the midst of that conversation, even though I hadn’t been all that churched he asked me if I had ever considered becoming a minister.  Oddly, that was something that had been floating around in the back of my mind but I would rather consider first being a lawyer or doing something in the field of science.  He shared that he had once felt that he might have been called to be a minister, but he didn’t think he was smart enough so he didn’t pursue it.  But also, he felt his work as an insurance agent was like being in the ministry in that he got to visit a lot of people and help them make sure they were protected against catastrophe and that he believed that the insurance business picked up where the church left off in being able to help people recover from major loss.  Dad just wanted to know if maybe I had felt the call.  He didn't push me, but that conversation sprouted a seed that a couple of years later took root.  Once it did, Dad more than anyone else encouraged me. 

I hold my father responsible for instilling in me the notion of pursuing what God was calling me to rather than what I or other people thought I ought to do.  He really was the only one in the family that I could talk to about my calling and not feel defensive or inadequate or like I had lost my mind.  He was a good father to me and what made him good was that he encouraged me to pursue what Jesus wanted for my life rather than just tell me to go figure out what I wanted to do or what I could do to the best of my ability to be successful.  

To reflect upon this a bit, one of the most important life questions parents can discuss with their children and grandparents with their grandchildren is the notion that there is a higher purpose to their lives than just being what they want to be and doing what they want to do.  The United States Army years ago had a recruiting slogan that was as effective as Nike’s “Just do it”.  It was “Be all that you can be…in the Army”. Military service aside, the idea of being all that you can be is pretty prevalent in our culture.  I don’t think it’s at all wrong to aspire to be all you can be as so many seem to lack that aspiration or are just to hopeless about the future to step up.  I just offer the question who or what defines what that all is.  This question is especially pertinent in a culture whose primary source of what it calls Truth (capital T) is what feels true to me from what I gather from social media.  Feeling is not fact.  We, the disciples of Jesus, have a calling incumbent to us that we offer Jesus and his way of the cross as the definition of what that all is.  This requires that we live accordingly so that the Truth we offer as Jesus is credible.

Young people today are growing up in a world that seems hopeless.  They are saddled with problems as big and as complex as this planet and its weather systems getting out of hand because we are addicted to fossil fuels.  They live in a world for which a fitting metaphor of the way things are is  that of the kings of Canaan sacrificing their children so that they themselves, not their children, can have all that they can have.  We want our children to be able to be all that they can be but the world we are saddling them with is ready to implode because we have gone about being all that we can be in very self-serving and might I add hedonistic ways.  (Hedonism is just doing what feels pleasurable to me.)  We haven’t been pursuing happiness.  We’ve been pursuing pleasure.  There’s a big difference.

Anyway, what my father did in pointing me in the direction of seeking what it was that God wanted me to be and do is, I think, a paramount task in parenthood and grandparenthood today.  That there is a peace and a love that surpasses understanding yet heals when it touches us is something we need to encourage our young people to seek.  We can’t force it upon them.  We can’t coerce them into following Jesus.  We just need to share the one we have found, testify to his love and faithfulness, and live accordingly.  The way of the cross leads home.  Amen.