Trust and Obey

Obedience is built on the foundation of trust....

Proper 8a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Was ever such a commandment so harsh and cruel been given? Was ever a commandment so harsh and cruel ever heard? Was ever a commandment so harsh and cruel ever obeyed?

These are the questions that form in my mind as I hear the truly frightening commandment of God to Abraham in this morning’s continuation of our reading from the book of Genesis. You will recall that just last week Abraham had received another cruel command — the one from his wife Sarah. She had told Abraham to send the woman Hagar and the son she had borne to him out into the wilderness, there to die but for the intervention of God who revealed the well of water in the desert to revive the woman and her child. God had comforted Abraham before he sent Hagar and Ishmael out to the wilderness, promising him that they would survive, and that while the boy would become a great nation, it was to be through Isaac that Abraham would be reckoned as the father of many.

And now, out of the blue, God orders Abraham to that very son Isaac, the very son through whom, just last week, he promised that Abraham’s descendants would be numbered — to take his son Isaac out into the wilderness and to offer him as a sacrifice on the mountain that God would show. So my questions: Was ever such a cruel and harsh commandment ever given, ever heard, or ever obeyed?

For Abraham is ready to obey. He doesn’t argue with God the way he argued with him about the people of the city of Sodom, for whom he showed concern and care when God told him that the whole population of that wicked city would be destroyed. Abraham complained that God should not kill the innocent along with the guilty; and God finally agreed that if Abraham could find just ten innocent people in that wicked city God would spare it.

Yet when God gives this horrifying and cruel command, that Abraham is to kill his own innocent son, Abraham doesn’t blink an eye. He gets up early the next morning, saddles his donkey and takes his son along with two servants — and the firewood, the knife, and the fire! And then throughout the scene that follows, through the questions of his young son, even through to the raising of the knife, Abraham does not hesitate or falter. It is only the angel of the Lord calling to him out of heaven that stops him, and then he finds the ram caught in the thicket to offer in sacrifice instead of his son.

So let us look again at those questions. Was ever such a harsh command ever given? Well, I think we’ve already answered that one if we look at last week’s reading from Genesis. Sarah told Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael. This was a harsh command in and of itself, especially considering that it was Sarah who had given Hagar to Abraham to start with, for the very purpose of bearing him this son. So, to look to the second question, how did Abraham receive this hard command about Hagar and Ishmael? He wasn’t happy. The Scripture records that “the matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.” Sending that woman and small child out into the desert, even with a water bag, is a horrible thing to do. Before God reassured him, Abraham would know there was every chance that they would not survive, they would die of thirst — as indeed they would have had it not been for God’s promise that the boy would survive, and the provision of water in the desert.

And that final detail offers us the beginnings of an answer to the last question, Was ever such a harsh commandment obeyed? Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert because he trusts God to keep the promise that God has made to him — for God had told him that the boy would survive and I will make of him a great nation, too. And so it is as well with the commandment God gives Abraham in this morning’s passage. Because God had promised Abraham — just last week — that his posterity would be numbered through Isaac — God had promised that this son would live and grow to manhood and marry and have children — and that those children would have children, until the descendants of Abraham — through Isaac — would be more numerous than the sand on the seashore or the stars of the heavens. Abraham obeys the commandment of God because he trusts the promise of God. Trust comes first, then obedience; or perhaps it would be better to say that obedience is built on the foundation of trust. Abraham knows that God is faithful, that God keeps the promises that God has made — and in this case, although he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how God is going to do it, he knows that God will do something to allow his son Isaac to survive and grow up and marry and have children whose children shall be numbered as his — Abraham’s — offspring.

Abraham is so sure of this, that notice two things: First, he tells the servants who accompany him to the mountain where God has told him to sacrifice Isaac, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” “And then we will come back to you” — not “I will come back to you” but “we will come back to you.” Second, when the boy Isaac asks where the sacrificial offering is, Abraham responds, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering.” “God himself will provide.” Abraham’s trust is so great that even when they come to the place of sacrifice, even when he reaches out his hand for the knife, he trusts that God will provide — and God does provide.

Abraham trusts God, and that is the basis of his righteousness and his obedience — not his own strength or his own virtue, but his belief, his trust, in the nature of God — who is supremely trustworthy and keeps every promise God has made. After all, Abraham has seen God’s righteousness at work — God offered to spare the wicked city of Sodom if Abraham could find two handfuls of righteous people. God kept the promise that Abraham and Sarah would have a child in their old age — remember, they were in their 90s — but they did. God kept the promise, and she bore him that son, Isaac. Abraham knows that God will not make promises and then take them back. He trusts, and then he obeys.

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And so ought we to do, and for the same reason. We have experienced the blessings of God in our lives; we have heard the voice of God speaking in our hearts and guiding us on the right way; and though we have known times when the command of God was hard, we have also known that the mercy of God is great. More than that, there are many of us here I’m sure, like those Romans to whom Paul the apostle wrote, can look back on parts of our lives when we were not obedient to God but were obedient to the demands of our own lower nature. There were times when instead of raising our eyes to the hills we allowed ourselves to wander through the valley of the shadow of death. Yet even then, and even there, God was with us like a good Shepherd leading us up out of that valley into the light upon the heights.

Somehow even in the depths and darkness a small spark of hope and faith and trust was kindled, and the grace of God helped grow that little spark into a flame, and by its light God led us out. That spark of trust allowed us to realign our obedience from slavery to sin towards service to God — whose service is perfect freedom.

So let us join our voices with that of Abraham, in the sure and certain hope and trust in our Lord, the God of the promise made and the promise kept, the God whom we obey because we know that the Lord has provided, that the Lord provides, and that on the mount of the Lord, the Lord shall provide.+

Lost and Found

Blessed are those who thirst for God, the living God...

Proper 7a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG Sarah saw Ishmael, the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son.”

Before I begin my sermon today I want to note that the Hebrew Scripture readings that we will be hearing over the next months up to Advent mark a departure from the old prayer book lectionary. We have been using the new Revised Common Lectionary for some years now, but this is the first year in which are hearing the alternate track of readings from the Old Testament — most of them never read in worship before, which is why the revisers thought it was about time for us to hear them; and I hope you agree. Now to the sermon proper.

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In the gospel today Jesus talks about the strife that will come to a household between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and various arrangements of in-laws. I’m sure we’ve all been there at one point or another. When we look at the passage from Genesis, however, we encounter an even more painful situation. We picked up the story in the middle of things, so let me back up just a bit.

As I’m sure you recall, Abraham and Sarah had grown to old age without having a child of their own; but Sarah, knowing how important it was for Abraham to have a son to carry on his name, had encouraged him to father a child with her slave-woman, Hagar. Then God enters the situation and blesses Abraham and Sarah with a child of their own, even in their old age. And that’s when the trouble starts — as we see in the passage we heard this morning. Sarah insists that Abraham cast out this slave and her son; and Abraham, after being reassured by God that all will be well, complies with Sarah and sends Hagar and young Ishmael out into the wilderness with bread and water.

There in due course the mother and the boy run out of water, and Hagar, at her wit’s end — thinking that they are doomed to die of thirst but unwilling to watch her child die — leaves the boy under a bush and goes off some distance away to wait for the inevitable. Weeping, she lifts up her voice to God, and the boy cries, too — and God hears and answers, and assures Hagar, as he had Abraham, that this boy will not die but he too will become a great nation. And so, as God has done so many times before, God provides water in the wilderness, opening Hagar’s eyes to see the well of water.

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Whenever I encounter this passage — including this first time as part of our Sunday worship — I find I feel a great deal of sympathy for Hagar, and that Sarah does not come off well. And the visual image that comes to mind is of Syrian refugees escaping from the horror of the very uncivil war going on in their country; most especially the women and their children, dusty and ragged and thirsty. I picture Hagar and her little boy looking like that: covered with dust, perishing of thirst, out in a sunny wilderness; and I ask myself, Why didn’t God help them as soon as they set out from Abraham’s tent? Why let them run out of water first, and get to the point almost of dying? Why let Hagar descend into such a pit of anguish that she could leave her child under a bush to die, out of her pitiable inability to watch the tragedy of his death unfold?

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And the answer is that you have to be lost before you can be found. You have to go without something before you know how much you need something. Now, this is so obviously true about ordinary things that it has become proverbial: I don’t know how many of you have heard the proverb, “Hunger makes the best appetizer,” but it’s true; nothing makes food taste better than being really hungry. And it’s the people who live in the desert who know how valuable water is; who know because they thirst what that thirst-quenching drink does to you — satisfying you the way nothing else can. They also know how hard water is to come by in these days of global warming — I just saw on a documentary last week that there is a town in Yemen used to have to dig wells 80 meters deep to reach water; now they have to dig ten times as deep, to 800 meters, and will soon have to dig to a thousand — that’s two-thirds of a mile! That’s a long way to walk for a drink, let alone having to dig — it’s as far from as from here on up to Bedford Park Avenue. Not many of us would like to walk, on a sunny 98-degree day from here to Bedford Park just to get a drink of water — imagine having to dig straight down that far to find some; and then for the well to run dry!

Now, to put this into the theological framework that the authors of the lectionary no doubt intended: it is those who know their need of God who will find God. It is those who thirst for the living God who will find God springing forth into the desert of their lives.

People who are full of themselves, satisfied with wealth and happiness in life without a care in the world, are not likely to give God much of a thought — perhaps this is why Jesus said that it was so hard for the rich to be saved! But those who have trouble in life, those who thirst after righteousness or hunger for justice, are comforted in the knowledge that God will hear and answer them — but not before they experience that hunger and that thirst, hunger and thirst that develop an appetite for God.

And this is in large part why Jesus tells his disciples that he has not come to bring peace to the earth. He has come to stir things up, to put us in the position of having to make choices — sometimes, perhaps often, hard choices. He lays before us the choice between the easy smooth way, and the hard and difficult way; and offers us the chance to choose the wide highway to perdition rather than the strait and narrow path that leads to everlasting life.

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It is not that Jesus is saying we will need to seek out sorrow or difficulty. These things will come if we are living a Christian life; for being a Christian, one devoted to the teachings of Christ, one willing to respond to the demands of the cross, one willing to be crucified with him as he was crucified for us — that will cost you some trouble, perhaps in your family or with your friends, who would rather you join them on that easy-peasy path that they have chosen. But the hard road that is the gospel of Christ — and it too has a proverb to remember it by: “No cross, no crown” — or as Jesus says in today’s reading from Matthew, “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” In God’s cosmic lost and found you have to be lost before you can be found, or as the great old hymn says, blind before you see. You have to wander for a while in the desert before you realize how much God means to you — and look, as to wandering in the desert, all the best people did it! Moses and Elijah and Hagar and John the Baptist and even Jesus himself all spent their time in the desert — and that is where they found the miracle of God’s grace.

Jesus reassures us — as God reassured Abraham — even as he promises him and us difficulties. He reassures us by promising us that however bad things get God will not abandon us, for we are very dear to God, of much more value than a whole flock of sparrows — and if God keeps an eye on them how much more surely will God keep an eye on you, on me, on all of us who have come to know him — who have been lost in this wicked world — but have come to know how much we need our Lord and our God. And who know that whenever we have reached out for God, whenever we have raised our voices, we have found God ready to help, showing us the well of water that was there all along — but which, in our grief, blinded by our tears, we had not seen.

We have taken up the cross and wandered into the desert of this life, but we have found the well of water, starting with the baptismal water into which we were baptized into his death so that, just as he was raised from the dead, so we too might walk in newness of life. He who lost everything for us, who gave himself up to the death of the cross, has redeemed us and found us — the lost has been found.

Thanks be to God for the thirst for God, that leads us to these plentiful waters of grace. To him be the glory, henceforth and for evermore.

Get Up and Go

Combating inertia and momentum is not just a physics lesson...



Lent 2a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go 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...”
Have you ever felt so discouraged, so worn out, that you just feel like giving up? I know I felt that way a few weeks back when I heard that yet another winter storm warning had been issued. You reach the point at which you feel like your “get up and go” has got up and gone! Newton’s First Law of Motion declares that an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by some force; and sometimes when you are resting you need quite a bit of force to get up and get going. I know that many of us can likely testify to another scientific fact: that the gravitational force of your mattress tends to increase in inverse proportion to the earliness of the alarm going off! The earlier the alarm, the harder it is to get up. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who found last Sunday, with that lost hour of Daylight Saving Time, that my “get up” only wanted to go back to sleep!

So it is that people will tend to stay put unless acted upon by some force. And in our scripture readings today, on this Second Sunday in Lent, we see forces at work to get people up and going.

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The prime mover, of course, is God. As I noted last week, left to our own devices and desires we will be pulled down by original sin that lies coiled in our hearts, an inescapable gravitational force — more powerful than the most comfortable pillow-top mattress — a force that pulls us down and away from love of God and neighbor, nested in our own wishes and desires, curled up and content to let the rest of the world fend for itself.

Pulling against this force — raising us up — is the power of God, manifest in God’s call — a call that is strong enough to wake the dead, which, if you think about it, is what all of us are until we come to live in Christ, and come to life in Christ.

We see this powerful call of God at work in the Hebrew Scripture passage that we heard this morning — the call of God to Abram to get up and go; to leave his home and his father’s house and travel to a distant land that neither he nor his fathers knew.

And in that call, and by its power, Abram acts. He gets up and goes. Even in this simple act, Saint Paul assures us in that Letter to the Romans, Abraham shows his righteousness. He didn’t question God — “God, why can’t you bless me right here and now, instead of there and then? Why not here in this place I know so well, among my own people and in my father’s house? Why not here on my home turf? I’m so comfortable here, and I hate traveling! Is this trip really necessary?”

No, Abraham doesn’t make any such excuses; he answers the call, like that, trusting that God has a purpose for him, and trusting in the righteousness of God rather than in his own skills or talents — or works. If he relies on anything at all it is simply on his faith, his faith that God will fulfill all that God has promised. And a refrain will take over his life, the rest of his long life: The Lord will provide. That is his faith. He leaves his own father, his own home in the trust that God will indeed provide, and make him the father of many nations. God’s promise itself gives Abraham the greatest gift, the gift of faith, and the power to get up and go.

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Then, in our Gospel passage today we see a different kind of getting up and going. I’ve spoken before about this passage, and how easy it is for to misunderstand the language of “being born again,” or being “born from above.” What Jesus is saying here is after the fashion of an orchestra conductor, saying to the orchestra: “Let’s take it from the top!”It is a charge to return to the beginning and to start again. Being born again isn’t an emotional feeling; it’s starting over.

You know, sometimes if you get lost what you need most to do is retrace your steps and get back to where you started, to at least to find some landmark with which you are familiar, and which you can use to help you reorient yourself. Sometimes, as C.S. Lewis once said, when you find you have gone the wrong way the best thing you can do is turn around and head back!

And one thing I’ve learned when traveling, is that sometimes you need to turn around to see what the signs on the other side of the highway say, in order to realize how far you’ve gone in the wrong direction! Has that ever happened to you? Your driving along and the signs are telling you that you are heading somewhere that you don’t want to go; and so you look back and see, on the other side of the highway, a sign saying Poughkeepsie is that way. I wish they’d had a side on this side saying, Poughkeepsie is back that way; turn around! And we get that in the gospel, don’t we: you have to be born again. It’s a sign saying, Go back, you’re headed the wrong way; start over. Take it from the top!

This is really a big part of what being born again or born from above means. It isn’t that you haven’t gotten up and been going — it’s just that you’re headed in the wrong direction! And to return to Newton’s First Law, just as an object at rest tends to stay at rest, so too an object in motion tends to stay in motion — and if it is headed the wrong way, it requires some force to turn it back again.

This is literally what repentance means — not feeling sorry, but turning around, heading back the way you came, for only by doing so can you find the right path. This Lenten season is given to us all as a time to focus on repentance, on assessing where we are. We are given this time to see, by looking at where we are, perhaps how far we’ve strayed, or how far on the right path we have traveled, to listen carefully and look for the road-signs — including those on the other side of the road — to be sure we are following the call and direction of the one who gave himself for us, and gives himself to us every day.

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For there is one final “get up and go” in our Scripture readings today. It is the greatest “get up and go” that ever happened. Only the one who descended from heaven and ascended there again has made such a trip. God sent his Son, because God loved the world so much that he gave him to us. And this sending has a purpose: to the end that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

God sent his Son, told him to get up and go, to leave his heavenly throne and descend into the very heart of the world God made at the beginning of time, to be born as one of us — as God with us — so that we might behold him in his innocence and in his glory, lifted up so that he might draw the whole world to himself. That signpost is raised for us at the end of Lent a few weeks from now — on Good Friday, when we will see the greatest sign ever given, when we behold the Son of God upon the cross of shame, which is also the cross of glory. It is through the love of God and the power of God and the call of God in Christ that we are called forth from the sleep of sin, shown the way forward, and empowered to get up and go: to follow him where he has gone before, ascended into heaven, where he again sits enthroned at the right hand of God the Father. So heed the call, see the sign, and get up and go: Turn to him, my sisters and brothers, saved by the one in whom all salvation rests, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

Promises, Promises

SJF • Proper 14c 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Our gospel this morning ends with a series of parables about homecoming and servants and thieves. Few people these days can afford to have servants anymore, though most of us have bars or our windows or an ADT alarm system on our homes. Still, a few of us have (or are) healthcare attendants who assist with tasks of daily living. But I think most of us may be familiar with the phenomenon of the babysitter. So let me try a few parables of my own with that in mind.

A couple returned home one night after celebrating the wife’s birthday with a dinner at a local restaurant. As they came through the front door they found the babysitter demurely seated on the sofa watching television, with the sound turned down very low so as not to disturb the sleeping children upstairs. All was well and the parents praised the babysitter and gave her a tip in addition to her wages; and blessed was that babysitter!

But another couple returned home one night after a similar birthday celebration and found the babysitter lying flat out on the sofa, drunk and snoring, with a half-finished bottle of the husband’s best single-malt scotch whisky sitting on the coffee table, and the children rampaging through the hallways after a tremendous pillow-fight which filled the house with feathers and broken knick-knacks, and the kitchen a disaster area worthy of BP after the children’s efforts to microwave a can of Spaghetti-Os. And when the babysitter was roused from her drunken slumber she wondered greatly at what had happened, and needless to say not only didn’t get a tip or her wage, but didn’t get a blessing either! And she was cast out into the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and had a terrible hangover the next day!

The point of these parables, both mine and the ones that Jesus told to the disciples in today’s Gospel, is that being a servant implies both a promise and a trust. People who employ a servant, whether parents or the master of the house, are committing things (or people) they value into the care of someone else. And they trust that the one so employed will take good care of those things or people — whether their children or the knick-knacks in their household.

And from the servants and the babysitter there is an implicit, or perhaps even explicit, promise that they will do what they are hired to do. In short, assurances and promises are given and trust is placed in those assurances.

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There are, of course, more theological words to express this principle: faith and faithfulness. What is interesting to me, and I hope to you, is that in our life in Christ is to a large extent a reversal of the kind of faith described in those parables — the faith of a master in his servants’ faithfulness. Isn’t it, for us, usually the other way around? It is God who is sure and trusted and reliable and faithful — the one in whom we place our trust, trust in God’s assurances: “In God we trust” (as our money tries to remind us), the one in whom we have faith is our Lord and God, the one of whose promises we are sure.

Surely this is the message of the other Scripture readings we heard today. Abram has a vision in which God makes a great promise: that Abram’s own children will succeed him — that he will be a father and a grandfather and a great-grandfather of many nations, greater in number than the stars of the heavens.

And as the letter to Hebrews continues, Abram — or as he became, Abraham — continues steadfast in that faith. He is assured of the things he hopes for by his faith, faith in God’s promise, faith in God’s great faithfulness, God’s trustworthiness. He sets out from his familiar home to go to an unknown land, trusting and full of faith that he will find a new home; and he lives and grows old for a long time in that land of promise, a land foreign to him and to his people, until in his late old age (and his wife’s old age too) a son is born to him and Sarah. From one as good as dead, the promise was fulfilled, the promise in which he had faith — the first installment on that promise that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of the heavens. God’s trustworthiness is proven.

And finally, Jesus calls upon the faith of his disciples. He assures them with a divine promise that they need not be afraid, that that little flock need not fear, because God is pleased to give them the kingdom. In God’s great faithfulness, God’s trustworthiness, God will provide them with all that they need. Jesus calls them to radical faith and radical poverty — the kind that risks everything: to sell their possessions and give away all that they have; to make purses for themselves that do not wear out, and to put their hearts — that is, their faith and trust — where the true treasure is to be found, with God in heaven.

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This is a great challenge to us, as it was to the disciples. It is a challenge both as individuals and to us as a community, as a church. Beyond that, it is a challenge to us as a society and a nation and a world. Our natural human nature is self-preservation. We want to store everything up close to us, not off in heaven, but here, here: we want our treasure where our heart is, not the other way around. Our natural urge is to store up our treasure, to hold it close, to keep it where we think it will be safe. And so we put it in a bank — forgetting the truth of the old saying attributed to a notorious thief and bank robber of the last century, who, when asked why he robbed banks, said, “That’s where they keep the money.” For not only do thieves break in and steal, but sometimes even the promises of the bankers, the promises of those who tell us that our money is safe with them are unable to follow through on their promises. How many broken promises and failed dreams were revealed as the economy shuddered and sank over the last few years?

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Not so God. For God is not promising us a return our investments, or a secure retirement, or that the value of our home will go on increasing and increasing year after year. These are the promises the world makes, and it doesn’t often keep them. God promises us more, and his promise is true, and worthy of our trust. Great is his faithfulness, and worthy of our faith in him. For his promise is not the promise of some merely earthly happiness, but of something more lasting; everlasting, in fact: a heavenly hope. We are, all of us, looking from a distance towards a homeland we that will not attain in this life; a better country, a heavenly one.

Now, the worldly will say, “That’s just the same old ‘pie in the sky when you die!’” And what I say to them is what I say to you: we are all going to die someday. And the question is, What next? The promise that we are mortal is a promise in which only the most foolish person would fail to have faith. And since it is absolutely 100 percent sure that we are all going to die some day, having an assurance, a promise from one who is trusted for his faithfulness from everlasting and beyond all time, is of paramount value.

Who do you trust? I know who I trust. I know such a one; his name is Jesus. He has told me not to be afraid, and that it is the Father’s good pleasure to welcome me into his kingdom. He has said the same to you — I know he has; haven’t you heard him? He calls to our minds and he calls to our hearts, that we should place our hearts and treasure in his hands. He has promised us that nothing will be lost, of all the Father has given him.

And so let us put our faith in his promise and our treasure in his care, that our hearts may surely there be set in that place of trust and assurance. An let us as well, in the meantime, like those good servants, be about our Master’s business, doing what we have promised God to do, to do the work he has given us to do. There’s a lot of work to do, my friends, a lot of work to do. But great is God’s faithfulness, and his promises are sure.+