And the corollary that comes with that notion is that if things aren’t going your way, you must not be living a Godly life. We recognize immediately that Job’s friends, who harangued him mercilessly to repent so that God would reverse his fortunes, had bought into that equation hook, line and sinker.
From that sort of quid pro quo perspective on living a life committed to God, a literal interpretation of the story of Abraham about to sacrifice his son would lead us to ask, What in the world did Abraham do to deserve being tormented by God with such a horrendous order—an order to murder his only and beloved son?
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| Abrahan and Isaac on Mount Moriah |
I have certainly heard that interpretation of bad things happening in a life. I have thought it and said it myself: Something bad is happening. What have I done to deserve this? And if I can’t think of any horrendous sin I’ve committed lately, then it’s “Why is God testing me this way?”
Reasons are really, really important—to human beings. We want to know “why?” And we want to know “why” in part because that will point us to a solution. If I know “why,” then I can figure out how to fix it!
But that’s human thinking, not necessarily God thinking. Remember that we are made in God’s image, not the reverse. Just because we think a certain way, just because reasons are important to us, does not mean God thinks that way or that “reasons” are part of God’s thinking at all!
We get so confused about that at times that we think we possess the people God has put in our lives: our children, our spouses, our friends. And then life happens. Those we love the most die. We cannot always protect our children from the bad things. Spouses or lovers leave us in the lurch.
We discover that love and relationship cannot be put in a jar and stored, like pints of mayhaw jelly lined up on the pantry shelf, to be pulled out and enjoyed during the off season. We must let go—and it does feel like dying.
But we must let go in order to go on living. And I would venture that going on living is sometimes the harder part of the bargain.
I’m not going to assume we know all the details of what actually happened so many centuries ago in a wilderness area of the Middle East. But I think it safe to conclude that God saved both Isaac’s and Abraham’s lives that day.
How, after all, would a father go on living in the knowledge that he had killed his only son—even if because God demanded it?
Yet I also must conclude that, in spite of having been saved from the unthinkable by God at the very last minute, both Isaac and Abraham went on living with huge, unanswerable questions in their minds.
What sort of God would demand such a thing anyway? What sort of father would be prepared to carry out such a demand? How does one trust God or anything else when we might, at any moment, be asked to let go of that person, that thing, that aspect of who we are… that we hold most dear?
Yes, God provided. But the entire incident can hardly be said to be a happy chapter in family life. It is hard to believe that Abraham and Isaac ever looked at each other quite the same way again.
But, of course, we Christians believe that God did precisely what this story seems to ask Abraham to do, and the passage from Romans that is our Epistle lesson today reminds us of that.
Paul wanted the followers of Jesus to consider themselves dead to sin, but alive to God through their association with Jesus' death on the cross. This text, therefore, is a vital reminder to us of the significance for us of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, and of the meaning of our baptism.
God saved our lives in a big way with the sacrifice of God’s only and beloved son and with the gift of the Holy Spirit, that kernel of God planted in each one of us.
But I find it interesting that in all of Paul’s talk in this passage of being dead to sin and free from sin, not one single particular sin is mentioned.
Of course, Paul does at times and in other passages provide us with some catalogs of bad things we shouldn’t do. But the absence of that here suggests that we need not always think of sin as specific things we should or should not do, nor of living a life for God as somehow never again doing any of those bad things.
Of course, we are not to go out and deliberately do bad things just because we live in and through God’s grace. But right there in the middle of the passage Paul explains why he says that: “I’m talking about this in these human terms because of your natural limitations.”
We will sin again; bad things will happen again. We will be asked to let go of things that have come to matter more to us than than life itself, perhaps even more than God… and yet to go on living. We are called to live... by and in and through the grace of God... after, and in spite of, all those things.
One of my favorite mentors is a Franciscan monk by the name of Richard Rohr, who publishes a daily meditation via e-mail. Just a few days ago, he wrote this: A Christian is someone who’s animated by the spirit of Christ, a person in whom the spirit of Christ can work. That doesn’t always mean that you consciously know what you are doing. …We may have no idea that we do what we do for Christ.
Note the utter absence here of any notion that we earn God’s grace by having the right answer, or by avoiding sin, or by believing or doing six impossible things before breakfast! That notion of earning our way to eternal life by good deeds, or proving ourselves through great acts of faith, is one of the things we are called to let go of—no easy task in a society dominated by concepts of merit and earning one’s own way.
Rather, we fall into God’s grace, pushed by the trials and failures and impossible choices life hands us. We can only accept God’s grace… in all of our human imperfection and limitations, and thereby become a vehicle of that grace.
And then we give a cup of cold water to a little one who needs it, not to prove we love God but because we know that God loves us, not to earn eternal life but because we already have it.
AMEN.
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