Fr. Troy Beecham
A Sermon, Proper 8A, 2020
Have you noticed how often a Jesus uses juxtaposition and logical contradiction in his teaching? Here are a few samples of what I mean:
• the last shall be first
• lose your life to find it
• the servant is the highest position in God’s kingdom
• the Son of Man came to serve, not to be served
These sayings of Jesus, along with the whole trajectory of his life, are a lesson in contrasting the life of faith versus the life of logic and strategy that we are shaped by through our families and cultures. The life of faith is not non-sensical; rather, it requires a complete resetting of our senses, a wholesale reorienting of our thinking and desiring, a culture that is profoundly different from the cultures of this fallen world. Jesus calls it being born again, being born from above, being born of the Holy Spirit. We have to unlearn all that we have been taught by our cultures, our philosophies, and even our families, an unlearning which will cause us to stand out, stand apart, even seem alien by those who knew us before faith blossomed in our souls. And the consequences are real.
Jesus has been teaching us the last three Sundays what it costs to be his disciple, what it costs to follow him – he even compares it to daily taking up our cross, to carry the instrument of our own earthly death wherever we go. He’s not asking for much, is he?! But he is not asking for more than what he himself gave, and he has sent the Holy Spirit to empower us to truly be his disciples, if we will allow the Holy Spirit to do his work in our lives – creating us anew, making the impossible possible, making us babes once again ready to be shaped by the love of the Father.
This path to being born again is like becoming an empty vessel so that God can pour life and love into us, filling us up to overflowing with the life of his kingdom, a kingdom that operates by rules that make no sense to the earthly mind.
Todays readings introduce us, suddenly and strikingly, to ways in which earthly senses and opinions are not only unable to deliver to us the life of his heavenly kingdom but also leave us confused about God’s desires for us.
In the first reading, Abraham hears God say “Bring your son and come to the mountain to make sacrifice and worship me.” Because he is still thinking in the logic of his culture and age, he hears God say “Bring your son to sacrifice him” because child sacrifice was common among the people of his culture and age of the world. It a terrifying, dark tale, we watch with horror as Abraham struggles with the faith that had taken hold of his soul and the darkened, earthly logic of his mind, which were warring with each other. In a last moment intervention, seeing that Abraham’s mind is still rooted in his culture so much so that he could think that God demands human sacrifice, God sends an angel to physically restrain Abraham and point out that God has provided a ram that was only steps away, but which Abraham couldn’t see through the blinders of his worldview. It is interesting to note that God never again speaks directly with Abraham again, but only through intermediaries on the spot to keep Abraham from so frighteningly misunderstanding him.
The only sacrifice that God desires and accepts is the willing sacrifice we make of ourselves as living sacrifices, becoming living, born again witnesses to the life of his kingdom, a witness that will mark us out as different, strange and dangerous, even. No wonder it is so hard for us to willingly choose the path of Jesus!
How often has “Christian culture”, individual Christians, and the Church as a whole made the mistake of Abraham because we have only yielded part of our souls to God, resisting the painful, wholesale, but absolute necessary process of being born again take place? Too many! And still the call remains from Jesus that we must be born again, completely born anew, a complete conversion of spirit and mind so that we can truly hear God and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, follow Jesus.
St. Paul writes to the Church in Rome in the second reading, pointing out just how hard it is to be born again. We are held captive to sin, to our passions and desires, to the value systems our our various cultures. We are held in slavery that only the Holy Spirit can change. Our only hope for true and lasting spiritual freedom is a two edged sword: we are born again and free to embody the desires of God, but this freedom separates us permanently from the modes of thinking impressed upon us by human and family cultures. With our natural minds we can see the chains of our bondage on full display at this moment in American history, and the rage we feel at seeing our chains. But our solutions are all based within the same culture that put us in chains! Our only hope, our only path to freedom is paradoxically to choose to die to the world and to be born again in Jesus to the culture of God’s heavenly kingdom. And the world will not congratulate us for our true freedom! Rather, our families and neighbors will either find us moldy confusing or dangerously subversive, and drive us out for not taking up the weapons of the age with them.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus promises us that we will be welcomed in the world with the same measure that any culture, family, or individual knows how to make for someone who is no longer bound by the chains they themselves either feel only vaguely or which they feel most brutally. It is a risky thing to become a living sacrifice in Jesus, to be born again, because it sets us adrift relative to the value systems of the world, especially if we are following our vocation as disciples of Jesus, going from person to person, family to family, town to town, nation to nation proclaiming the Gospel!
Yet this is our calling, our vocation as disciples of Jesus. There’s no way to soften the reality. We have tried for two thousand years to short sell the Gospel, to make it less life altering, to not become such aliens in this fallen world. We want to be nice, to work within the systems that give us privilege without having to actually take up the cross and carry it with us wherever we go – a stark sign to all who see it of the cost of freedom. Yet no matter how we try to explain it away and neuter its content, it still means what it says. Losing our life is the only way to find it. Letting go is the only way to be held securely in the bosom of God. Willingly becoming an alien is the only way to find our home and true citizenship in the kingdom of God.
May God pour out his Holy Spirit into each of us through his Son Jesus, our Risen Savior, to see us truly free and make us born again, for we surely cannot do it on our own.
Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
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