Fourth Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack
Genesis 22.1-14
St Paul’s Letter to the Romans 6.12-end
St Matthew’s Gospel 10.40-end
There was so much in last week’s Scriptures I felt I was barely able to scratch the surface. It is no easier today as we simply continue through Genesis and St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. St Matthew is at least a little more straightforward today - there they are out in the mission field, as we are in our own time.
Although the sermon today is preached by the great Anglican priest - poet George Herbert and Ralph Vaughan Williams. RVW’s setting of Herbert’s poem Love - a dialogue between ‘me’ (that’s you) and Love (that’s God), that just says it all.
But nonetheless, I have learnt in church-porch conversations and through being in the pews myself how, usually, it is the most difficult bit in the readings that we want to hear tackled and untangled in the sermon. (A footnote: sermons are a limited medium, and we clergy are always delighted to chat more about anything arising in the Scriptures.)
Today, it seems to me there are not one but two principle thorny patches: ‘sin’ in Romans, and the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis.
I’ll take them one at a time.
Sin. Immediately, perhaps, our minds leap to Victorian hell-fire preachers, or to a specific category of sins (often, let’s be honest, sexual ones). ‘Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions’ - there is nothing in there about sex, but I bet most of our minds made a sexual connection hearing those words. This kind of very common response says a lot more about the baggage we Christians have collected over the last 20 centuries, and less about Holy Scripture or Paul the Apostle.
Having a properly earthed theology of sin is an integral part of having a proper theology of grace. That’s what St Paul is trying to help us with today. Sin is important and must be talked about maturely and well; it has to be faced, neither with fear nor fetish.
So let’s make a start. What is sin? And how can we hear these words from St Paul as a gift from God today?
Sin is blockage. Sin is anything that represents a barrier between us and love. Anything that is a wall between us and loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and between us and loving our neighbour, and between us and loving ourselves (because, after all, we are to love our neighbours as ourselves). (Matthew 22). St Paul writes in a couple of chapters time that ‘love is the fulfilment of the law’ (Romans 8). So anything that is a barrier to loving God, neighbour and self, is sin. Love can be tough, sacrificial, it can be tender and wonderful, it can be romantic, it can be full of duty and care - its comes in all shapes and sizes in different contexts. And that which strangles or blocks it is sin.
The words St Paul uses for sin is ἁμαρτία ‘hamartia’ (and like the Hebrew equvialent חַטָּאת ‘chata’) they both mean ‘missing the mark’. As in archery when we miss the target. Missing the mark carries with it the sense of being off-course - we are made for love, and when we live in a way that is not love, then we’re just not being our true selves, on course, doing/being the thing we are. That of course includes how we exercise our sexuality, but also our money, our speech, thought, our whole way of being in the world, not just some red neon cliches.
I don’t know about you, but I can certainly relate to these two ways of understanding sin: one: barriers/blockages to love, and two: missing the mark.
But as much as we were made by love (‘God is love’ 1 St John 4), for love (Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’…’Love your neighbour as yourself.’ St Matt 22), the teaching of the Church also does not shy away from the reality of the human condition. Yes, all is grace; but also we so often choose the darkness over the light (we see it in our own lives, and in the world at large). Yes, we have been set free by Christ’s death and resurrection. Sin and death and hell have been rendered sting-less, bankrupt; but neither must we indulge in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the great Protestant Pastor murdered by the Nazis) called ‘cheap grace’.
The Christian life, as I’ve said before, is not a set of propositions, or a club membership, or a collection of cultural tropes. It is a relationship. An adventure lived in company with God and others. A relationship in which (by God’s grace) we grow, dispensing with these barriers, and missing the mark a little less as the decades go by. Read St Paul’s words about sin in this way, and I think we’ll begin to really see why he was so excited to write to the Romans, and to us, in this way.
So - to our second patch of thorns. Child sacrifice in Genesis. Again, the first thing we have to do is question our assumptions. This passage is often called the 'Test of Abraham’. Is that it? The Late Chief Rabbi Lord Sachs isn’t so sure. Lord Sachs wrote: ’The Torah, and Tanach generally, regard child sacrifice as one of the worst of evils. Child sacrifice was widely practised in the ancient world. In 2 Kings 3:26-27, we read of how the Moabite King Mesha, in the course of war against Israel, Judah and Edom, sacrificed his eldest son to the god Chemosh. Had the point of the trial been Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, then in terms of the value system of Tanach itself he would have proven himself no better than a pagan king.’ That can’t be what’s going on.
So what is going on here? Well those last words of today’s first reading are the point ‘The Lord will provide’ and indeed the Lord has provided. It is not Abraham’s willingness to kill his son that is the thing, it is his trust that he will not have to. The relationship between God and us. That’s the journey, that’s the point: grace and provision.
Lord Sachs again: ’When Isaac asked, “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replied, “God Himself will provide the lamb.” These statements are usually taken as diplomatic evasions. I believe, however, that Abraham meant exactly what he said. He was living the contradiction. He knew God had told him to sacrifice his son, but he also knew that God had told him that He would establish an everlasting covenant with his son.’ Abraham trusted in God in the not knowing, in a way that one can only do when one has a mature and real relationship with the other.
This incident isn’t best titled the Test of Abraham, but the Provision of God. No son will be sacrificed. God provides. A narrative arch for us Christians that only resolves two millennia later when God sacrifices Himself, the Divine Son, once and for all, a sacrifice to end all sacrifice. As St Paul writes to the Roman Church: a sacrifice that abolishes and heals all the wounds of sin, even death itself.
Together today’s Scriptures renew us in our sense of calling to this relationship. They are meaty and thorny lectionary readings at the moment. No bad thing. The point is: God provides. This journey through life with God is one full of transformation and becoming. How will you and I turn again afresh to this invitation this week?
[https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/vayera/negative-capability/]
[LOVE (III) by George Herbert
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.]