Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

August 12, 2007 - Proper 14 (Year C)

Mr. Ryan Fleenor

Isaiah 1: 1, 10-20; Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16; Luke 12: 32-40

Let us pray.
Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love,
take our minds and think through them,
take our lips and speak through them,
take our souls and set them on fire.
Amen.

It must have been in my fourth or fifth week as a teacher last year in New Orleans that I launched my tenth-grade English classes into an intrepid (if now infamous) study of ancient Hebrew literature.  It seemed at the time a safe way to cut our teeth together, diving into familiar stories from the Old Testament as we explored the usual litany of literary terms – symbol, characterization, and the like. 

We’d been at it for a week or two when one of my students came to me after class – I believe we’d made it to the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar – and he had a look on his face that I can only describe as perturbed.  “Mr. Fleenor,” he began, “I, well, I just don’t like this Bible stuff anymore.  It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would God bother?  Why should he care about these people after all the mistakes they make?  It’s like the woman who sticks with her boyfriend even after he cheats on her.  It just doesn’t make any sense to me.  I don’t think God is that patient with us.” 

I didn’t quite know what to say.  His reaction was, after all, a perceptive one.  The story of God’s love affair with humanity is one of almost unbelievable patience.  God creates; we rebel. God establishes covenants with us; we fall away.  God sends his prophets; we greet them with scorn.  God sends his Son to reconcile us to himself and we nail him to a tree. And yet, throughout it all, God never falters: his passion is clear, his goal focused – he longs to bring his faithful people home into right relationship with him.

I want us to spend a few moments thinking about this relationship, this covenant between God and Israel – and, by adoption, between God and us.  What does it look like to be in a relationship with God, I wonder?  What does it mean, as the Gospel of John puts it, to be friends with God?  And what exactly do we mean when we say that we love God? 

Today’s Epistle points us to Abraham. It was Abraham’s faith that made him one of God’s better-known friends.  It was his faith that gave him the confidence to set out from Ur and it was his faith that allowed him to trust that God would grant him and Sarah children in their old age.

I, of course, don’t want to suggest to you that Abraham’s faith was perfect; it certainly was not. Like us, he grew impatient as the years stretched by and Sarah remained childless.  Like us, he was quick to take matters into his own hands.  Like us, he found some of God’s promises to be simply laughable.    

But then we get to chapter 22: the binding of Isaac, the moment when God asks Abraham to trust him with even Isaac’s life – Isaac, his long-promised heir, the child of his old age.  You can almost hear Abraham wrestling with God as he walks up that hill, struggling to maintain his faith in a God who had never yet let him down.  His journey toward faith had thrown him completely into the arms of God: his son’s very fate lay not in his control, but in God’s.  Somehow, by the grace of God, Abraham mustered enough faith to trust God that day.  And in him, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God who would one day offer up his own son in love, saw a friend.  

We, like Abraham, come to friendship with God as people who struggle to walk in faith.  God asks us to place our complete trust in him, promising that he will be our God and we his people, and yet we often live as if that weren’t the case.  We build bigger and bigger barns to store up that which moth and rust destroy.  We learn to trust in no one but ourselves.  Sometimes we even have the audacity to think salvation rests squarely on our shoulders.  

God calls us to move beyond these crippling attempts to save ourselves by reminding us that he created us, and that he died to redeem us, and finally that he pours out his Spirit to sustain us.  He reminds us that whatever faith in God we can muster is amplified and sustained by the remarkable faith God has in us, despite every shred of evidence suggesting we aren’t up to the task. 

We see God’s faith in us in our reading from Isaiah.  Perhaps you missed it at first glance, what with all the thundering threats to cut Israel off forever.  But a second reading reveals a remarkably faithful God – a God who never loses his desire for reconciliation.  “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow,” he promises, and “though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”  God longs to welcome us home as his friends.  

But our friendship with God, our discipleship, is a costly business and it comes with clear demands.  There is no cheap grace.  It is never enough to proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ and then fail to allow that faith to cut us into some new creation.  Isaiah reminds us that empty faith and hollow sacrifices are abominations to God.  Having faith demands that we do something about it, that it challenge us, change us in important ways. 

This is the heart of today’s Gospel.  It is no accident that Jesus’ consolation “do not be afraid, for your Father desires to give you the kingdom” is next to his command, “sell your possessions and give alms to the poor.”  You see, God welcomes us into his circle of friends, many of whom are among the poor and marginalized of this world, and we cannot accept Jesus without accepting his friends as our own.  Let go of your possessions, Jesus commands us, they cannot save you.  Give abundantly of your time and money to those who have little.  Invest in the kingdom.  Risk something for God.   Have faith.

Ruby Bridges may be a name familiar to you.  In 1960, she became the first African-American student to desegregate the New Orleans public schools by walking through the doors of William Frantz Elementary.  A brave 6-year-old, indeed, she had to pass violent, jeering crowds on her way into the building – only to find herself alone with the teacher because all the white parents kept their children home.     

Robert Coles, a Harvard psychiatrist at the time, became fascinated by Ruby.  How could she be so calm amid so much hatred?  How did she carry herself with such poise?  How could she possibly pray for those who tormented her?  It’s simple, she explained to him, “God loves them, and Jesus tells me I should love them, too.”  God loves them, even them, even those who persecute me, and tells me that I should too.  Simple as that.  I think that’s what the Bible means by having the faith of a child.

Ruby, of course, was not perfect.  Neither was Abraham.  Nor are we.  But she did have enough faith to let Jesus’ story become her own, to make his desire for reconciliation her own.  She did have enough faith to view each and every person as a child of God worthy of love and forgiveness.  And in the moment of trial, the moment when she must have been tempted to hate those who were hateful toward her, she chose instead to have faith and love her enemies.  Can’t you just imagine Jesus smiling, charmed to recognize Ruby’s action as an imitation of his own?  In her, Jesus saw a friend.

Will we, like Abraham, place our faith in our friendship with God?  Will we, like Ruby, become a people shaped by wanting what God wants, and loving as God loves, and desiring to be in relationship with one another as God is in relationship with us?

Are we prepared to be that intimate with Jesus?

Blessed are those whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.  (Luke 12)

This is the promised invitation from God to those he calls friends.  As we put our faith in him, as we conform our desires to better reflect his own, we grow in our friendship with God. “Truly I tell you, he will have us sit down to eat as friends.”  That’s the great news this morning: the banquet prepared for us is a mere foretaste of that dinner among friends that awaits you and that awaits me in God’s new creation.

The table is set.  Come, meet God here.  Come, desire God.  Touch, taste, see the God who desires you, who longs to be in relationship with you that you might desire him more perfectly and seek to do his work in the world more faithfully.

What is it that you desire?

What is it that we desire?

And are we willing to let those desires be transformed by what God desires for us as his friends?

Amen.

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