Saturday, May 17, 2014
Pentecost 2, Year A, Proper 8, 2011 ~ The Wages of Sin
SERMON FOR PENTECOST 2
PROPER 8 “A”
christ church summer chapel
…the wages of sin is death,
but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
+ In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Maybe it would be best to consider today’s rather challenging
readings in terms of the last two weeks: God is Love. The Holy Spirit is that
love, poured out into the world and suffusing it to such an extent that we
don’t even notice, any more than we notice the air we breathe. And, since love
is a personal, term – a word about a relationship – then God has to be
personal, because love is personal. Love is what we call it when we break
through the isolation of our individuality into the community of relationships
with other persons. In fact, that is what the word person means. From the Latin - per-sona. It was also the term used for
the masks actors wore on stage, in ancient times. In Greek theater. They had
little megaphones built in at the mouth-opening, to help the actors be heard,
to help their voices to sound through
the masks. To this day, a play will list the characters as dramatis personæ.
With that in
mind, let’s turn to our three readings: Abraham’s sacrifice, Paul and the wages of sin, and the Gospel about
sending. Jesus was talking to His apostles,
which is Greek for someone who is sent. In our calendar, the Sunday closest to
July 29 is always dedicated to these apostles
and prophets, because June 29 is the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and
Paul, the preëminent apostles and the founders of the Church in the imperial
capital, Rome. According to tradition, they gave their lives on the same day. I
want to suggest that we are all sent to do the same thing.
Not literally,
perhaps – to die violently for Jesus and the Gospel – but to give up our lives,
as we commonly think of them; because we commonly think of ourselves as individuals, not as persons. As an individual, I see myself as defined by my
limitations : my history, my individual characteristics, my skin. “I” am that
which lives inside my skin. That is what I think of as “my life”. But Jesus
says over and over that “those who would save their life will lose it; those
who are willing to lose their life for my sake and the Gospel’s will find it”. I think He is talking about the difference
between individual life and personal life, what Paul calls the
difference between sin and righteousness, or putting it another
way, the difference between ego and love. This is the difference in
consciousness between self-absorption and self-forgetfulness, between
concentration on self, and contemplation of the Love of God. To lose life for
the sake of the Gospel is to forget about oneself in receiving and sharing the
ravishing Good News that Love rules That is what it means to be an apostle: not
only, perhaps, to be sent into the world with this Good News, but to be sent out of ourselves, into the Community of
the Holy Trinity, into which God wills to include all Creation. Apostles are
those who are sent beyond themselves.
Then there is
Abraham: probably the most difficult story in the whole of Holy Scripture. What
kind of God is this, Who tests the one he called His “friend” by requiring him
to kill his only son? There are many ways to interpret this story.
·
Some rationalist scholars say that it is a primordial
memory of the abandonment of human sacrifice in favor of animal sacrifice.
·
One ancient rabbi observed that after this incident,
God never spoke to Abraham again. Who knows? Maybe if Abraham had refused the
sacrifice, the world would have been even better off: further along toward its
transfiguration.
·
The ancient
Christian interpretation is that Abraham’s sacrifice is a foreshadowing of the
sacrifice on Calvary, not far from Mt. Moriah, now known as Temple Mount, the
place where Abraham offered Isaac, which became the site of the great Temple in
Jerusalem, now sheltered by the Muslim Dome of the Rock. As Abraham laid the
wood of the sacrificial fire on his beloved son and was willing to sacrifice him,
his only son, whom he loved, so is God,Who lays the wood of the Cross in His
only Son and leads Him up Calvary. The
difference is there is no Ram caught in a bramble to save the Son of God.
All of these
are useful meditations. I want to suggest one more. When God asked Abraham to
kill his son, he was asking him to kill himself: to slay his own ego. As far as
we can tell, in Abraham’s time, children were important mainly as extensions of
their fathers, signs of their fathers’ substance, extensions of their fathers’
ego: my house, by lands, my sheep and cattle, my wives and my sons (daughters,
of course, didn’t matter much at all). Thye
father might have many sons, and he might or might not love them, as we think
of parental love today. Sons were the father’s immortality, carrying on his name which is to say his very being into
the indefinite future, the extension of his ego in time. That is why it was
considered such a misfortune to have a childless wife, like Sarah. And the boy
required as a sacrifice was not merely the ONLY son, but the son miraculously
born of a laughable promise, when Sarah
was ninety years old! So, when the Lord
required the sacrifice of Isaac, God was asking Abraham to give up not simply a
beloved child, as we might think of it nowadays, but to renounce all his own
hope of individual immortality. He was asked to lose his life. God was sending him beyond that kind of
self-consciousness on a strange, new journey. Although Abraham could see
nothing but total loss in this command, he was willing. And his willingness
resulted in the promise, now fulfilled, that his descendants would issue not
just from Isaac, but would outnumber the stars of heaven and the sands of the
sea.
Abraham is the
Father of Faith because faith is being sent beyond our natural, individual
self-consciousness, and Abraham was willing to go. Faith requires us to risk
everything, as Abraham did when he abandoned his mid-life prosperity in Ur of
the Chaldees and set off for a land he knew not. He risked everything, again,
on Mt. Moriah. God sent him beyond
himself. And that is what God does to each of us, who dares to identify with
the Gospel.
And so to
Paul. The Wages fo Sin is Death; the gift
of God is eternal life. Let’s just forget about the standard doctrine that
God punishes us for sins, by which we mean out individual failings. That’s not
what Paul is saying at all. It is not God Who kills us, but the tyrant called
Sin. Sin is what we turn to when we turn away from love, back into the old
consciousness of self as individual.
Sin is turning away from the life of interpersonal communion in the Love of the
Holy Spirit, back toward the limited self, whose only future is death. That’s
what Paul means, I think, when he speaks in other places of this body of death and the old man. Forget about the medieval
pictures of the Last Judgment. Forget the great Michelangelo. These are
metaphors for the decision we make every waking moment, to remember God and to
move toward God’s love – or not. When Paul writes of the “passions of [y]our
mortal bodies” and “presenting (y)our members as slaves to impurity and to
greater and greater iniquity” He wasn’t talking about mere physical desire. He
was talking about what we might call our devotion to ego. He meant what Jesus
called the attempt to “save our life” by concentrating on the individual self,
seeking to enlarge and perpetuate it (MY house, MY lands, MY cattle, MY
sons….). That is what it means to be enslaved to sin, and sin pays its slaves
the wage of death.
When our
Father Abraham raised the knife over his son, he had decided to renounce that
kind of self-aggrandizement. The wonderful surprise is that when we are willing
to be sent, like Peter and Paul, beyond everything we know and hold dear, God
opens to us the way of unimaginable grandeur that Paul called sanctification and eternal life.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
