March 8, 2009
Edwards (Knox) United Church
Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Romans 4:13-25
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Mark 8:31-38
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
Our Lenten texts call us to the discipline of renouncement. They speak to the Buddhist idea of detachment. They speak to the spirituality of freedom - a new understanding of sacrifice; where the cross is not blood sacrifice.
Freedom in our culture is often, as the song puts it, "nothing left to lose." Often freedom is taken as freedom from responsibilities, from being connected. I like to reframe "nothing left to lose," as the idea that in renouncement, in sacrifice, we have found a true center of gravity, a more centered way of life.
Freedom includes obligation and responsibility. Freedom is the ability to commit oneself to God and noble causes. To take up the cross is to have the freedom to commit to worthy causes.
Freedom is the ability to make choices, based on free will. It is not a freedom from influences but a freedom to make creative responses and create novel outcomes. Becoming more creative and innovative, is the meaning of freedom. It is to seek creative solutions which includes risking failure. Freedom means we have the power to influence the direction of history. To achieve creative responses we need to identify those things that block out freedom, that stand in the way of the well being.
Our texts help us understand the paradox of taking up a cross that gives life, and the paradox of losing one’s life to save it. The texts reaffirm how leaving behind the familiar and safe territories can lead us to freedom. They remind us that the road to freedom involves a cost.
The Abraham and Sarah story reminds us of what all healthy families and communities need - a geographic cure. This is where our children must claim their own identity as adult persons. To gain that freedom we all need to let go of attachments and move into a strange country and live among a strange people. This is also true of churches - they need to push their comfort level and be challenged. It is to hear a voice that does not comfort but demands more of us.
What set Abraham apart from his neighbours was his sense of God. No longer would human consciousness be enslaved to the whims of fate. This sense of God is one in which God takes human power seriously, and in fact, needs it. No longer would it be serf and king relationship, but one of God empowering humanity toward freedom and care of others.
Abraham had to leave behind all notions of sacrifice as a way of controlling the future, where the right practice or offering would protect one from the contingencies of reality. The insight of the text is sacrifice is to let go of such controlling images and take a giant step into a unknown future. It would have cost him something to do that - to let go of safe understandings of being religious.
Paul reflected on the story of Abraham and connected it to Christ. Paul gives us a template because he reacted to our habit of making something into a idol or we have the ultimate truth. We like to take things that are our creations, those things that are finite and penultimate, provisional, and make them into a ultimate final word - into idols.
We get attached to things that are perishing. We have certain hymns and ways of worshipping and we get attached to them. Of course, this is natural because they have helped deepen our faith, but they now are worshipped. We forget they are only way-stations or aids to help us reach God. We confuse important yet temporary explanations with the fullness of religious experience.
This is why we stop singing certain hymns or reject some theological ideas because they get in the way. An example is the line found in some hymns of "given up for our misdeeds." This is carried over in the idea of vicarious atonement, where Jesus had to die for our sins. Paul is not referring to a notion of human sacrifice to appease a vengeful God. Nor does Mark mean this. What is suggested is the idea of a noble death where the hero dies faithful to the cause of transformation. This sacrifice is a template for followers, and there is a cost when one challenges the interests that bring disharmony.
What the gospel writers suggest is blood sacrifices are not needed to make us whole. It is God’s compassion from the beginning of creation that has done this. What the cross does is to remind us that we have received compassion and death has no control over us. We have received freedom to to live the noble life of right action. We can live in freedom, as those who bring a healing hand to life. God continuously is in the restoration business and as a restored community we are freed to restore the common good.
We are freed from obligations to justify by doing good. We do good because that is who we are. In the old paradigm people have to prove themselves or make a sacrifice to receive forgiveness. In the biblical view, God’s grace is freely given. Knowing we are healed, we heal - it is just who we are.
Mark makes the idea of the noble death as the central motif of his gospel. Jesus dies because of freedom to his cause. He is not sent to die but to announce that the kingdom of God is right here, a reality in human experience. Jesus remains true to the end, he risks and this puts him into danger and leads to the cross.
Remember when Mark wrote they all knew of the crucifixion and the resurrection - for he wrote some 40 years after the events. The temptation for the community was not to follow the path because it was dangerous. Mark says that the power of God is not one of force or compulsion. God's power was unlike the capricious power of the rulers of the age. God's power is creative love. And the community is called to take up their cross, which means to get their priorities straight.
The Lenten discipline is like the Buddhist insight - detachment. It is to ask, what are we attached to and is it worthy of us? It is to ask whether this is where we ought to commit our energy? We are free, so how should we use this freedom? And this is the discipline of letting go of those things that possess us. An example is the call to turn off our cell phones and Blackberries one day a week. You know we are possessed by the interests of commodified society when the Daily Show makes fun of twittering. We need to ask in whose interests is it really that we are so connected by cell phones - for it is not in our interests nor the interest of community. We may, as Christians, have to say no to the erosion of our community well being. This is to ask what is it that blocks us from fully participation in community, family and society. Lenten days are time to renounce habits and ways of living that inhibit the growth of well-being for us and all creation. It is to make God our infinite centre - to journey into new ways of being with the creative transformative power of love.
George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com
