Father Abraham

Lent 2 B February 25, 2018

Do you remember the Bible camp song, “Father Abraham?”  Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you, So let's all praise the Lord.  Sing it 6 times. After each one. right arm, then left arm, right foot, left foot, chin up, turn around - sit down!

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; . . . I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face.

Billy Graham was 99 years old. November 7 he would have been his 100^th birthday. Friday’s paper compared him to St. Paul as an evangelist. In the 58 years between1947 and 2005 Graham conducted 417 crusades in 185 countries on six continents. He was heard by more than 210 million people - face to face and on television. The longest crusade was in 1957, 16 weeks in New York City. In 1973 in South Korea he preached to over 1,100,000 people at once. I never heard him in person but I watched him on television. Graham is remembered for his friendship with Presidents and other world leaders, remembered for desegregating his crusades in 1953, remembered for posting bail for Martin Luther King in 1963, but chiefly Billy Graham is remembered as a preaching witness to the good news of God’s love in the life, death, ns resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Billy Graham was 99. Abraham was 99. I can’t imagine beginning a family at 99. I hope we all continue to be like Billy Graham and like Abraham, trusting in the love of God as long as we have breath.  St. Paul tells us that Abraham’s faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” God offered, and Abraham received by faith, a covenant of eternal life. We are spiritual descendants of Abraham and God offers us in Jesus Christ the same covenant of eternal life.

Abraham stands at the margin of legend and history. Noah is oral tradition and legend. We have physical evidence of an ice age, and global warming, and many cultures have a tradition of flood, destruction, and new life repopulating the world.  Genesis tells us of God’s covenant with Noah and with all humanity, a covenant of respect for life with the sign of the rainbow.

God offers Abraham a covenant for himself and for all his descendants physical and spiritual. God will bless Abraham’s descendants, and they will be rulers of nations.  Abraham received tis covenant in faith. “Then Abram fell on his face.” He prostrated himself in faith and obedience before the Lord.

In the Holy Land from November to February the rain clouds blow east from the Mediterranean Sea. On average 24 inches of rain fall each year. (Boone gets 52 inches.) Most of the rain falls west of the central ridge where Jerusalem sits. East is a steep escarpment down to the central valley of the Jordan and Dead Sea – 4,000 feet in 14 miles. Little rain falls there. But the rock formations bring some of the water that falls in the west through the limestone to springs and pools to the east. The Dead Sea has so much salt and minerals that swimmers can lie on their back, put chin up and all four hands and feet in the air. “Father Abraham had many sons . . . .”  Four yards from the edge of the Dead Sea is a fresh water swimming pool.  This is sheep and goat country, nomad country. Flocks move from spring to spring, well to well. Scholars think Abraham was a nomad chieftain, living in a big tent. The bible stories about Abraham fit into the Middle Bronze Age, about 1800 to 1500 years before Christ.

Abraham received God’s offer of blessing with faith and trust. St. Paul reminds us, “The promise that he would inherit the world” came to Abraham “through the righteousness of faith.”  It is not what Abraham did, but what God does. God offered the covenant to Abraham not based on what Abraham did, but what God does. God offered, “I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous. . . . You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations .” The covenant with Abraham and his descendants was God’s free gift of a relationship.

Abraham had a choice. He could have rejected God’s offer. But Abraham fell on his face in worship and acceptance. Sarah first doubted and then accepted God’s offer of a son.

God offers us in Jesus Christ the same covenant of relationship that he offered Abraham. We don’t have to be 99 years old; we don’t have to be childless; we don’t have to be a nomad herder of sheep and goats in the Holy Land. We are who we are; where we are, in the present time. We don’t have to fall prostrate.  We have simply to open our hands and our hearts to receive God’s love, and to allow that love to fill us, and cleanse us of sin, and give us the truth and power of the Holy Spirit to love and serve God, this day, and for the rest of our lives.

Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you, So let's all praise the Lord.  Right arm, left arm, right foot, left foot, chin up, turn around – love and serve! Amen.

 

 

Noah

Lent 1 B February 18, 2018

 

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you . . . that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Our Lenten readings from the Hebrew Bible tell us of God’s Covenant with his people. Today the covenant is with Noah and his descendants. Next Sunday God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17), then the Covenant of Sinai and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), the healing in the wilderness (Numbers 21), and the new covenant on the heart prophesied by Jeremiah (31), fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus our Lord.

About 15,000 years ago the ice age ended and over 7,000 years the sea level rose over 300 feet. Farm land in present Persian gulf area and similar areas all over the world was drowned. Many cultures have a flood story in which a few people survive, by divine providence, to repopulate the earth.

Genesis chapters 6-9 combines two stories. Today’s reading is from the earlier story.  The later one tells how when Noah came off the Ark he offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving and in response “the Lord said, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” We can rely on God’s promise.

In today’s reading, God offers a covenanted promise never again to destroy the earth by flood, and gives the rainbow as a covenant sign. Noah and his descendants are free to repopulate the earth – and to eat meat. Before the Flood all were vegetarians! Unchecked human violence was one of the causes of the flood. In the new creation one of the signs of the covenant was that human conflict was to be mediated by a recognition of the importance of human life, expressed as “of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.”

The rainbow is a sign of God’s offer of the covenant. God has promised not to destroy all life. But God gives us freedom to accept or reject the human side of the covenant, our human promise to recognize the importance of human life. God calls us to respect one another’s life, to recognize that every human life is s gift from God, and precious in God’s sight.  

We are horrified by last Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida. I heard a parent say, “We send our children to school and we expect them to come home.” Once again someone rejected God’s covenant of life and chose to kill. The news media reported that he had been expelled from that high school, that his adoptive parents had died, that he was living with a friend’s parents. We can imagine, and  appreciate, that he may have had feelings of exclusion and isolation, of loss and anger at loss. We have all shared feelings like these. But we have not taken up a rifle and shot up a school. We have dealt with our feelings. We know ourselves as part of a community. We know we live under God’s covenant with Noah and his descendants. We see the rainbow; we are free to eat meat if we want; we are here because our parents took seriously their freedom to be fruitful and multiply. We recognize that every human life is s gift from God, and precious in God’s sight.  

Noah made a sacrifice to God. Jesus offered on the cross the supreme sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, from Adam through Noah and Abraham and Moses, the prophets, the kings, the chief priests, Pontius Pilate, and even the horrible murders of Nikolas Cruz last Wednesday. Nicholas is the name of a saint, a bishop in Turkey. Cruz is Spanish for cross. On the cross Jesus offered the supreme sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, his and ours.

God knows in Noah “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”  We are all sinners, saved by God’s grace received in faith, saved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The Parkland reports tell of a teacher who stood between the murderer and a student, who saved a student’s life as he sacrificed his own life. That teacher’s life sacrifice joins with Jesus’ supreme sacrifice, joins with our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving this morning, to witness to God’s love for his creation and for the sacredness of human life.  So let us give thanks for God’s sure promise, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” And let us show in our lives God’s eternal love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 

Last Epiphany Grace

Last Epiphany B February 11, 2018

Some summers we go back to the coast of Maine where my wife Lucy spent many summers at camp. A while go a camp friend from New York in book publishing brought us a new book about an English schoolboy named Harry Potter. Potter’s story was a good fairy tale. Mysterious birth, living with distant relatives who feared and mistreated him, rescued and sent to a school where he learned magic. By magic ordinary things could appear to be extraordinary. A magic gate and track in the midst of an ordinary train station, an invisible school with talking portraits and a water balloon-throwing poltergeist, a lacrosse / soccer game played in the air - at which Harry excelled. A best friend who is a boy and a good friend who is a girl, Harry lives in a dorm, complains about school food, and has homework and teachers - some exciting and some really boring. Harry is really special and marked for great things and growing into his greatness. Harry is a good and moral person, kind and generous, without being stuffy about it, and he is magic. Harry confronts evil with good, and good triumphs. No wonder the Harry Potter books were popular.

          We like the idea of magic; we like the idea that ordinary things can not only appear to be extraordinary, but are extraordinary. We like the idea that people are really special, and marked for great things, and can be good and moral, kind and generous, but not stuffy.  These ideas may be childish, but we give them up slowly and reluctantly. No matter how old we are, we want to confront evil with good, and see good triumph.

          When I was Chaplain at Rosewood State Hospital in Maryland, following my father who also served as Chaplain, we used to teach the children this verse, drawn generally from St. Augustine, “I am a child of God. He wants me to be good. I can be good if I want to be, and by his grace I will.”

          “By his grace I will.” We all know from experience that we can’t be good just because we want to be good. Wanting is a beginning to having, but not the whole thing. Whatever we accomplish, we accomplish by God’s grace, by God’s power working in us. Magic is the attempt to make God do our will for our benefit. Grace is God working in us and through us to accomplish God’s purposes. Magic is in fairy tales; God’s grace is the reality of our lives.

          The Transfiguration of Jesus, like Elijah ascending into heaven in a whirlwind, is God’s gift of grace, the grace of the brightness of God’s presence.

          St. Paul’s Epistle tells us of the light that shone “out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We see something of that light in a bride coming down the aisle on her wedding day, in the joy of a mother with her infant. The grace of God is his gift to us, his gift that we may be fully and completely who God means us to be.

          We are called to be holy people, grace-filled people, good people, godly people. Being godly, and good, and grace-filled takes practice; it takes work. It requires us to be part of a community of people, as regular in prayer and worship as we are in everything worthwhile we do. Elijah and Elisha came together in God’s love and service. Our psalm tells us “Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty, God reveals himself in glory.” Peter, James, and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration. They saw Jesus as he really is, as we experience him today. We are with him as they were, though not on a mountain, but in his church, and with his church. Jesus is present to us in spiritual ‘clothes . . . dazzling white” as we receive the Holy Communion. In gratitude for his love for us, and in the power of his grace poured out on us, let us be as we really are, his holy people.

A reporter once asked Mother Teresa what it felt like to be called a “living saint.” She responded, “I’m very happy if you can see Jesus in me, because I can see Jesus in you. Holiness is not just for a few people. It’s for everyone, including you, sir.  My prayer is with each of you – and I pray that each one of you will be holy, and so spread His love wherever you go. Let his light of truth be in every person’s life, so that God can continue loving the world through you and me.”

[From Love: A Fruit Always in Season, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 233]

 It is not magic. It is grace. Thank God. Amen.

Last Epiphany Grace

Last Epiphany B February 11, 2018

Some summers we go back to the coast of Maine where my wife Lucy spent many summers at camp. A while go a camp friend from New York in book publishing brought us a new book about an English schoolboy named Harry Potter. Potter’s story was a good fairy tale. Mysterious birth, living with distant relatives who feared and mistreated him, rescued and sent to a school where he learned magic. By magic ordinary things could appear to be extraordinary. A magic gate and track in the midst of an ordinary train station, an invisible school with talking portraits and a water balloon-throwing poltergeist, a lacrosse / soccer game played in the air - at which Harry excelled. A best friend who is a boy and a good friend who is a girl, Harry lives in a dorm, complains about school food, and has homework and teachers - some exciting and some really boring. Harry is really special and marked for great things and growing into his greatness. Harry is a good and moral person, kind and generous, without being stuffy about it, and he is magic. Harry confronts evil with good, and good triumphs. No wonder the Harry Potter books were popular.

          We like the idea of magic; we like the idea that ordinary things can not only appear to be extraordinary, but are extraordinary. We like the idea that people are really special, and marked for great things, and can be good and moral, kind and generous, but not stuffy.  These ideas may be childish, but we give them up slowly and reluctantly. No matter how old we are, we want to confront evil with good, and see good triumph.

          When I was Chaplain at Rosewood State Hospital in Maryland, following my father who also served as Chaplain, we used to teach the children this verse, drawn generally from St. Augustine, “I am a child of God. He wants me to be good. I can be good if I want to be, and by his grace I will.”

          “By his grace I will.” We all know from experience that we can’t be good just because we want to be good. Wanting is a beginning to having, but not the whole thing. Whatever we accomplish, we accomplish by God’s grace, by God’s power working in us. Magic is the attempt to make God do our will for our benefit. Grace is God working in us and through us to accomplish God’s purposes. Magic is in fairy tales; God’s grace is the reality of our lives.

          The Transfiguration of Jesus, like Elijah ascending into heaven in a whirlwind, is God’s gift of grace, the grace of the brightness of God’s presence.

          St. Paul’s Epistle tells us of the light that shone “out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We see something of that light in a bride coming down the aisle on her wedding day, in the joy of a mother with her infant. The grace of God is his gift to us, his gift that we may be fully and completely who God means us to be.

          We are called to be holy people, grace-filled people, good people, godly people. Being godly, and good, and grace-filled takes practice; it takes work. It requires us to be part of a community of people, as regular in prayer and worship as we are in everything worthwhile we do. Elijah and Elisha came together in God’s love and service. Our psalm tells us “Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty, God reveals himself in glory.” Peter, James, and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration. They saw Jesus as he really is, as we experience him today. We are with him as they were, though not on a mountain, but in his church, and with his church. Jesus is present to us in spiritual ‘clothes . . . dazzling white” as we receive the Holy Communion. In gratitude for his love for us, and in the power of his grace poured out on us, let us be as we really are, his holy people.

A reporter once asked Mother Teresa what it felt like to be called a “living saint.” She responded, “I’m very happy if you can see Jesus in me, because I can see Jesus in you. Holiness is not just for a few people. It’s for everyone, including you, sir.  My prayer is with each of you – and I pray that each one of you will be holy, and so spread His love wherever you go. Let his light of truth be in every person’s life, so that God can continue loving the world through you and me.”

[From Love: A Fruit Always in Season, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 233]

It is not magic. It is grace. Thank God. Amen.