Lectionary Readings
O God, our hearts are restless until they
rest in you; grant us your grace that we might follow you into the blessed rest
of eternal life in your Kingdom. Amen.
The
fact of the matter is that what is often labeled as “Christianity” in the
United States really does not fit with this call of Jesus to deny ourselves and
take up our cross and follow him. It’s been remarked that a “crossless Christianity”
is no Christianity at all. Jesus himself says this in Luke’s rendering of this
moment. He says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my
disciple.” Now, it doesn’t take a scholar to figure out what this means.
Denying ourselves means not putting our wants, desires, or even needs ahead of
others. The Cross means humiliation, suffering, and death. And following means
not being in charge, but rather being obedient. Selfless, humble, suffering,
obedient – does that sound like what most people would say about Christians in
our culture?
By
focusing on the text from Genesis this morning, I want to consider an
alternative to what usually passes as Christianity in our culture and see what
following Jesus is all about. As I mentioned last week, in Lent, I am roughly
following the Human Nature section of the Prayer Book Catechism. The question
of the Catechism for this week builds on last week’s, “What does it mean to be
created in the image of God?” and the response is “It means that we are free to
make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with
creation and with God.” It’s important to note that in that response, there is
a colon between our freedom to make choices and the enumeration of those freedoms
as loving, creating, reasoning, and being in harmony. To be made in God’s image
is not to have the freedom to do whatever our sinful and selfish desires are,
but rather our freedom is to love, create, reason, and be in harmony.
What
this part of the Catechism shows us is the purpose of our creation. We were
created in the image of God, which is defined as having freedom. To be God is
to be free and unrestrained. Everything that God is and does is done in freedom.
And this is the image in which we are made. We are given the gift of freedom so
that we can be God-like by loving, creating, reasoning, and being in harmony.
But this freedom quickly becomes corrupted when we think that freedom is
absolute.
God
comes to Abram and promises descendants and land – Abram is renamed as Abraham,
meaning “father of many.” God intends to bless all the world through the family
of Abraham. God says that Abraham will be exceedingly fruitful; nations and kings
will come from him. And there will be an everlasting covenant, an indissoluble
relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham. In other words, Abraham
is blessed by God in order to be a blessing for the world. Abraham’s blessing
is not just for him to enjoy and use as he sees fit, rather it is a gift given
for a very specific purpose – the flourishing of God’s people. Freedom is the
same sort of gift. We are given the ability to make choices not so that we can
do whatever we want, but rather that so we can choose to love God with all our
heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves.
In
this covenant, God promises to be our God – and what does it mean for God to be
our God other than that to God we receive gracious blessings and respond in
gratitude? As is always the case, this is fully and totally about grace. Read
through the previous and following chapters in Genesis and you’ll see that
Abraham is what we might call a “scoundrel.” At times, he’s cowardly,
thick-headed, disobedient, and an outright liar. And if you read the chapters surrounding
this encounter between God and Abraham, you’ll notice that God keeps coming to
Abraham to explain that God will make him into a numerous nation. So we might
think that God has a memory issue of some sort – why does God keep coming to
Abraham to tell him the same thing. The problem is that Abraham wasn’t
listening.
God first said to
Abraham that he’d be the father of a great nation. The problem was that he had
no children. Now, Abraham had been given freedom by God, he had been given a
blessing. But things weren’t going the way he envisioned. His wife, Sarah, hadn’t
become pregnant. So Abraham uses one of Sarah’s servants, Hagar, as a surrogate
and has a child with her. That’s in chapter 16. But here we are in chapter 17,
and still, God is coming and saying “I’m going to make you a great nation.” And
Abraham is probably thinking – “I know, I saw to it myself.” But God insists, “No,
no, no. I am going to make you into a great nation. You can’t do that for
yourself.” God clarifies, “Your wife, Sarah, she’s the one who is going to be
the mother of this great nation. She’s as much a part of this covenant as you
are.” And to make this even clearer, God uses a name here that is somewhat unique
– the Lord says to Abraham, “I am
God Almighty.” That use of “Almighty” reminds us that God is God, and we are
not. God is always the subject of all the verbs. We are used by God, not the
other way around.
With this lesson
from Abraham in mind, we can then consider more fully what it means to be given
freedom so that we take up our cross and follow Christ. Consider how most of us
Americans view freedom – it’s about having rights that allow us to do pretty
much whatever we want. Want to say hurtful things – that’s free speech. Want to not wear a mask in public – that’s your decision. Don’t want to live the consequences of actions – join the pro-choice side. Want to own assault-style weapons – go ahead and bear arms. As Americans, we don’t like the word “No.” One of the rallying cries
that lead to independence was “Don’t tread on me.” Even in the Declaration of
Independence, we hear those famous words “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s all about freedom and the right of the individual.
Compare this to
Jesus, who says “Take up your cross and follow me.” That’s pretty much the
opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In our nation’s
history, we’ve tried to combine these two things – but they are oil and water.
They do not mix. Consider the words of George Will, writing about Thomas
Jefferson’s vision: “A central purpose of America’s political arrangements is
the subordination of religion to the political order… religion is to be
perfectly free as long as it is perfectly private – it must bend to the political
will.” In other words, the reason for the First Amendment isn’t that everyone
gets to practice their own beliefs without fear of persecution, rather the goal
was to force religion into the realm of the private and keep it out of the
public square. Again, contrast this with Jesus who is crucified by the State.
Here, I’m leaning
on the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas who has noted that Christians ought
not to be concerned about autonomy or independence, but rather faithfulness to
the conviction that we belong to God. Or, as God puts it to Abraham, that God
is our God. Autonomy, which linguistically means “self-law,” really is a fancy
way of saying idolatry. Hauerwas notes that what most of us think of as freedom
or autonomy is actually just slavery to our sinful desires. Rather, paradoxically,
true freedom is found in perfect service and total obedience to God. This is
what Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those
who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Hauerwas has also
critiqued our whole notion that we can even make a free choice. What we think
of freedom really is just entering into the conformity that our culture has
given us. We think we’re making up our minds, when in reality, we’re just doing
what the forces of capitalism, tribalism, pride, selfishness have conditioned
us to do. This is what Martin Luther and other Reformation theologians meant
when they spoke of our wills being bound. There is no such thing as freedom –
we are captive to forces bigger than us. So instead of serving economic or
political forces, the Gospel presents us with the alternative of following
Jesus.
Jesus though is
very clear about where following him leads – yes, abundant life, but the road
to get there is the Cross. We’re a bit
too soft for that. We prefer the illusion of control. We’d rather believe that
we get to determine the meaning of our lives, even if it’s a lie and deep down
we know it. We like to pretend that our decisions and preferences are the result
of our careful analysis, not just the whims conjured up by our sinful subconscious.
Even if it’s all a lie, it still looks better than the Cross.
It’s telling that
one of the central ways of understanding Jesus given to us by God through Scripture
is that Jesus is the “Word made flesh.” Why the “Word?” Because we are clueless
and need to be told the truth so we can follow it. Jesus comes to show us the
way because God, in God’s love and mercy for us, knows that we are like sheep without
a shepherd. Left to our own devices, we’re just going to mess things up. So he
comes as the Word so we can understand what God would have us to do and he
tells us to follow him. But we say, “Oh, no, I don’t need a shepherd, I have autonomy.
I can make up my own mind. I have a right to go and do this, that, and the
other.”
And where has this
gotten us? This week, we passed 500,000 Coronavirus deaths in this country. In
11 months, we’ve had more people die from a virus than Americans who died in World
War I, World War II, and Vietnam, combined. And what’s behind that large number
– the perversion of freedom. We make everything about us. Together, we are made
in God’s image, but we prefer to think that everything ought to be our
reflection. Instead of being willing to make collective sacrifices and wear masks,
we have hundreds of thousands more dead than was inevitable. Anyone who thinks
that theology doesn’t matter and is just for priests and academics isn’t seeing
the connection here.
Nowhere in all of
Scripture does God grant a single right to anyone. Not once. Instead, God gives
gifts. And gifts are to be received with gratitude and humility. Gifts are to
be used for good of all. This is why, more than the language of freedom and
rights, the Church needs to reclaim the idea of gifts. And with the framework of
a gift, we realize that gifts are given for a purpose – the flourishing of God’s
kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And so we give praise, worship, and
obedience to the giver of the gift. We have mutuality with those who share in
the gifts with us. And we have a duty to use the gifts to serve those in need.
This is a very
different, but very liberating and holy way of understanding freedom. It’s not
freedom to be a slave to our passions, preferences, and fears, rather it is the
freedom to enter the Kingdom of God as a servant of King Jesus. Tough words,
yes, but they are the words of life: “If any want to become my followers, let
them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
