Fairhaven UMC

The door, it opened slowly. My father, he came in, I was nine years old. And he stood so tall above me. Blue eyes, they were shining.

 And his voice was very cold. He said, I’ve had a vision. And you know I’m strong and holy. I must do what I’ve been told.

 So we started up the mountain, I was running, he was walking, and his axe was made of gold. While the trees they got much smaller, the lake a lady’s mirror. We stopped to drink some wine. Then he threw the bottle over, broke a minute later, and he put his hand on mine.

 I thought I saw an eagle, but it might have been a vulture. I never could decide. Then my father built an altar. He looked once behind his shoulder, and he knew I would not hide.

 These are the opening two verses of the story of Isaac, which was written in 1969 by the Jewish-Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s best known in the U.S. for writing the popular song Hallelujah.

 Many of you know that one. It was in Shrek, which brought it back to kind of popularity. And it’s been covered by countless artists, almost all of whom made a cover that was more popular than the original. But like that song, the story of Isaac has this haunting, dark quality that’s easy to miss when you’re hearing kind of the prose of scripture.

 But whenever it’s written out or sung, it comes through. You hear it sung in his clear, understated, deep voice where the story is primary and the song is secondary. And you can almost envision as the song is sung from the perspective of Isaac. Not a narrator, not Abraham, Isaac.

 You can almost imagine the singer looking right off into space as he recalls this terror that he experienced as a child at his father’s hands. Nine years old, Cohen imagines. And this is one of those stories in the Bible where it’s very, very hard to know what we’re supposed to do with it. And if it doesn’t trouble you, and this kind of happens when we know a story from the Old Testament or the New over and over again, I would suggest that it should.

 Hear it again and feel how troubling this story is. There’s always a key risk when we read the Bible, and that’s that we know the end. every story we have a general idea of what the end of the story is, but the characters in the story don’t. And we know the end of this story, but we can’t really grasp what goes on without holding on to the reality that Abraham and Isaac don’t.

 And so as we remember that Abraham has no idea what’s going on, No idea what’s going to happen. It becomes a really unsettling story. This is a story that in Abraham’s context, he lived in ancient Canaan, is almost certain to end in child sacrifice. They did that all the time in that culture.

 It wasn’t all that uncommon for the Philistines, for the Canaanites, all those around to do that. And so, which is worse as we read this story? Is it that God is asking Abraham to sacrifice his son or that Abraham says pretty much okay. Consider also that Abraham at this point in Genesis is not looking great. A chapter ago, the passage we heard last Sunday, he sent his second wife Hagar and his first son Ishmael to die in the desert.

 Why? Well because his first wife Sarah is jealous. Pure jealousy. That’s it. Sarah saw Ishmael playing with Isaac and saw him laugh, Genesis says.

 Sarah saw Ishmael laugh playing with Isaac and that made her so angry and hateful that it justified that Hagar and Ishmael had to die, despite Sarah, you’ll remember, being the one who urged Abraham to marry Hagar to have a child with her. God arguably doesn’t look great in that story either. He’s told Abraham to comply with Sarah’s demands and Abraham sends out Hagar and his own son into the wilderness with just enough water that they could get out a good distance before they died so Abraham wouldn’t have to feel, you know, responsible. God happens to step in and he saves them.

 But But is there any reason to assume that Abraham knows what happened out there with Hagar and Ishmael, that all is well that ends well? He probably doesn’t know that. Does God know, does Abraham know rather, that God met them out in the desert, that he saves them, that he blesses them, that he is going to make Ishmael the founder of another great nation? Or as far as Abraham knows, is Ishmael dead somewhere in the sand of the Arabian desert? So as far as he knows, God is asking him to kill his second kid in a row and by his own bare hands this time without any plausible deniability. You know, he could kind of brush off Hagar and Ishmael. I don’t really know what’s gonna happen out there, but it is crystal clear what he’s being asked to do here.

 And so Abraham’s mind must be reeling whenever God speaks out of nowhere. Abraham, God says. And Abraham answers with this completely open-ended response, I’m here. And God lays out the command.

 He says, take your son, your only son, which isn’t quite true, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him up as an entirely burnt offering there on one of the mountains that I will show you. And Abraham’s guilt must have been overwhelming. And perhaps he thinks that this is coming to him because he was too cowardly to stand up and save Ishmael and Hagar, and now he is the one that has to experience the suffering.

 He sent Hagar to watch her son die, and now this is gonna be his fate too, amped up even further. And the implications must send him reeling as well because God’s command here is just completely mysterious, contradictory, and confusing. Isaac was going to be the beginning of a great progeny, a great legacy for Abraham. He was gonna have descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, as the sands in the desert.

 And through Isaac, God has promised that he’s gonna make Abraham a great nation. And now instead, Abraham is to tie up his son and burn him like a goat or a dove. And so what is Abraham hearing here from the God who led him hundreds of miles out of his homeland into this new and unknown place, promising the world and the future to Abraham? Nevermind. I chose you, but I’m taking it back.

 And it’s worth stopping here for a moment here. It’s worth stopping here in the story at God’s unexplainable command, because this is a lot. And maybe it’s worth being reminded by this story that God is God. You know, we have as Christians, as contemporary Christians, a fairly casual relationship with God, and that’s a blessing.

 We can call God Father like Jesus did, and God is our Father. We speak to God, we don’t have to go to the Great Stone Temple in Jerusalem, We don’t have to confess through burnt sacrifices, through a priest going into a secret chamber. You know, we can pray sitting at our kitchen tables, sitting in the car, and yet God is God. God creates all things, God rules over all things, God judges all people, and God can do whatever God wants to do.

 God is God, and that’s great and mysterious, and he’s infinitely beyond us. We serve a God who’s impossible to get our minds around, and that is what Abraham is encountering in this moment. We serve a God who has high expectations for his people. He has very high expectations for Abraham.

 Jesus has high expectations for his disciples. And it seems here that God tests us for our faithfulness, as uncomfortable as that is. You know, I’ve written over this story, I’ve been trying to figure out how to wiggle out of that ’cause the testing is, you know, that’s uncomfortable. We don’t like that idea that God might test us, but that’s what’s here.

 God expects Abraham to be willing to offer everything. And he tests him to see if he will. And Isaac, to Abraham, is everything. He’s the fruit of everything he’s longed for in the past.

 He’s the joy of his present, and he is his entire future promise. The only future that Abraham can envision is all that’s gonna happen through Isaac in the world. And yet when God calls Abraham, he goes. He doesn’t object.

 Abraham, and I say this with empathy because I am too, We see him in Genesis as kind of a pathological coward. He’s repeatedly told others that Sarah is his sister out of fear. He just finished doing this in the previous chapter again. It’s like his third time.

 He’s driven his own son and second wife out into the desert because he’s afraid of his wife. But here, he goes without hesitating into the wilderness. The narrator of Genesis tells us in chapter 19, or chapter 21 rather, that Abraham is terribly upset whenever he casts out Ishmael and Hagar. He’s really uncomfortable, he doesn’t want to do it.

 And that’s why actually God talks to him to calm him down and say it’s gonna be okay. And a few chapters ago, going back to chapter 19, Abraham bargains with God over and over again. They go back and forth. God is threatening to destroy the city of Sodom from destruction and Abraham is negotiating.

 Oh, well, if it was even a hundred people there, You wouldn’t destroy them, right? You know, even 30, even 10. Abraham goes back and forth, face to face with God, confronting Him, trying to save the people of Sodom that he doesn’t even know. But not here. He doesn’t do that for Isaac.

 He gets up in the morning, he loads firewood on his donkey, and he sets off for the land of Moriah with two servants and his beloved son, and they begin this three day journey. And so we can hear Cohen’s words in that song start to take shape. This little caravan of a few men and the boy arrives at the mountain, and soon Abraham tells his servants to wait behind. Him and the boy are gonna go up alone to worship.

 And Abraham maybe is walking stoically up the mountain, trying to take his time not to get there too fast. And Isaac’s getting increasingly disoriented. He’s fearful, the altitude’s starting to get to him a little bit, and he slips into a run. And he’s got the firewood on his back, so he’s running clumsily up the hill while trusting his father enough not to run away.

 He knows something’s wrong, but he doesn’t run away. My father, he asks, Dad. And Abraham says, Here I am, my son. exactly the same way as he responded to the Lord’s voice a couple of days before.

 Here I am. Where’s the lamb for the sacrifice? And Abraham says, The lamb for the sacrifice? God will see to it, my son. And they ascend above the tree line well up into the sky, where the trees are done, an open, scraggy bush is all over the place. There’s all kinds of those like twisted like bonsai bushes you see at the top of a mountain.

 And a lake below them has receded so far into the distance that it looks like a hand mirror. And Abraham stops and Cohen imagines to tremble his trembling knees. He takes a swig of wine and he finishes the bottle and he flings it off the mountainside. And they’re so high that the bottle seems to take a minute to hit the rock below.

 And above them, circling the rest of the way to the top, is an eagle or maybe a vulture. And then they reach the peak of the mountain. And perhaps knowing in his heart what’s been coming for a long time. Isaac’s known, right? He doesn’t say a word.

 And his father ties him up and places him on top of this rough altar of logs. Genesis doesn’t say that Isaac says anything. He doesn’t fight. And Abraham takes the knife, I mean the literal Hebrew it’s a butcher’s cleaver, not you know a knife, but a cleaver, and prepares to take it to his son’s throat.

 And God speaks once more and this time with more urgency, Abraham, Abraham! twice. And once more Abraham answers the exact same way, I’m here. And he is. And a new command is given loud enough that Abraham can hear it over his heart pounding in his ears.

 And God says, Don’t stretch your hand out against the young man and don’t do anything to him. I now know that you revere God and didn’t hold back your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham looked up and he saw a single ram caught by its horns in the dense underbrush. And Abraham went over, he took the ram and offered it as an entirely burned offering instead of his son.

 He makes a sacrifice, he finishes, and God speaks again. I give my word as the Lord that because you did this and didn’t hold back your son, your only son, I will bless you richly and I will give you countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky and as the grains of sand on the seashore. They will conquer their enemy’s cities. All the nations of the earth will be blessed because of your descendants, because you obeyed me.

 This covenant that God made with Abraham quite some time ago, God says it’s still there. I meant it, it’s still true. And somehow it is in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice everything out of obedience to God, his entire future, everything that God promised him. He took it up to that mountain and prepared to lose it.

 That is when God steps in to provide. It’s a mystery that we can’t possibly understand that Abraham wouldn’t have understood as testing and providing are both what God does. And our lives involve both times of testing and trial and then miraculous providence that lifts us beyond whatever we could have planned for ourselves. And I wonder, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s clear from this chapter, but I wonder if something has changed in Abraham by the time we get to this test here in chapter 22.

 You know, Abraham, said this earlier, has proved himself to be kind of a coward over and over again. He’s flimsy, he’s hesitant to make the right decision, he doesn’t listen to God all that well. And I wonder if Abraham deciding to take Isaac up the mountain is the moment that he truly comes to faith in the God that he’s walked with for a long time. Is that why he doesn’t object, right? He does for Ishmael, he does for the people of Sodom, but he doesn’t object for Isaac.

 Is that because he knows he doesn’t have to? Does he actually mean it when he promises Isaac on the way up the mountain, that God will provide a lamb for the sacrifice. Maybe he means that. And yet it seems clear as he ties up Isaac and puts him on top of the logs, that he is unshakably ready to sacrifice his son if that’s what’s required. He has placed his trust as fully in God as Isaac has placed in him.

 That I think is something that really struck me in this story this time. Isaac trusts his father so much. He doesn’t resist, he doesn’t object as he’s tied up and placed on the logs. Abraham doesn’t contest God as he goes up the mountain because he trusts God fully and like Isaac seems to, he trusts that God is good.

 Even in the face of all available evidence, it looks like what’s gonna happen is gonna be horrifying. He and Isaac walk up the mountain of the shadow of death, and he trusts that God is still good, and at the end of it, he’s proven right. I wanna return now to our gospel reading for last Sunday, which really would have fit much better this Sunday, specifically Matthew 10, 37 to 39. Those who love their father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me.

 Those who love son or daughter more than me aren’t worthy of me. Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me. Those who find their lives will lose them. And those who lose their lives because of me will find them.

 Those who find their lives will lose them. And those who lose their lives because of me will find them. The Lord has promised us love, mercy, and life eternal. And yet to really get there, to really experience that now requires knowing deep in our souls that God is good.

 Worth laying everything down for, worth trusting, even if we can’t know for sure what’s ahead. But you and I, like Isaac and like another son generations later are still called. Carry that firewood. Carry that cross up the mountain that lies before you.

 Trust that God will provide the lamb. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.

 Don’t think, Jesus says pretty ominously, that I’ve come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace, but a sword. Yikes, huh? I don’t really like that very much. I’m not a sword kind of guy.

 Peace sounds a whole lot better than a sword. And the contemporary church is not really a sword kind of place in my experience, which works out pretty well for me and for you. Very rarely do we even have outright debate and disagreement in church council. I mean, it happens here usually in a pretty healthy way, but for the most part, it’s not particularly intense, violent.

 Our existence in this community is not for the most part controversial. It’s not polarizing. And that stands in contrast to Jesus and the disciples’ experience in Judea and Galilee, as well as the early churches’ experience under Roman domination. They were a disreputable, unwanted group.

 They were a challenge to the society around them, and people just wanted them to go away. Jesus’ words to the disciples proved to be right, and this was long before his crucifixion. He said, If they had called the head of the house Beelzebul, which is another word for Satan, it’s certain they will call the members of the household by even worse names. That is, if they’ve called me the devil, imagine what they’ll call you.

 It’s easy to forget in an era where Christianity is so incredibly mainstream how true this was for them for a long time. The Roman world knew, for example, that the church partook in communion, and since they already really didn’t like Christians to begin with, they were, Christians were widely accused of practicing cannibalism. Oh, they say they’re eating the body and blood of Christ. There’s something sketchy going on in there.

 A similar thing happened in the early years of Methodism. This is an often forgotten piece of our history. Methodists in America were known for their loud, mixed gender, interracial worship services that were closed. You could only go if you were a member of the Methodist movement.

 They were often held in barns. They were super loud and rowdy. And there was all kinds of gossip that would always go around about what sort of obscenities were happening in those barns. Christianity and eras of vibrancy has often existed at the same time in a state of controversy.

 And yet, we can be pretty sure, I think, that no one is walking or driving past us this morning suspiciously wondering what’s going on in here. Probably not. We don’t really tend to bother anyone or upset the outside world, Nor is that really even in our concept of what a church might do. We don’t really think that way anymore.

 The church in the US across denominations, it peaked in numbers the middle of the 20th century. And so for a time spanning roughly the 40s through 70s, which many of you will remember, it seemed like everyone went to church. You might remember those days. You probably remember those days.

 I don’t. I’ve talked to some older pastors and they really can’t even grasp this. I have never seen a full sanctuary on a Sunday morning. Those days are just outside my experience.

 Now in that time period, the church was the least controversial thing imaginable. Every decent person went to church. It was a pillar of the community. It was the social hub.

 You know, whether you’re an adult, whether you’re a kid, your whole world was in the church. That’s where the town rotated around. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with being the center of community life, there’s nothing wrong with being a close-knit body.

 We’re supposed to be. But that, as it turns out, wasn’t quite enough. The next generations found that there wasn’t really any compelling reason to stay. The church didn’t offer much that was particularly distinctive from the outside world besides an additional demand for time, effort, money.

 and people decided it really wasn’t worth it for what they were getting out of it. And so here we are. So consider the state of the United Methodist Church locally and nationally. It’s not just us, it’s everybody.

 Something has gone wrong. And frankly, we don’t get to blame it on the people who are out there for not wanting to come in here. It’s not their job to decide to come in here, is it? We have failed, as our traditional confession of sin says, to be an obedient church. And accordingly, give people a reason to stay or now even come to begin with.

 We don’t treat the church, generally speaking, as a place where life-changing growth in discipleship happens. Our life together has diverged a little bit from the one Jesus describes this morning in Matthew 10. That church was living on the edge. It was wholly committed to Jesus, regardless of what that would cost them, And it did cost them a lot.

 And it was a church that was taking up its cross. I’m currently reading a book right now by Will Willimon. If you’re familiar, he’s the somewhat harsh former United Methodist bishop. He spent decades in pastoral ministry in Alabama and in the Carolinas.

 And his most recent book that’s written in the wake of our church split is called Don’t Look Back, Methodist Hope for What Comes Next. so I’m about halfway through that book. And in it, he writes of his experience pastoring a church. It’s really funny.

 So he’s writing about this church that he was appointed to serve early in his career. And he’s so disappointed in this place. He’s like, I got there, their attendance is only 300 people. It was declining.

 I’m like, Okay, bud. I don’t relate, but I understand your point. He said the median age was 60. I’m like, Wow! But he writes about his experience pastoring this church that was declining and that had no interest in revival.

 And he wrote something that I had to go back and read a couple times. He says, We are a loving, caring congregation, they reassure one another as they peacefully pass away. Listen to that and see if it stings, right? We are a loving, caring congregation, they reassure one another as they peacefully pass away. Look, I got a couple notes in my pastoral reviews that some of you want to be challenged, so here we go here.

 Jesus tells us flat out that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword. The gospel should be a source of comfort. The gospel is a source of comfort. The congregation should be a place of love and inclusion.

 But the sword that Jesus describes must have an edge. The work of a faithful church requires making hard decisions to build the kingdom of God and make disciples of people who are both here already, we should be getting better, and people who aren’t here yet, they should be coming in, being welcome, being built up in Christ. It requires doing this, risking conflict and disagreement because it requires movement. It requires risk, period, which we’re really averse to.

 Are we willing to take risks in the name of Jesus’ ministry? Are we willing to accept the possibility that we might be controversial or in a position that makes us truly uncomfortable? And I hope so because Jesus says here in Matthew 10, Those who do not pick up their crosses and follow me are not worthy of me. Those who find their lives will lose them and those who lose their lives because of me will find them. We can be timid, we can maintain above all a concern with stability and comfort. We can hold on to our preoccupation with stability.

 We can be conservative with our resources out of worry of what the future holds. Or we can have faith that honest, striving to follow Jesus will be blessed. I have emphasized this before, but I think one of the boldest, most Christ-like ministries in the partnership. is Fairhaven’s welcoming prevention point.

 We know full well that most of our neighbors don’t like this. We know that many of them are actively opposed. There was a threat in the midst of our controversy last year that someone was going to call in KDKA, was going to stage a protest on a Thursday afternoon, and I was really nervous about that possibility at the time. But now I wonder if we might have welcomed the opportunity to witness to Christ’s grace, to our ministry in this place, to a group of people that plenty of people aren’t willing to have nearby.

 Similarly, I spoke to a colleague recently, he just finished grad school in Boston, he was getting a second master’s, and he went to a church in Boston that flies a rainbow flag every June to symbolize that all people are welcome there. And they know full well, he told me this, they know full well that every year they’ll face vandalism that month, Every year that flag is going to get burned on their front lawn, and they do it anyway, knowing that flag is going to get burnt up. The congregation has internalized the challenging message that Jesus offers his disciples. If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul, it’s certain that they will call the members of the household by even worse names.

 Now what taking up our cross looks like in our context might be different. Mission is different everywhere, but part of the work of discipleship is figuring out what our mission field is, what our call is, what we are supposed to reach out to that may or may not be a popular choice to make. But some aspects of discipleship are universal. One, we have to spend our money doing risky kinds of ministry.

 We have to come come up with plans that are new, that are different, that are focused on reaching new people. We have to open ourselves up to the world, including people that the wider world doesn’t like very much, and we have to put our comfort on the line for Jesus. And that’s scary. That’s scary for me.

 I want the peace, not the sword. But consider the sparrows whom God knows and loves. Are you not worth more than many sparrows, Jesus said, which is very generous, right? Why should we be scared to do the work that Jesus assigns to us? If he watches even the sparrows, if he numbers the hairs on our heads, there’s nothing that we can do seeking to follow Jesus that will bring us to harm. If you don’t internalize anything else today, I want you to think about this.

 Has any church in history spent itself to death ministering to its own community or the world? Or do churches die and dwindle when they decide that their own needs, their desires, their survival are the first thing that comes first? If you can find for me a church that died because it spent too much money on evangelism and outreach, or spent too much time in the community trying to reach new people, I will take that back. But I don’t think it’s happened. And I think that’s because Jesus’ promise here is crystal clear. Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them.

 The only way to survive, let alone grow and thrive, is to pour ourselves out for the sake of others. To risk losing what we have, money, security, comfort, whatever, to gain what Jesus promises us. living and proclaiming the good news of Jesus, inviting all people into grace and freedom, announcing it from the rooftops, Jesus says, is the single priority that we are given. The single priority above everything else, regardless of what the cost is, regardless of what our preferred plans may be.

 Above family, Jesus says, above loved ones, this is the thing. So this day, measure your life, the life of our church together, by whether or not we’re picking up our cross for the one who carried it for us. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.