Horror, absurdity, and hope

A father must sacrifice his son.

The voice of God boomed from the heavens, commanding Abraham to take his son Isaac into the wilderness, and kill him – kill him – kill him in honor of God.

The voice of God commanding Abraham to kill his son?

Abraham, like us, would have been consumed with the perennial human question: why? Why would God ask this of him? Why would God want this to happen to Isaac? Why would God put Abraham in this impossible position? Why would God be pushing a child of His to commit murder – murder another child of his?

And then there was the second perennial human question – maybe even the more haunting question: what am I going to do?

Will he have the strength to do the right thing?

And, what is the right thing? In life, it’s pretty clear: Listening to God is the right thing. Upholding the sanctity of life is the right thing; murder being absolutely wrong.

But, Abraham can’t have it both ways. He can’t listen to God and not commit murder.

The horror of it all, the absurdity of it all, and the questions are left hanging in the air.

A father must sacrifice his son.

The voice of God boomed from the heavens: This is my son; the beloved, with him I am well pleased.

This was God’s Son – He was God in the flesh – and from the moment he was laid in the manger in Bethlehem, he was laid in the shadow of the cross.

God had come to live among us, and he had also come to die for us.

Why? Why would God allow His Son to be murdered? Executed? Humiliated?

Why would God submit Himself to hang on a cross? God lying dead in a tomb?

Can you have it both ways? Can you be God and be beaten by a whip? Can you be God and hang limp and lifeless on a tree?

The horror of it all, the absurdity of it all, and the questions are left hanging in the air.

A father must sacrifice his son.

“Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.”

Unwittingly, Isaac was carrying the timber which would burn his corpse, after his father killed him with a knife.

He has no idea what the plan is – no idea what the real purpose of their hike is.

The loudest sound from Abraham is his silence. He leaves home, and his wife, with their son without a word. He leaves his hired hands at the bottom of the mountain with no word that he’s planning on come back alone. He doesn’t tell his son what’s going on.

If he told anyone – would they believe him? He heard a voice in his head telling him to kill his son? Would they take him for being crazy? Would anyone else believe that this was really the word of God?

If his son knew what was going on, would he die angrier with God than his own father? Who is better for Isaac to lose faith in – his father, or God?

If Abraham tried to explain what was going on would Abraham believe the words that were coming out of his own mouth?

The horror of it all, the absurdity of it all, and the questions are left hanging in the air.

A father must sacrifice his son.

Jesus, beaten, broken, denied, and betrayed would climb the mountain.

His father, looking on from above, would be silent. There would be no last minute turn of events. He was on the road to his death.

Knowing full well what was coming, Jesus was carrying the timber which would bear his corpse, and the soldiers were carrying the hammer and nails.

The loudest sound would have been from the crowd – jeering, laughing, heckling, taunting.

And God was silent (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)

Would anyone believe that this was God – the Son of God – being led to his death?

Jesus had tried explaining it to his disciples – even to his best friend Peter – and not only couldn’t they comprehend it, they refused to accept it. Then abandoning him, denying him, betraying him they left him alone with his cross.

The horror of it all, the absurdity of it all, and the questions are left hanging in the air.

A father must sacrifice his son.

The son is bound, set on the timber, the knife is raised.

But, God’s silence is shattered. The voice of God boomed from the heavens: hold that knife.

The only sound more welcome than those words is the rustling of the ram in the thicket.

God provided a ram, and didn’t demand the unthinkable. All the questions are answered – or at least deemed mute.

God provided. God shattered the silence. God acted.

The horror and the absurdity of it all fade away in the wake of joy, the example of the profound and steadfast faith we find in Abraham,, and the absolute hope that God offered in the nick of time.

And yet, A father must sacrifice his son.

The son is bound to the cross by nails ripping through his flesh.

A sign above his head hangs with word of truth, meant to taunt.

The “King of the Jews?” Breathing his last?

For this son, there is no ram – there is no booming voice from heaven offering an alternative – a hope – an option of life and victory.

The only sound to shatter the silence is the words: “It is finished,” and the exhale of his last breath.”

The way out that God offered Abraham, God didn’t give himself. In the end, God was still a Father who had to sacrifice his Son, so that the rest of His children – that’s us – might live.

The horror of the death of a son, and the absurdity of the death of God’s son hang in the air. The questions of why are awkwardly answered: because of our failures, because of our sin.

We are the cause.

The joy and the hope are lost, at least until the third day, when the women come to the tomb to prepare God’s corpse for final burial. In that moment everything changes, but before then, it’s still the sacrifice of the Son by the Father.

For those long, painful days, there is left a sonless father, a childless mother standing at the foot of the cross, a pregnant tomb.

God provided a Lamb – and the Lamb was his Son. God sacrificed his One Son and gave him over to death, so that we His sons and daughters would find victory in death.

And it’s out of that horror and that absurdity that the questions aren’t just answered, but the questions themselves are changed forever.

And so is the world.

And so might we be. If only we let ourselves. . .

Urgent: Moving with Purpose

If you’ve been in church since the end of November, and you’ve been awake (!), you may have noticed that we’ve been reading the Gospel of Mark almost exclusively as our Gospel lesson. That’s because we’re in ‘year B’ of our lectionary, and this whole year we will mostly be reading from Mark (as last year we read mostly from Matthew, and next year we’ll read mostly from Luke).

There are a couple things that the Gospel of Mark is known for. One is the ‘messianic secret’: just about every time Jesus does something for someone else (healing, exorcism, etc.) he tells the person not to tell anyone what he did or who he is.

There’s the incredible amount of exorcisms in Mark. In relation to the other Gospels there’s a much higher percentage of stories of evil spirits, demonic possessions, and stories of Jesus casting these demons out. More than any of the other Gospels, Mark is very clearly the depiction of the forces of God battling the forces of Evil.

There’s the ending of Mark. If you look in your Bibles, and turn to the end of the Gospel of Mark, you’ll see that there are several ‘versions’ of the ending of his Gospel. If you look at the bottom of that page to the footnotes, you’ll almost certainly find some explanation that there are different ancient copies of Mark that have different lengths of endings. The oldest copy that we have of Mark has no Resurrection appearance of Jesus at all. The women go to the tomb, find it empty, and run away scared, and tell no one what they have seen – certainly an odd way to end a Gospel!

But, maybe the most curious thing about the Gospel of Mark is a single phrase that turns up over and over again in the Gospel: “and immediately.” Everything in Mark happens ‘immediately!’ The phrase “and immediately” thumps through the Gospel like a drum, constantly propelling the reader forward, and giving a quick pace to this, the shortest of the Gospels.

You might be asking yourself, ‘why does everything happen immediately?’ Well, the best answer that we can give, is Mark’s disposition. In all accounts, Mark is the first of the Gospels that was written, probably written only 10 or 20 years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and maybe even a full 40 years before the Gospel of John was written.

Mark was writing in a time of the Church – the very, very Early Church – when everyone was certain that Jesus was going to come back any moment. They literally thought that they would not die before Jesus came back to bring them all to Heaven and end the World as we all know it.

If you had told Mark that people would be reading his Gospel almost 2,000 years later in the mountains of western Maryland, he wouldn’t have believed you for a moment, because the thought that 2,000 would pass without Jesus coming back would have been completely foreign to him. So, when he sat down to write this Gospel he wasn’t trying to write a literary masterpiece – this was not the great American novel: he was writing a short testimony of the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus so that the most people possible would quickly read it and come to faith before Jesus came back.

That’s the reason why this is the shortest Gospel in the Bible. It’s the reason why there is no account of the birth of Jesus (no Bethlehem, no star, no shepherds, no Joseph and Mary in waiting). It’s the reason why Mark doesn’t have any long account of the Resurrection of Jesus (No road to Emmaus, no doubting Thomas, no appearances of Jesus to the disciples in the Upper Room).

And, it’s why everything happens ‘immediately.’

Mark was writing with urgency, and when he looked back on the ministry of Jesus, he saw it as an urgent ministry. He saw Jesus battling the cosmic forces of evil with urgency. He saw Jesus teaching His People with urgency. He saw Jesus come up from the waters of Baptism (as in today’s Gospel lesson) and be propelled with urgency to begin what he was sent here to do.

2,000 years later, we can look at the Gospel of Mark, and realize that Jesus wasn’t coming back quite as soon as Mark or Mark’s church thought he was. Looking back over these 2,000 years we can see that God’s Time isn’t as our time, and that God will move, and act, and come when the Time is right.

But, that doesn’t mean that we have to abandon the urgency of Mark, and the urgency of Jesus. It doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to laziness and carelessness when it comes to the things of God. Faith and moving with urgency are bound together, inseparably, both in Heaven and on Earth.

Mark’s Gospel is written so as to move us to act and live with a sense of urgency and purpose when it comes to the things of God. The drumbeat of ‘and immediately,’ and immediately,’ ‘and immediately,’ should be a drumbeat that infects us – effects us – to carry the same urgency in our lives. It’s an urgency that should alter how we understand our own baptism, our prayer life, our sense of mission in the world, and our drive to liver closer to God day by day.

When the paralytic, whose friends dug a hole in Jesus’ roof and lowered him down to the feet of Jesus, was healed he ‘immediately’ got up. When the leper was touched by Jesus, the leprosy ‘immediately’ left him. When Jesus came to Simon’s mother-in-law’s home, everyone ‘immediately’ told Jesus of her illness. When Jesus invited the disciples to drop everything in their lives and follow him, they ‘immediately’ left their nets and followed him. And, today, when Jesus was baptized by John in the wilderness, the Holy Spirit ‘immediately’ drove him into the wilderness for prayer, fasting, and tempting by Satan.

Some questions rise to the surface here:

What in our lives drives us with urgency?

What drives us? What consumes us? What makes us jump to our feet? Job? Family? Sports? Politics? . . . God?

Are we moved with a sense of urgency to grow in our faith - this Lent?

Those are questions that I can’t answer. Though we’ll all know the answers we give.

And, so will God.

Ash Wednesday: Time to Stop Kidding Ourselves

If we had been able to have our Leviticus dinner and study this past Sunday, we would have done more than just eaten chocolate covered grasshoppers. We would have also heard about the Day of Atonement.

The Day of Atonement was established by God to give God’s people one day when they were forced to stop kidding themselves. For one day all – and I mean all – God’s people gathered together to remember that they had sinned against God. They had sinned against God as individuals, they had sinned against God as families, they had sinned against God as towns, tribes, and villages, and they had sinned against God as a nation. And as sinners they all came together to say they were sorry and atone for their wrong-doings.

We don’t celebrate the Day of Atonement as its called for in the Book of Leviticus – and it’s a good thing too, as it was pretty bloody! Blood thrown all over the place.

But we do have a day when we are given a chance to stop kidding ourselves: and that day is today.

Today we are confronted with two realities, and they’re hard realities to face: we are one day going to die; and we are sinful people.

Most of us probably, and hopefully(!), don’t obsess with either of these two realities. To be consumed with our own mortality, or our own brokenness, wouldn’t be healthy, productive, or even holy. But, to block these two realities out completely – to kid ourselves – isn’t healthy or holy either.

It’s easy to triumph in the illusion of immortality. And it’s tempting to think, ‘gee, how sinful and bad can I really be? I’ve never killed anybody or stole anything big. . .’

Those illusions are easy, and tempting; and that’s why it’s called kidding ourselves.

But, tonight, there’s none of that. Tonight young and old alike are sealed with the ashes of last year’s triumphant palm branches from Palm Sunday, with the words: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Tonight we fall to our knees to pray the words of Psalm 51: “Indeed I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb. . . create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

No, little chance of kidding ourselves. In fact I’ve heard some people speak of Ash Wednesday as the most uncomfortable day of the church year. It can be uncomfortable because it holds a mirror up to our faces, and shows us the parts of us that we’d rather forget about – the parts we’d rather deal with later. . . much later.

And so, what we get today is a reality check. And reality checks are good. But, there is a larger reality check: reality beyond our impending death and inherent sinfulness. It’s the reality of God.

We are going to die one day, but that needn’t be a bad thing: because with God, death doesn’t need to be an end, but can be a new and wonderful beginning.

We are sinners in God’s sight, but in one respect that can be ok too: because with God there is plentiful redemption, there is forgiveness, and there is the hope of new beginnings.

The real reality check of Ash Wednesday is that we’re human – fully human. We’re flawed, fragile, and frequently unimpressive.

But with all our limitations and shortcomings, God sent his only Son to come and live among us as one of us: he became human too. He didn’t have the problem of sin, but he had the problem of fragility, emotions, pain, and death. And he had love, for us.

With all that we are and all that we are not, tonight we are ashed and reminded of our sinfulness, but we are also invited to God’s table. We are fed with the bread of angels, and the cup which Jesus called ‘of the new covenant.’

Today we are reminded exactly who we are, and where we sit in the grand scheme of things. And, when you look at it, not from the perspective of our own neediness, but from the perspective of God’s overwhelming generosity, it’s not a bad place to be after all.