[Propertalk] Proper 8 a

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

I'm still tweaking this, which I started last week when I wasn't 
preaching, but here's what's up so far.

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY 
THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
GENESIS 22:1-14							                PROPER  8 (A)
ROMANS 6:12-23					 
29th JUNE, 2014	
MATTHEW 10:4042   					 
PSALM 13

	I’d like you to do something for me. Well, it’s for you too.

	In your bulletin this morning is a square of blank paper. In the pew 
rack in front of you you’ll see a pencil in a tube. Take the pencil – 
you’ll probably need to share it with your neighbour – I’ll give you a 
second.

	Now write on the paper, “This is not my seat”, and place it in front of 
you where you can see it. And where other people can see it.

	There are all sorts of jokes about pew sitting. Art Stevens tells of 
some horrified parishioner in Virginia, I think it was, who came up to 
him one Sunday prior to the church liturgy, saying, “That’s George’s 
pew!”

	There was a moment of confusion till the penny dropped and it clicked 
with Art that that was George Washington’s pew and, obviously, they were 
expecting him at any minute.

	Of course, back then, there were pew rents. You had to pay in order to 
be able to sit and worship and, no doubt, enough money could get you a 
pretty good seat.

	But the thing is, these are GOD’S seats. You’re in them today only 
because, in one way or another, God invited you to come. NOT because you 
have  right to be here, to sit there, but because God WANTS you to be 
here, God HOPES that you’ll be here. But God would be really happy if 
you didn’t turn this into an ownership thing, at which point you start 
down the greased skids of taking things for granted.

	So, NONE of these are “MY” seats.

	We’ve had a succession of fancy festivals these past few weeks. Palm 
Sunday, Holy Week and Easter; then Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, 
followed immediately with our Patronal Festival last Sunday. Next 
weekend we’ll be observing Independence Day.

	Today, however, is “just” a Sunday after Pentecost – the third one, if 
you’re counting. We’re now in what the Church calls “Ordinary Time”, 
from the concept of order, rule, somehow regulated, marking a 
discipline. We’re in the season of Pentecost, in which we’re given 
somewhat close-up pictures of what it’s like to be a Christian, how we 
live in the day-to-day world when the hoopla has died down and the 
nitty-gritty of life becomes more apparent. THIS is where we start to 
tease out all the implications of our faith so that we can see how 
Jesus’ talks, and healings, and stopping-off at friends’ houses, as well 
as His pains, actually have practical implications; this is where what 
Jesus said and did can become a bit more obvious and fall a bit farther 
into place for us.

	So it may be an important lesson to realise that this is not OUR seat, 
just as it’s not OUR altar. It’s God’s place, it’s God altar, to which 
we’re welcomed, with everybody else, and at which God hopes that we’ll 
discover the meaning of sharing more clearly focused.

	God had spoken to Abraham often. And, from time to time, Abraham 
listened. Abraham even began to understand a few things.

	Abraham, like any adult, wanted an heir. In those days, that meant a 
son, someone to keep the family memory alive, but the fulfilment of 
God’s promise had been a long time coming. Abraham lived in a culture 
where there were many superstitions, where there were practices of 
appeasement that, hard though they may have seemed, people simply 
followed pretty much without a squawk.

	So when finally Isaac was born and grew to the doorstep of adulthood, 
Abraham heard this voice telling him that he had to follow the cultural 
patterns of his neighbours. He had to sacrifice his first born.

	Would this have been difficult? You bet, especially after the long 
wait, and especially when there’s no mention of taking Sarah’s feelings 
into account. Abraham simply followed the norms of society and went up 
the sacred hill to kill and burn his son as a thank offering, just as 
his tribal neighbours had done.

	Of course, it sounds horrifying to us. But everyone did it. It was only 
at the last possible second that Abraham picked up on the fact that God 
didn’t want this, from him or from anyone else. Abraham’s role was to be 
the rule-breaker, the norm-shatterer, the compassionate conserver and 
nurturer of life which was to know no boundaries.

	God called Abraham: first to marry Sarah; then to break from the 
safety, the security, the perhaps rigid familiarity of his living and 
working arrangements; then to set up new rituals and standards by which 
all humanity would flourish and come to know the loving ways of God 
better.

	Abraham learned that no matter that Isaac bore both Sarah’s and 
Abraham’s DNA, combined in a way that was specific to him; Abraham 
learned that Isaac was, and always would be, God’s, albeit a gift from 
God which the two parents were charged to nourish.

	It didn’t matter what the neighbours said. It didn’t matter what the 
neighbours did. There was one way of looking at life which took 
precedence over everything else, even if it meant facing danger, or 
ridicule, or apparent loss of faith and respect. The love of God, the 
sensibility of God, the compassion of God, the joy of God took pride of 
place in the rule of life God was teaching Abraham to give to his 
descendants for ever.

	THIS is why it’s not our seat. THIS is why it’s not our building. THIS 
is why it’s not our city – beyond the fact that God charges us to 
maintain the pews, keep them clean and reasonably comfortable in which 
to sit, yet not so comfortable that we fall asleep during the sermon. 
THIS building, the city, everything about life, is to be maintained in 
such a way that each is a perpetual sign of welcome to Christ ro 
absolutely whoever ealks through the door, or drives off the freeway 
into Albany, and so on.

	Pardon my Spanish, but “mi casa es su casa” – if you’re ever in the 
Lower East Side   – God’s words to us, our words to everyone else. A 
place where we are those privileged to look after all the resources, so 
that evertone will benefit from them, no matter what custom and 
tradition may try to tug us to do.

	Of course, people would have been outraged that Abraham didn’t kill 
Isaac. In fact, in the poem of Wilfrid Owen there’s an horrendous 
commentary on what happens so often:

		When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
		Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
		Neither do anything to him. Behold,
		A ram, caught in the thicket by its horns;
		Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
		But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
		And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

	We can experience such pressure to conform, to do what everyone else on 
our streets, or our congregations, or our nation says and does that it 
becomes difficult and dangerous to change, to admit that God might be 
saying something else, or that we all may have misheard God in the first 
place. YES, God seeks our loyalty and our trust. But God’s will seeks to 
be destructive only of what divides us, what lessens our humanity and 
dignity. Anything else which actually is destructive is likely NOT the 
will, the heart of God’s desire, but some careless conformity to the 
comfortable, possibly less challenging, mantras of societies which decry 
anything which suggests “liberty and justice for all”, as a somewhat 
familiar, but not fully observed saying has it.

	Of course, people would have been outraged that Jesus shared His food, 
his conversations, His company, His offer of the realm of God to any 
James and Miriam who came along.

	No doubt, people went around back then, expecting the sky to cave in, 
for some Krakatoa to erupt and blanket the world with debris and 
darkness for years because Jesus suggested offering a cool drink of 
water to whomever.

	But outrage didn’t stop Abraham or Jesus, even if Abraham appeared to 
conform to social norms initially. As Paul might have said to both of 
them, “Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies – or your 
hearts and minds – to make you obey their passions.” Don’t give in to 
the selfishness that assumes that everything is our right, to control 
and to consume. Even a cup of cold water, given out of respect to the 
Christ in everyone who crosses our paths and stops to look at us; even a 
cup of water is ours in order to give it to someone else, anyone else, 
anyone who asks.

	We live in a time when people are more and more afraid of what people 
will think; who’s looking over the fence or, worse yet, looking over our 
shoulder or down our internet connection and keeping a scorecard so that 
what we say will be flung in our faces to try to hurt us later? We’re 
tempted so strongly to live with a sense that, no matter what the 
custom, what another may say, we have to follow along with what everyone 
else does, instead of listening to hear or see what God may be saying, 
or instead of looking into the eyes of Jesus in all the people of the 
world.

	IF we listen, IF we look, then SURELY we can’t sacrifice any more. We 
HAVE to acknowledge that ALL things come from God, that whatever 
resources we may have at any given time are simply entrusted to us for 
the glory of God.

	In the book the Monday morning group has just finished reading, Fred 
Schmidt wrote about his brother, Dave, and his friends, “A lot of people 
have said that they love my brother. Only a few have been willing to 
follow his struggle through two surgeries, weeks on end of radiation 
treatments, and the litany of side effects that follow on long-term 
chemotherapy. Are these (the others and not the few) people who just 
haven; learned how to love? Or are they people who aren’t confident 
enough to love through proverbial ‘thick and thin’? …

	“Real love, deep love only begins to take center stage when or 
commitment to others faces the test of life made hard and ugly. It is 
work to learn to love beyond the platitudes. You can do it, but it is 
hard.

“Dave’s friends have not just said, ‘We love you.” They have acted on 
their love.” 4

This is what relationship with God is all about. It’s all about caring. 
It’s all about dedication. It’s about trust. As a writer pointed out, 
relationship, as seen through the eyes of Sarah, Abraham and Isaac “has 
to do with a road out into Godforsakenness, a road on which Abraham does 
not know that God is only testing him.” 4 Yet, even as God tests our 
faith and obedience, there are those who will stick with us, no matter 
what, who will bring cup after cup of far more than cold water, who will 
sit with us as we all explore our place and our meaning in creation.
	
These seats are NOT ours. They’re there that we might welcome someone, 
anyone, anyone at all; so that we can tell folk and demonstrate to them 
about the love if God, and of Jesus’ love, and of the Spirit’s love – 
that, in their Name(s) everyone may be cherished, everyone may be 
released from the fears of any imprisoning patterns and thought 
processes, that “none of these (people, including ourselves) will lose 
their reward.”

	And what to do with your square paper notices? Perhaps you can take 
yours with you, as a reminder that we’re all pilgrims on a journey, and 
to make us think about what we like to call “ours” – but really isn’t!

NOTES:

1 	http://www.yelp.com/biz/mi-casa-es-su-casa-new-york

2	See “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, by Wilfred Owen”
 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/poem-of-the-week-wilfred-owen

3	“The Dave Test” Frederick W. Schmidt. Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN © 
2013. Pp. 145-124 .

4	“Genesis: A Commentary” by Gerhard von Rad, translated by John H. 
Marks. S.C.M. Press, London. Second Impression of the English 
translation © 1966. P. 237

Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
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