Pentecost 4

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and blessed be God's family now and forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you, and also with you.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, you've built your church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone.

Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.

Amen.

A prayer for the power of the Spirit among the people of God.

God of all power and love, we give thanks for your unfailing presence and the hope you provide in times of uncertainty and loss.

Send your Holy Spirit to enkindle in us your holy fire.

Revive us to live as Christ's body in the world, a people who pray, worship, learn, break bread, share life, heal neighbors, bear good news, seek justice, rest, and grow in the Spirit.

Wherever and however we gather, unite us in common prayer and send us in common mission that we and the whole creation might be restored and renewed through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

A reading from Genesis.

God tested Abraham.

He said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am.

He said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac.

He cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.

On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.

Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey.

The boy and I will go over there.

We will worship, and then we will come back to you.

Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac.

And he himself carried the fire and the knife.

So the two of them walked on together.

Isaac said to his father, Abraham, father, and he said, Here I am, my son.

He said, The fire and the wood or here.

But where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

Abraham said, God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.

So the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order.

He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.

Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham! Abraham! And he said, Here I am.

He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy, or do anything to him.

For now I know that you fear God.

You have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.

And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by his horn.

Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

So Abraham called the place the Lord will provide.

As it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Will you forget me forever?

My heart is joining me.

I will praise the name of the Lord my God.

The word of the Lord.

Reading from Romans do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies to make you obey their passions.

No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.

If you are not under law but under grace.

What then?

Shall we den because we are not under law but under grace?

By no means.

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of them, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.

But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were interested.

And that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

I'm speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations.

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

So what advantage did you then get from the things of now, of which you are now ashamed?

The end of those things is death.

But now that you have been freed from sin and slave to God, the advantage you get is sanctification.

The end is eternal life, for the wages of sin is death.

But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Where the sky works upon me, and a sheep breeze that ease, where the sky does, this new land summons each door and be I had not seen, I could not know what this true land would be.

I had a piece of one that was waiting for me from the room to the bird, from the crack to the day.

Once I stepped out in faith, then there's no turning for me.

I love and free.

Every winter is free, it is for us, and every joint means a new life means in the passing from the old night, every sorrow and fear for the night heart, its darkness means the dawn is here.

Jesus said, Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward.

And whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous.

And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple, truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

The Gospel of the Lord.

So we're in for a second week in a row of what I consider the biblical guide on how not to be a parent.

And uh I have to scratch my head a little bit and wonder here.

Um I sure hope Abraham did better things than this.

I mean, I hope we're not being presented with the high points of his parenting, but but maybe these the anomaly stories, maybe he was really good a whole lot of the time, and these are just the low points, and we're being told about them so we can learn from them.

What's really, really tough is that the way that the scripture reads this week, when we hear about the Akada, that's the word that means the binding.

Our our Jewish brothers and sisters do not call this the sacrifice of Isaac because in the story Isaac isn't sacrificed, he's bound.

Um, what's tough is that it says God tested Abraham, and this is a really tough bit because it starts, makes me start to wonder, did God not know how Abraham was going to respond?

I thought God knew everything.

Is God uh testing Abraham to see uh how blind his obedience would be?

Uh, or rather, is this an idea that Abraham gets that ultimately bears out where his faith is?

Maybe it's helpful to hear that all around Abraham, particularly in the lands of Moab and Edom, which are now mostly what we would consider in modern-day Jordan, uh, there were a couple foreign gods under the names of Milcom or Molech or Kemosh, later some kings of Israel worship these gods.

And um, essentially what happens is in order to worship these gods, you try to offer them the most valuable thing you have.

It sort of is like a holy trade.

The more you give, the more you get back in return.

Uh so rather than this is a pre-monetary economy, the most valuable thing in your life is not even your own, it's the life of your firstborn son.

That's of the person who's going to have the land and the title, who's going to be the namesake and the leg and the legacy.

And so the understanding, I think, is that if you will offer these gods the best you've got, then they're obligated to offer you the best they've got in return.

We sometimes shake our head at this idea and say, how crazy, but I would tell you that root idea underlies a lot of what I've heard as a kid about why we should tithe or give money to the church.

If we do that, then God will bless us back.

That is to say, um, when we hear if we sow generously will reap generously, giving money to the church is really just like an investment and God will make sure you have financial gain.

And I want to tell you, I didn't think that could possibly be true.

Um, the blessing, I think, is knowing that you're living into your values of being generous and you're supporting life as done through the mission ministry of the church.

But uh, friends, there can't be any kind of guarantee that we're going to reap financial benefit because we share finances.

That just doesn't even make sense economically.

Uh in fact, I would tell you uh the God I think we hope in is the one who doesn't require holy trades from us.

The God we hope in is the one who gives holy gifts to us.

And I mean that in two ways extraordinary gifts, like in the word holy H-O-L-Y, and the God who holy W H O L Y gives to us.

And a gift, unlike an investment, doesn't have strings attached to it.

If you've ever been in middle school or high school and found yourself taking a test and thought, God, if you'll just help me get an A, I promise I'll become a nun, these are holy trades.

If you've ever been pulled over by a police officer and thought, what did I do to deserve this?

This is at the holy trade mentality.

The whole idea is how can we obligate God through some kind of patronage system, through some sort of gift that really is an investment, it has strings all over it to get what we want.

How do we wrestle what we want out of God?

I want to suggest to you that is often how we hear this story.

So as a kid, when I saw this on a flannel board, I remember very distinctly, we all knew killing was wrong.

Killing your children is definitely wrong.

And yet I think what I heard was if God tells you to do it, you do it.

And what I hope you hear from me is that our Jewish brothers and sisters don't read the story that way either.

They say Abraham is at his worst here.

This is the guy who advocated on behalf of a city full of wickedness, Sodom and Gomorrah, when he didn't even know any of the people there.

And the rabbis say, why does this guy not stand up for his own son?

And it makes me think that God is not interested in our blind obedience.

God is interested, this is why I like being an Episcopalian, in our reason and following where reason leads to life.

And this story suggests to us, I think, a really important thing at this moment that we're facing as a nation.

Who has to pay?

So I think the question is: if we have to sacrifice some trees on behalf of the forest, maybe that's one way to think about agriculture, but that is not a particularly very good way to think about our fellow humans.

Is there any circumstance in which sacrificing Isaac is okay?

And I want to tell you, I think the answer is no.

So I don't think Abraham passes this test.

I think he fails it with flying colors.

I don't know if it's interesting for you to hear, but I have a brother who is Orthodox Jewish.

And I remember when I turned 37, my brother called me and said, Happy birthday, but you should know this is going to be a really hard year for you.

And I said, Why is that?

He said, Well, because in the in the rabbinic tradition, Yitzhak was 37 when his father of Ram took him up to sacrifice him.

That changes the story a little bit.

This isn't a little bit of baby, this is an adult.

Either way, though, think about the faith that Abraham is introducing to his child.

Isaac meets God at knife point.

I asked my brother about this, and he said, Well, yeah, that's why in rabbinic tradition, Isaac goes back to the Garden of Eden and has to spend a lot of time there, like maybe two or three years, studying the Torah and recuperating from this because this is a really traumatic experience.

Um, I don't know if you've heard any of those uh those uh rabbinic thoughts that I share with you.

I still think this, I still think this is really, really difficult, and um I hope you will join me in resisting a surface level reading of this.

I think this calls into question what we're willing to sacrifice and whether or not we believe in a God of holy trades, or whether or not we believe in a God who gives generously.

I think right now we are being asked by the nation to consider whether or not we won't heal the visions that we've taken advantage of and how we're gonna do that.

Uh and I want to suggest to you in full disclosure, I'm having a little bit of a hard time thinking about even my own use of language.

And some of you have already heard me say this, but I think it's really, really important to say.

Um I went to seminary, I realized that I had a very strong patriarchal language system.

That is, I used language such that man meant men and women, and that uh I only used masculine pronouns for God.

And at the same time, our our scriptures say that man and women are created in the image and likeness of God.

Both of us are.

And um, this may sound like a contemporary thought, but friends, I firmly believe in the depths of my heart it isn't, and it has consequences that when we don't include women in our language, we exclude them in our worship.

And so you have undoubtedly heard me do this for a few years here.

Whenever I uh God shows up in the liturgy, I try really hard to not assign a gender, but to be gender neutral.

It's not the fix to the problem.

It's not the fix, but it's a fix.

Because the truth is, God does not love men more than women.

Men are in no way superior to women.

Men are no more deserving leadership in the church or anywhere else than women.

It is incumbent upon us to include those whom God includes and invites and not sacrifice anybody on a pyre so that we think we can get closer to God.

Well, look, uh, a few weeks ago um after the death of George Floyd, I found myself thinking that I am also circumscribed by this linguistic problem regarding race and light and white and black.

Um honestly, friends, I I don't even know what a fix is, let alone the fix, because in general, uh almost every major metaphor we have white and light are pure and blameless and good.

And beware of the dark side because that's what sin's like.

It's like a dark stain, it's like darth beter, it's like a black hole.

And I'm struggling to find even ways in our language in which we can say black is beautiful, black is good, alongside white being beautiful and good.

And I'm struggling for those concepts.

And uh, I think those are the kinds of sacrifices God is asking us to lay down, to stop, frankly, and Making our convenience the criterion by which we decide we're going to worship God and instead be willing to lay some of our own patterns, some of our own ways of talking our being so that God can transform and reshape us.

I think because our culture so favors these ways of discourse, it's incumbent upon us to do this hard and holy work, not to be politically correct in some fake way, but to be theologically right with God who created and loved each and every one of us.

And I think this is a major struggle we face as a church is to say, how can we be as open as God is?

That doesn't mean that there's no accountability, of course.

We believe in accountability.

But accountability has to be righteously executed, and you can't compromise the dignity of a person.

We even believe that in our Constitution, that everybody deserves a free trial by their peers.

I don't know the answer to the language situation.

I do know it's a problem.

And uh I want to suggest to you, I I it's not just comforting, but I think it's really, really important.

Um, the Harvard anthropologist, Paul Farmer, says, you know, sometimes we think because I can't solve a problem, I just give up or I'm not obligated.

And he says, No, actually, we don't have to solve a problem, but we have to remember it is a problem and pay attention so we can think about even small ways or connections around figuring out what the problem is and how we can go forward into new life.

And it's really interesting to hear Jesus say, we don't even have to be prophets.

We can welcome them.

We may not even know what to do aside from giving somebody a cup of water, and it's doing something.

And I think this gospel is really asking us to consider opening our hearts to the opportunities, and yeah, they're challenging and they're tough, and they involve us giving up things we don't want to give up right now.

But I think the gospel is asking us, even in small ways, to welcome messengers from God, even if we don't really care for the message.

After all, that's what a prophet is: someone who speaks a word inspired by God to other people.

Prophets can be really messed up, like Abraham's parenting.

That doesn't take away from the fact that at least in one area they're able to speak an inspiration from God.

And Abraham has done that in his lifetime.

I want to tell you in some ways that's hopeful because it means we don't have to be perfect human beings ourselves.

God loves us not in spite of our flaws, but because of them, and God is able to work through us.

And I think that is really important in us having compassion for other people and not poisoning the well.

I've seen people write, well, George Floyd had a criminal record, and maybe he did, but in the incident that we all have seen photos of, that record had very little bearing on his arrest and his treatment.

When we do things like poison wells and say, well, see, he wasn't a good person, he got what we deserved.

I'm afraid we're doing what Abraham does and sacrificing people and justifying ourselves later, when God really might be calling us to say, no, I will not do that.

That's a bad idea.

And Romans is really clear, and I want to offer you a different frame format.

I grew up hearing that this whole business about the wages of sin is death and the gift of God is life, that that was about heaven and hell.

And because we're all sinners, we earn deserved hell.

And uh, if we have the right confession and faith, well then we'll we'll somehow earn heaven because we believe the right thing.

But I want to suggest to you actually that um if we continue to close our hearts to prophets, to messengers, about language, about our convenience being more important than the hardship of others.

If we continue to think God demands our blind and unquestioning obedience instead of our righteousness and our faithfulness, then friends, the wages of that is death.

And I have lived in it long enough.

It's not just death for other people, and most certainly it is, it is death of God's dreams for me.

But God would give us eternal life.

In fact, I want to suggest to you God is actively offering it to us over and over and over again.

Whether or not we will receive it is up to us, but of course, it belongs to us.

It's our gift.

And I've come to the point in my faith where I think if we can't receive it in this life, then God will make sure we get it in the next.

But I don't want to live in death for the rest of my life.

And gender is important to me because of the women I love, including my mother, who has been paid throughout her career as less than men in her same profession and denied opportunities for leadership, whether she admits it or not, my wife and my daughter.

And that's just in my own circle.

And we're being asked to think in our circle as a church.

So maybe you don't have a daughter, maybe you don't have a spouse, maybe as a professional woman, you haven't suffered the gender inequity I'm talking about.

Somebody in our parish has, and we owe it to the family of God.

Maybe you're not, like I'm not, a person of color or a person of generational poverty, so it's easy to remove ourselves from this.

But people in our own parish are.

People in our own neighborhoods are.

We cannot choose to settle for death when God would give us life.

I don't know which cups of water God is asking you to offer messengers.

I don't know what messengers God is knocking at the doors of your heart and your spirit to open yourselves to.

But I pray, I pray that we as a community and congregation, as a church, as a nation would increasingly open our ears, open our hearts to the eternal life that God would give us now, and that God would give a world, a world through us now that is desperate from some eternal life.

Otherwise, my friends, I think we continue to live into not only the wages of sin as death, but binding God's children and thinking that somehow God is glorified in that.

And there is no firmer conviction I have in my heart than that God is not glorified, that God is horrified by the binding we so often inflict on one another.

With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord.

I ask your prayers for God's people throughout the world, for all people and ministers, for the priests in our community, Mike, Craig, Bill, and Lillian, for our bishops, Andy, Hector, Jeff, and Kay, in the diocesan cycle of prayer, St.

Cyrus Lechin, St.

Francis Tyler, and St.

John's Carthage, for Justin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and for our presiding bishop Michael, pray for the Church.

I ask your prayers for all who govern and hold the authority of the nations of the world, of the members of the armed forces, and for all who struggle for peace and justice, that they may act with prudence and vision to plant the signs of your kingdom everywhere.

Pray for justice and peace.

I ask your prayers for our parish and our vestry, that the source of wisdom may guide us, the source of strength may support us, and the source of love may unify us.

I pray that our community may discern clearly and minister effectively.

I ask your prayers for St.

Thomas the Apostle School, that those who teach and those who learn may rejoice in the knowledge of your truth, that we may teach our students to love whatever is just and true and good.

I pray that we may be bearers of God's grace to all who come through our doors.

I ask your prayers for the poor, the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, and those in prison.

Pray for those in any need or trouble.

I ask your prayers for all who seek God, for a deeper knowledge of God.

Pray that they may find and be found by God.

Especially Britta.

Pray for those who have died.

Let us give thanks for our blessings and pray for our own needs and those of others, especially Chris, Larry, Jerry, Sean, Jerome, Susie, Ted, Kendall, McKenna, and Andrea.

The congregation is invited to name their own celebrations and petitions silently or aloud.

O Lord our God, accept the fervent prayers of your people, and the multitude of your mercies, look with compassion upon us and all who turn to you for help.

For you are gracious, lover of souls, and to you we give glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and forever.

Amen.

Let us renew and reconsider our faith with the words of a children's creed sung to the tune of for the beauty of the earth.

I believe in God above, I believe in Jesus' love, I believe the Spirit who comes to teach me what to do.

I believe that I should be kind and loving Lord like thee.

The peace of the Lord be always with you, and also with you.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to pray, our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.

Amen.

May God, who by the Holy Spirit cause those of many languages and world views to proclaim Jesus as Lord, strengthen your faith, and send you out to bear witness to God in word and deed.

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be with you this day, and remain with you always.

Amen.

Alleluia, Alleluia, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God, Alleluia, Alleluia.