Abraham and Isaac

Our Old Testament story is a very strange one, isn't it? The editors of Genesis explain it away as “God testing Abraham”, but although they might think God is Like That, I'm not at all sure I do!

Still, it is very much a part of the story of Abraham, so we must look at it. Scholars seem to think that these stories of Abraham, which had been an integral part of the Jewish tradition, were collected together and written down during the 5th and 6th centuries BC – this, you remember, was when the Israelites were in exile, the Temple had been destroyed, and they had no king of their own. Only a very few Israelites were left in Jerusalem, and they had rather lapsed from their traditions and practice. So the various stories were collected and written down, possibly somewhat haphazardly, in case it should all be lost.

Abraham himself is thought to have lived in the early part of the 2nd millennium BC, somewhere between 1976 BC and 1637 BC. This was in the Bronze age – he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife.

Robert and I went to Italy over Easter this year, and on Easter Monday we went to the town of Bolzano, where they have the museum where the body of Oetzi, the ice-man, is stored. You may remember that he was found in the Alps about 20 years ago, having been preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years. The point is, this was even longer ago than Abraham – he only had a copper axe, as they hadn't discovered about bronze yet. But the things that were found with him – his axe, his coat, his trousers, his bow and arrows, his knife and so on, you could see just how they were used, and he was really a person just like you or me! That makes Abraham feel less remote, as he, too, would have worn clothes we recognise, and carried tools we'd know and so on.

Abraham had felt called by God to leave his home-town of Ur in the Chaldees, which in his day was allegedly highly civilised. They had, apparently, nineteen different kinds of beer and a great many fried-fish shops, if you call that being civilized!

However, they did enjoy other kinds of food, such as onions, leeks, cucumbers, beans, garlic, lentils, milk, butter, cheese, dates, and the occasional meal of beef or lamb. Foods that you and I enjoy to this day! There was wine available, to make a change from beer, but it was expensive, and drunk only by the rich. They played board-games, enjoyed poetry and music, which they played on the lyre, harp and drum, and were generally rather well-found, from all one gathers.

The only thing was that without many trees in their part of the world, they had to do without much furniture, and tended to sleep on mats on the floor, for instance, instead of beds. But definitely a sensible and civilised place in which to live. When you hear it described, it doesn't sound all that remote, does it? They were people like us, and had similar tastes to us.

But Abraham had felt called to leave there, and to take his family and household and to live in the desert. And there, eventually, long after Sarah had given up all hope of having a child, Isaac was born.

And now this. Now the demand to give up Isaac, to sacrifice him to God. What should Abraham do? What could Abraham do, being the kind of person he was? He wasn't perfect – he had been known to tell lies when things got awkward; he had tried to bring God's plan for him into being himself by conceiving a child on his servant Hagar. No, he wasn't perfect, but what he was, was someone who really wanted to follow God, and to do what God wanted. And now, it seemed, God wanted him to sacrifice his only child. What of the promise to make his descendants a great nation? But if God said to do it, Abraham did it, to the best of his ability.

Child sacrifice was, of course, not unknown in that era and that region, and some scholars even think that it was not unknown among worshippers of God, although it's explicitly and emphatically forbidden in the various books of the Law. The Israelites were not to copy their neighbours' bad example! Deuteronomy 12, verses 30-31 says: “After the Lord destroys those nations, make sure that you don't follow their religious practices, because that would be fatal. Don't try to find out how they worship their gods, so that you can worship in the same way. Do not worship the Lord your God in the way they worship their gods, for in the worship of their gods they do all the disgusting things that the Lord hates. They even sacrifice their children in the fires on their altars.”

Anyway, Abraham and Isaac – who, by the way, wasn't a small boy by then, but probably a young man – go off with the servants up to the mountain to sacrifice. Traditionally, they went to where the Temple would later be built in Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock is now. At least, that's what Jewish scholars say – Christian commentators have thought it was more probably Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. The Bible isn't exactly clear, but it's in that sort of area, anyway. And Abraham causes the servants and the animals to wait behind, while he and his son go and worship, “and then we will come back to you.” Note that “We”; we'll come back to that!

And Isaac asks where is the animal for the sacrifice, and Abraham says that God will send one – but he binds Isaac and puts him on the altar. You notice, Isaac doesn't struggle – or we are not told if he does – but accepts his fate as from God. And then, just in time, the angel intervenes and the ram is sacrificed instead of Isaac.

Well, it's a very extraordinary story! What was Abraham thinking? What was Abraham thinking God was thinking? God had promised him that he would be the father of many nations – but Isaac had not yet married or had a child, so if he was killed, that would be the end of the line!

Of course, the traditional Christian interpretation of this story is stated in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verses 17-19: “It was faith that made Abraham offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice when God put Abraham to the test. Abraham was the one to whom God had made the promise, yet he was ready to offer his only son as a sacrifice. God had said to him, 'It is through Isaac that you will have the descendants I promised.' Abraham reckoned that God was able to raise Isaac from death – and, so to speak, Abraham did receive Isaac back from death.”

Abraham may well have thought that God might provide a last-minute substitute for Isaac, or, failing that, would return Isaac from the dead. Remember that he said to his servants that “We will come back”, not “I will come back.” He trusted God.

The story is, of course, considered to be a picture of the Atonement, too – God sacrificing his own son, Jesus, in place of humanity. And Isaac, like Jesus, went more-or-less willingly to his death. And where Jesus was raised, Isaac was given the ram as a substitute.

Of course, there are many other ways of looking at the Atonement, and frankly, this one is one that I don't find says anything to me at this stage in my Christian journey. It is part of the truth, of course, but not all of it. I prefer those parts of the truth that focus on God's love, rather than on God's judgement. But it's there, nevertheless, and it is part of it.

I said at the beginning that the stories had probably been written down during the Exile, and it's also interesting to read what some of the Jewish fathers have made of it. One writer reckons that actually, Abraham was testing God, not vice versa! This, after all, is the Abraham who had pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah – it's like he went off and did what God was asking without arguing in order to put pressure on God to do the right thing, as it were, and send the ram! After all, he doesn't even say “You what? But you told me Isaac was to be the father of many nations!” He just went off and obeyed what he believed God was asking him to do.

And that, of course, is the important thing that I wish to leave with you this morning. We have just begun the very long haul of Ordinary Time that goes on until the end of November. And while, during the first half of the Church's year, we look at the life of Jesus, his birth, his teachings, his death, resurrection and ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, during this second half of the year, what we are basically looking at is our faith, and what happens when what we believe comes up against what we think we believe!

And that's what happened to Abraham. He was asked to trust God even for the life of his only Son, the Son that God had promised would father many nations.

Of course, that test, if that's what it was, didn't come out of the blue. Abraham had had long practice in believing God, in trusting him, from moving out of Ur of the Chaldees, through the promise of a son – and the failure to trust that led him to conceive Ishmael – and the birth of Isaac, and so on. He was used to trusting God, and so when the crunch came, he was able to.

Are you used to trusting God? If and when the crunch comes in your own life, will you still be able to trust him? Job, you may remember, said he would go on trusting God even if it killed him. And trusting God has killed many, many people down the centuries, the martyrs who preferred to die than to renounce their faith. Could you trust God when the crunch comes? Can I?

I tell you one thing; we may or may not be able to, but we certainly won't be able to if we don't practice trusting Him in our everyday life! Amen.

The Fruit of the Spirit

Think of a bowl of fruit. I wonder what fruit you think of. Apples, oranges and bananas, perhaps; or at this time of year peaches and nectarines and strawberries? Or perhaps the tropical fruits, like pineapples and mangoes and papayas. It doesn’t really matter what they are – they are all fruit. So are things like tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and marrow; basically if it is a mechanism for carrying seed, it’s a fruit. If not, not, which means that disgusting rhubarb is actually a vegetable!

Fruit, of course, is Nature’s way of ensuring that seeds are widely distributed – the fruit is eaten, and the seeds deposited somewhere else to grow away from the parent plant. Obviously centuries of cultivation have meant that some fruit has grown a very long way from its origins, and of course, for farmers nowadays it is a cash crop; I’ve driven past cherry orchards in the South of France, and plum orchards in the Vale of Evesham, and we have all heard of the fruit fields in California.

St Paul talks about a crop of fruit, too, in our reading from the letter to the Galatians. He isn’t talking about apples and oranges, though; his fruit is qualities: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control And he calls this the fruit of the spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit. Now, you may have heard plenty of sermons on the fruit of the spirit – I know I have! And do you know, almost every time I’ve heard one I’ve ended up feeling horrible and guilty – I always start to think that I don’t show the fruit of the spirit in my life, and that means I must be a terrible, rotten person, or I’m doing the whole Christian thing all wrong, or something like that!

But I don’t think St Paul really meant what he was saying to make us feel all guilty and horrible. I’m sure he meant something rather different.

You see, he didn’t just write this list of good qualities out of the blue! He wrote it as part of a letter to the Christian Church in Galatia, which was either the Roman province of Galatia, or a much smaller area that was called Galatia long before the Romans came. Doesn’t matter which it was, not at this stage. What does matter is that the Galatians had a problem. They wanted to follow Jesus, but some of their teachers thought that in order to do that, they must also keep the Jewish law. They were teaching that they must become Jews first and Christians afterwards.

Well, St Paul was Jewish himself, and he knew that this was not so. He knew that you could be a good Christian without necessarily being a good Jew. He himself was both, of course, but he was beginning to abandon the Jewish rituals when they became a barrier to evangelism. He said that the Jewish law was fine as long as it lasted, but now that Jesus has come, it’s all changed. You don’t need to keep the Jewish law any more. “For freedom, Christ has set us free.”

But then he realised that people might just misunderstand him, so he goes on to say BUT. And his BUT is that you do have to let god the Holy Spirit fill you, and live in accordance with God’s will. You see, Paul says, if you just live for yourself – what he calls “the sinful nature” – if you don’t either follow the Jewish law or allow God the Holy Spirit to lead you, you might well end up with some or all of the nasty qualities he listed: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies and the like. And, he says, people like that don’t fit into God’s kingdom.

And then he says, but if you allow yourself to be filled with the Holy Spirit, you’ll produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And he says that if you belong to Jesus, the old selfish you has been crucified. Put to death. He doesn’t you notice, say it should be put to death, or it must be put to death. He says it has been put to death. By virtue of the fact that you belong to Jesus.

The trouble is, of course, that when you hear that, if you’re anything like me you go “I wish! In your dreams!” and similar sort of remarks. Because we know all too well that we are prone to some of the things in the list of nasties – we might get jealous, or bite someone’s head off because we’re stressed out... and so on. There are times when a life showing nothing but Paul’s fruit of the Spirit seems like an impossible dream.

Perhaps Paul is being idealistic? Perhaps we should all be trying to be loving and so on? Perhaps that’s the ideal, and if we mess up it doesn’t matter all that much?

Well, that's not what it says. Yes, of course we should, ideally, be trying to be loving and all that, but by ourselves we simply aren’t going to succeed. It isn’t that we should try and develop these qualities – it is that, if we are God’s person, we gradually will develop these qualities.

I’ve said before and I’ll probably say it again that these Sundays in Ordinary Time are the ones when the readings put what we say we believe smack up against what we really do believe, and how that belief translates into practice. If we are God’s person, we are told, we gradually will develop these qualities. We’re told that we’re being made more and more like Jesus as we carry on our walk with God, and these qualities, above all, are ones that shone out of Jesus.

Now, we’re probably not going to notice them very much; it’s far more obvious that we’ve had a meltdown than that we haven’t had one when we might have done! Reminds me of the silly story of the man with the string round his wrist, and when asked why he wore it, he said, “It’s to keep the elephants away!”
“But there are no elephants!”
“Yes, you see, it works!”
It’s really hard to prove a negative! And in some cases it’s hard to prove a positive – we know when we have been unloving or unkind, but do we know when we have been loving or kind? And ought we to know? Wouldn’t we end up being proud of ourselves, as though it were all down to us, when it isn’t really.

Because, you see, these qualities are fruit. And you can’t make fruit, can you – well, there is doubtless an Apple factory somewhere, but that’s something different. You can’t go and watch a banana being made, or the peel being put on an orange. Fruit grows. It’s the farmers and the growers who produce fruit, not factories or mills. The farmer, or the market gardener, does a great deal to protect the fruit trees, and see that they aren’t eaten by pests, or get too dry, and that the trees have been pollinated so that the fruit can grow, but basically they have to be patient, and wait for the fruit to grow and ripen.

And so do we. We can’t manufacture love, or joy, or gentleness, or the other qualities Paul mentions. But we can help them grow.

How? Well, obviously first of all by really being God’s person, not just in Church on Sundays, but allowing what we do on Sundays to affect the rest of our week. Ideally we should try to take time to be with God, even if only for a few minutes, every day. John Wesley reminds us of the “means of grace” of prayer, both private and corporate, the Holy Scriptures and Holy Communion. He points out, in his famous sermon on “The means of grace” that these things aren’t powerful in and of themselves, but only insofar as they bring us towards God. We can pray until we’re blue in the face, Wesley says – well, words to that effect, anyway – but it’s not our prayer that changes things, it’s God working in and through our prayers. And, of course, Wesley reminds us, it’s not praying or whatever that makes us a Christian – it is God’s grace alone that can do that.

Nevertheless, the “means of grace” are very helpful to keep us aligned with God, and the closer we can stay to God, the more fruit will grow in us. Remember what Jesus told us, in John 15: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

And in another of Paul’s letters, he reminds us to go on being filled with the Holy Spirit, too; it’s not a once-for-all thing, but a daily need, a continuous process.

But let’s be realistic, too – we are going to fail! We often show more nasty qualities than good ones. It happens. It’s no good saying “It oughtn’t to happen,” or “It doesn’t happen” when we know full well that it does. That’s because we’re here on this earth and we are not yet made perfect. And when it happens – not if, when – then we need to admit to ourselves, and to God, that it has happened. That we aren’t perfect. We need to apologise to the person we were unkind to, or who bore the brunt of our latest meltdown, or whatever, and then pick ourselves up and go on being God’s person.

Because the more we go on with God, the more we will grow these fruit-qualities of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s the only way. We can’t make them; we can’t even fake them. We can only grow them. Let’s be committed to doing just that. Amen.

Twelve Years

Twelve years. The story in today’s gospel reading is about two people who, for twelve years, have led very different lives.

Twelve years is a very long time. Twelve years ago, it was 1997. Most of us, at least those of us who were alive twelve years ago, were worshipping here then, but things were very different.

We were still a local Ecumenical project. Sheila was our minister. The Conservative Government finally came to an end, and Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister in May. Emily was in the Lower Sixth at School, and went into the Upper Sixth in September. And in that September, Diana Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed were killed in a car-crash in Paris. It feels like a long time ago.

But Chelsea won the FA cup – some things don’t change! I think they were just as international then as they are now. Michelle Kwan took Silver in the Figure Skating World Championships, and is still talking of making a come-back next year. I wonder whether she will. And in other sporting news, Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France for the first time. Pete Sampras and Martina Hingis won Wimbledon.

Ummm, what else happened in 1997? It was just before the infamous Dot-com bubble that was to build up over the next couple of years, so e-mail and Internet access, although growing, wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Most people still had dial-up connections, so you couldn’t be on-line and talk on the phone at the same time, and you couldn’t download television programmes or anything like that – if you knew you were going to miss a television programme, you set your video to record it on to tape. People did have mobile phones, but children didn’t, by and large. Your home or business telephone number was still the first thing you thought of when people wanted to contact you – and you mostly had a telephone-answering machine at home if you needed one, since the useful 1571 service wasn’t launched until 2001. Our telephone numbers, by the way, began 0171 or possibly 0181, depending on the exchange.

Such is the pace of change, that twelve years is a different world for us now.

And for the little girl in today’s story, it was a whole lifetime. She was twelve years old, so Luke’s version of the story tells us – beginning to grow up. She would, perhaps, be expecting her parents to start thinking of a husband for her within the next couple of years – her culture, you were more or less grown-up at 13. We don't know her name; women in the Bible don't tend to have names very often. We do know that her father was called Jairus, and he was a leader of the synagogue in Capernaum. I don't know if that means he was a rabbi, or whether he was the local equivalent of a church steward or something. Not that it matters. What does matter is that he loved his daughter, and now she was ill. Seriously ill. Her short life was ending almost before it had properly begun.

And there was the other woman, the one for whom twelve years was not so much a lifetime as a life sentence. The one with the haemorrhage. Twelve years of constant nagging, dragging pain. Twelve years of constant blood loss, of constantly feeling unwell, of constantly being tired and anaemic.

And, worst of all, twelve years of total social isolation. You see, back then, if you were a woman and you were bleeding, you were considered unclean. Nobody could touch you, or they risked becoming unclean, too. Your husband certainly couldn’t touch you – not even a cuddle. She couldn't go to the Temple, or to her synagogue, to worship. If she sat in a chair, that chair would be unclean for the rest of the day. And so on. She was basically cut off from normal social contact. We aren’t told whether this woman was married, although it was very unusual not to be in her society. But if she was, it’s quite probable that her husband had consoled himself elsewhere.

And nothing was helping. She’d spent all her money on seeing doctors, but they hadn’t been able to help, and the problem was, if anything, growing worse. She was becoming weaker, and knew that soon she would be too weak to carry on. Her life, too, was drawing to a close – and it may well be that she was profoundly grateful that it was happening.

But then, a rumour swept through the crowds. Jesus of Nazareth was visiting Capernaum today! Everybody had heard of Jesus of Nazareth. He had done some spectacular healings. Maybe, just maybe....

Jairus, it seems, had no doubts. The doctors hadn't helped his girl, and she was dying. Maybe this Jesus could help. Nothing to lose, anyway. At worst, he could do nothing for her. And at best.... well, perhaps Jairus didn't really allow himself to hope what that best would be.

The woman with the haemorrhage may or may not have doubted. Probably she was in despair, too. And anyway, Jesus wouldn’t look at the likes of her. She didn’t have any money. She didn’t have clout, like a synagogue leader. She was just a lonely old woman.

But the crowd was so huge that Jesus could barely walk up the street. The disciples were going, “Excuse me, excuse me, make way there now, oh would you please shift your – er – yourselves”, but progress was very slow. And the woman, caught up in the crowd, suddenly plucked up the courage and just, with one finger, touched his cloak.

And Jesus felt it. In all the crowd, with people everywhere, jostling and rubbing up against him, he felt that one deliberate touch. "Who touched me?" he asked. We aren't told the tone of voice he said it in. Sometimes, preachers seem to reckon he was irritated, angry even. I don't think so. I think he was full of compassion and love. He knew. He may not have known who she was, but he knew why she was hiding.

For Jesus, being ritually unclean didn’t matter. Sure, he was a devout Jew, worshipping in the synagogue every week, going to Jerusalem as often as possible, but for him, people mattered a lot more than ritual. You’ll remember he makes rude remarks to the Pharisees about their habit of tithing every herb in the garden, but refusing to take care of elderly parents. People, to Jesus, mattered far more than ritual. He was quite prepared to visit the centurion's house to heal his servant, even though that would have made him unclean.

Not that he could have been made unclean by her touch – it is, after all, He who confers cleanliness upon us, not us who make him unclean. But would Jesus, walking about on earth, have known that? Arguably not. I think, for him, it was more a matter of minding about people more than about rituals, without really realising why. So he doesn't care that the woman may or may not have rendered him unclean. What he does care about is that everybody should know that she is now well, and thus no longer a social outcast. So he says to her "Go in peace; your faith has made you well!"

And then to the little girl, who, if she wasn't already dead, was very close to death. But Jesus never let a little thing like being dead stop a healing, and he reached out to her and held her hand. "Get up, little one!" he said. And she did. She woke up, yawned, and stretched, for all the world as if she had just been enjoying a lovely, refreshing nap. "Get her something to eat," Jesus said, what could be more practical? And he didn't want her surrounded by the media of the day all yelling at her and stressing her out, either, so he suggests the parents don't tell anybody.

---oo0oo---

So far so good. But what is this telling us today, on this summer morning?

It’s about the obvious things, of course – about faith, about trusting Jesus, about having the faith to reach out and ask when things go pear-shaped. I suppose it’s about healing, and patience, and all that sort of thing. And it’s about the fact that everybody, but everybody, is welcome to Jesus.

You have the little girl, loved, accepted, coming from a relatively well-off family, who are in despair at her illness. And you have the old woman, poor, outcast, alone, friendless, who has nobody now to care whether she lives or dies. Yet Jesus heals them both.

I don’t know whether these two healings actually happened in the way that those who retold the stories say – it seems remarkably pat, to me. The rather obvious parallels and contrasts between the two healings – the repetition of twelve years, the risk of uncleanness in both cases, the woman, reaching out secretly, privately, yet healed in public. The little girl, whose father comes to Jesus in public, yet the healing is private and supposed to have been kept that way. It might be that the two stories were linked together very early on, even if they didn't happen quite like that. Not that it matters, of course, and all the three Gospels who tell it do link them together.

Another thing to notice is that both of them were women. Neither has a name, which is typical, but in that time and place, even for women to be noticed is pretty incredible. Certainly religious Jews didn't go round allowing themselves to be touched by strange women!

So, I think for today, the story is about inclusiveness. God's love is for everybody, no matter who you are. Rich or poor, old or young, male or female, religious or otherwise, whatever your race or ethnic origin. Even the worst type of sex-offender or paedophile. Even terrorists. God's love is for everybody.

I think we sometimes like to be a bit exclusive about who we worship with – I don’t know whether the Methodist church in this country has a less shameful history in this respect than the Anglican church, but I doubt it, somehow. We like to be with “people like us”, and in some ways, that’s all right. What isn’t all right, though, of course, is when “people like us” becomes “the only people worth knowing”, or “the only proper people”. That way leads to tribalism, and we know how many and dreadful conflicts tribalism has led to throughout the years. Including, it has to be said, Northern Ireland.

But, of course, the joy of it is that the Lord Jesus who brought healing to the little girl and the old woman, the Lord Jesus who was not afraid to get his hands dirty, not afraid to be considered ritually unclean, who put people before religious ritual, that same Lord Jesus is still with us today, still loving us, still healing us, still reaching out to us as we reach, however tentatively, out to him.

Praise God!