God gets involved

One of the joys of preaching at two different churches on consecutive weeks on consecutive readings is that you can use the same introduction as you used last week! Which is my fairly standard Abraham introduction, but still...

I wasn't here last week because I was at Mostyn Road, and so I don't know what A focussed on. But I had a look a the story of what's called “The Binding of Isaac”, when Abraham nearly sacrifices Isaac but doesn't at the last moment. Our Old Testament reading for today, follows more or less straight on from there, and tells how God provided a bride for Isaac to help fulfil the promise that Isaac would be the father of many nations.

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. Apparently the earliest he could have been born was 1976 BC and the latest he could have died was 1637 BC.
This was in the Bronze age –
he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife.

When Robert and I were in Italy at Easter-time,
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, butter, cheese, dates, and the occasional meal of beef or lamb. Just the sort of food I like!
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 Isaac has grown up and Sarah has died, and it is time for Isaac to marry. Abraham is urgent that he marry a woman from his own tribe, not a local Canaanite woman, who wouldn't have known about God, so he sends his servant back to Ur, to find a suitable relation for Isaac to marry.

The servant explains, rather earnestly, how he asked God to show him which the right woman was – would she offer to draw water for his camels, or not? That wasn't an easy task – camels, which can go four or five days without water, like to drink A LOT at one time, so she'd have needed a fair few bucketsful!

Rebecca's family would have liked a few days to get used to the idea, but the servant says he needs to get back as soon as possible, and Rebecca agrees to leave next day. So she and her various maidservants – one of them may have been her old nurse – got packed up and ready, and set off. And eventually they get home safely, and there is Isaac coming to meet them. And they get married, and live more-or-less happily ever after!

We sometimes get alarmed about arranged marriages these days; we know that in those communities where they're still more-or-less the norm, things can go horribly wrong – think of those so-called “honour killings” we hear so much about! Even in this day and age, it isn't always easy for someone to escape an abusive situation if they don't know where to go. But as I understand it, an arranged marriage can be every bit as happy and as successful as one where the bride and groom have chosen one another; we all know that you have to work at being married, whether you knew your husband for years beforehand or whether you met him a few days or weeks before the wedding – or even at the wedding!

I think Rebecca was very brave going off with Abraham's servant like that; she had no way of knowing who or what was awaiting her at the far end of the journey. The servant had bigged up Abraham's – and thus Isaac's – wealth, and had given her lots of gold jewellery, but was he telling the truth?

But one thing stands out about this story and that is that God was involved from beginning to end! And God led them all to a happy ending.

I wonder how much we actually believe that God is really involved in our lives? I know we say we do, but these Sundays in Ordinary Time are very much places where what we think we believe tends to come up against what we really do believe! After all, not all of our stories have happy endings, do they? Some do, many do, and for these we give thanks, but what happens when they don't?
Does God get involved in our lives? And if so, how does this work, and how can we work with God to ensure a happy ending?

Well, the Bible definitely tells us that God is involved in our lives, and I am sure most of us could tell of moments when we were perfectly and utterly sure of this. But equally, most of us could tell of moments when we really struggled with it! Where was God when this or that bad thing happened? Does God really care?

Many of us have lived through enough bleak times to know that one comes out the other side. We know that, when we look back, we will see God's had upon it all. God may not have led us to a happy ending, exactly, but we can see how God has worked all things together for good for us.

It's not a matter of God waving a magic wand and producing the happy ending we want; we all know God doesn't work like that. And it's not a matter, either, of God having set the future in stone so that nothing we can do can change things. Nor is it a matter of God simply sitting back and letting us struggle as best we can, although everybody feels at times that this is what is happening.

It's more as if God is working with us, moment by moment. Sometimes we – or other people – do things that mean the situation can't come out as God would have wished. God has a detailed plan for creation, but his plan for our individual lives isn't – can't be – mapped out in moment-by-moment detail since we are free to make our own choices. But God truly wants the best possible life for each one of us. The idea, I think, is to stay as close to God as possible, trying to be aware of each moment of decision and what God would like for us to do.

But, of course, as St Paul points out in the letter to the Romans, that isn't actually possible! We're a bit crap at actually doing the right thing, no matter how much we know we want to! It was impossible for Paul to keep the Jewish law in its entirety, no matter how much he wanted to. And although we know we're, and I quote, under grace not under the law, we do tend to find it easier to try to follow a set of rules and regulations than to follow Jesus! And, of course, we don't follow those rules and regulations perfectly – how could we?

But Jesus points out that his burden is light! Sometimes we don't feel as though it is. “Come unto me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”

I am sure Abraham's servant must have felt incredibly burdened when he went back to Ur to find Rebecca. But the servant, at least, spent his time moment-by-moment in God's presence. He trusted that God would lead him, step by step, to the right woman and that God would bring the whole journey to a happy conclusion. “Come unto Me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”

Abraham's servant trusted God. I wonder how much we trust God? It isn't always easy, is it. Last week's story, how God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, was very much about trust. Abraham didn't even argue with God – he just went ahead and did as he was told, leaving it very much up to God to do the right thing! Even Isaac didn't struggle – he was a young man at that stage, not a small boy, and he could easily have overpowered his elderly father. But no – he allowed himself to be bound and laid upon the altar. And God did do the right thing, as it were, and produced the ram.

And now God did show the servant his choice of wife for Isaac. And so was born the Kingdom of Israel. We never know the consequences of our choices – they may be far more far-reaching than we expect. But we do need to practice involving God in our everyday lives, otherwise, when the crunch comes, we'll find it much harder than it need be to rely on him. “I will give you rest,” says Jesus, but if we don't know how to come to him for that rest, how can he give it to us? Amen.

Allowing God

Jesus said to his disciples:
"A large crop is in the fields, but there are only a few workers.
Ask the Lord in charge of the harvest to send out workers to bring it in."

St Paul wrote to the Christians in Galatia:
"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

You can see the theme the lectionary compilers were thinking about –
harvests!
But there are other themes, too, that unite the two readings.

In many ways our two readings are completely different, of course.
Nobody seems to know who the 72 people that Jesus sent out were –
nor, actually, how many there were,
as some translations say seventy, others say seventy-two.
But who were they?
Where did they come from?
Why do we never hear of them before or since?
All very peculiar.

But Jesus sends them out, telling them they were not to take anything with them –
no luggage, not even hand baggage.
One paraphrase has it:
"comb and toothbrush only!"
but I'm not entirely sure they were meant to take even that much.
They were to be totally dependent on other people's generosity in order to live.
If one household wouldn't take them in, another probably would,
but you weren't to move from house to house to find who was the better cook.

Apparently the instruction not to stop and greet people en route was because doing the polite, in those days, could take a mighty long time,
it wasn't just a matter of saying "Hi!" and moving on, you had to stop and ask about all the family members right down to your sixth cousin twice removed, who was probably their uncle anyway.
So it all took time, so you hadn't to stop.

And when they come back –
we are not told how long they were on the road –
they were full of their experiences:
"Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!"

But Jesus said that was almost by the way.
It didn't matter.
What did matter was "that your names are written in heaven."

A modern paraphrase puts it this way:
"All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God's authority over you and presence with you.
Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing."

---oo0oo---

Some years before this story was written down, but a few years later, chronologically, St Paul was coming to the end of his letter to the Christians in Galatia.
This is, you may or may not know, one of the earliest letters –
they think it might have been written as early as 54 AD, so within twenty-five years or so of the Crucifixion.
People who had actually heard Jesus speak would still be alive;
people who had seen the Crucifixion;
maybe even people who had seen the risen Jesus.

And St Paul was already travelling around and making converts.
And this is where the problem arose, because originally, people who were converted were Jewish, and tended to follow the Jewish law and so on.
At that, St Paul himself was.
But then you started getting this new lot of Christians,
who had never been Jewish
and didn't see that it was necessary to keep the Jewish law in order to be a Christian.
This, as we know, is also what St Paul thought,
but there were others who disagreed,
and said that if you were to be a proper Christian, you had to be circumcised
(if you were male –
they didn't practice female circumcision)
and keep the Jewish Law, with all the observances about what you did and didn't eat,
what did or did not make you unclean,
what you could and couldn't do on the Sabbath Day and so on.
For St Paul, this had all been rendered totally obsolete by the Cross of Christ –
you were saved by faith, not by keeping the Law.
And thus his letter to the good Christians of Galatia.

The end of the letter, he says, is written in his own handwriting –
some scholars think he had something the matter with his eyes, which is why he tended to use a scribe or secretary to write his letters for him.
And when he uses his own handwriting, it tends to be rather large and scrawly.
But it enables him to stress what he wants to leave them with which in our pew Bibles reads:

"Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything;
what counts is a new creation."

Another modern translation puts it:
"It doesn't matter if you are circumcised or not.
All that matters is that you are a new person."

And in a modern paraphrase, they put it like this:
"Can't you see the central issue in all this?
It is not what you and I do—
submit to circumcision, reject circumcision.
It is what God is doing, and he is creating something totally new, a free life!"

That is really the point:
a new creation.

St Paul is very big on that, it's one of the things he stresses.
This from his letter to the Corinthians:
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation;
the old has gone, the new has come!
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.
And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."

---oo0oo---

Obviously, being "a new creation" is something God does.
It's not something we can do.
And having our names "written in heaven",
that's not something we can do, either.
It is something God does.

Now, over the centuries, some branches of Christianity have interpreted this to mean that you don't get a choice about it,
and that it's not until you get to heaven that you find out whether your name was or was not written down there.
They call it "Limited Atonement" –
as if!

But we Methodists don't believe that.
We believe that everybody needs to be saved –
to become a new creation, if you like –
and that everybody can be saved.
We also believe that we can know that we are saved, and that we can be "saved to the uttermost", as they say –
for Wesley, this meant that one could grow so close to Jesus that for all intents and purposes one would be practically perfect.
He didn't, you will note, claim to be like that himself,
although he did reckon he knew one or two folk who were.

We know all this, of course.
Most of us have been Christians for more years than we care to remember!
But it's always good to remind ourselves of the basics from time to time;
and the thing that really leapt off the screen for me from the various translations and paraphrases that I read
was that both having our names written in heaven and being a new creation is something that God does, not something we do.

"Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing," as the modern paraphrase put it.

And we who have been Christians for many decades sometimes forget that.
We get so involved in Church administration, or worse, in Church politics, that we forget what we're here for –
and the main thing we're here for is to allow God to do something for us!

So the question I want to leave with you today is:
When did you last allow God to do something for you?