Category Archives: Genesis

True Freedom – A Sermon

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This sermon is based on the following scripture passages, which can be read by clicking on the links:  Genesis 8:13-22 and Genesis 9: 12-17, Galatians 5:1-26, and John 4:5-42.

I am in the process of developing a four year lectionary that features John’s gospel in Year D. I have plotted out much of this lectionary, but am filling in the details, so to speak, as I work my way through the years. Currently we are reading consecutively through Genesis, Galatians and John. If you want to know more about this lectionary, feel free to contact me by clicking the appropriate tab above.

True Freedom

Two police officers had stopped a car in downtown Milwaukee and ordered the driver to get out from behind the wheel.
The man was obviously very drunk and had a hard time standing up,
much less completing the field sobriety test.
The police were trying to get the man to turn,
lean over and put his hands on the hood of his car.
The man was screaming,
“Hey… I’m an American and I live in America and that means nobody can tell me what to do!”

One of the frustrated, but somewhat amused officers replied,
“Yea, sure buddy… If you can spell American, I’ll let you go.”
The drunk, offended by the reflection on his sobriety yelled back,
“Don’t make fun of me sir… I can spell it borwards and fackwards!”

If there is one thing we Americans love it is the idea of freedom.
But as the story about the drunk illustrates,
for many of us Freedom is just another way of saying that nobody can tell us what to do.
I’d want to suggest that freedom is so much more than that.

We start with Noah.
The flood has ended; the waters have receeded,
and for the first time in 190 days – over six months,
Noah, his family, and all the animals set foot on dry land.
To get how thrilling, how freeing that must have been,
you first have to imagine how horrible, in many ways,
those 190 days stuck on a boat with all those animals must have been.
Can you imagine the smell?
Can you imagine the noise?
One preacher has said that the only thing that helped Noah and his family
put up with all that noise and stench was the storm raging outside the ark.

But now Noah is free . . .free from the ark . . . free from the noise and smells,
and free from the responsibility to save the world.
It is a sweet, sweet feeling this freedom.
It is the freedom an inmate feels when getting out of prison,
the freedom immigrants felt when they arrived in the US and spotted the Statue of Liberty for the first time.
It’s a palpable, physical freedom.
That’s one type of freedom.

Continue reading →

Hoping Against Hope – A Sermon for Lent 2B

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Here is the beginning of my sermon for Sunday.  I can’t believe that I have gotten this far already.  I will move from where I have ended to talking about the fact that ultimately Abraham’s hope did not disappoint, though it was fulfilled in God’s time and not his own.  I will also reference the fact that part of the reason Peter rebukes Jesus is that his own hope in Jesus was that Jesus would be a different kind of Messiah than the one Jesus says he will be . . . i.e., one that must suffer and die.  Hopefully (pun fully intended), I will move to talking about the hopes the people of First UMC have for their church and how we must live that hope out even when things seem dire or hopeless.

Let me know what you think, if you don’t mind.  The scriptures the sermon is based on are as follows:

(Genesis 17:1-7)
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

(Genesis 17:15-16)
God said to Abraham, "As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her."

(Romans 4:13-25)
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")- -in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

(Mark 8:31-38)
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

—–
"Hoping Against Hope"
As a kid there were two presents I always hoped to get for either my birthday or at Christmas.
The first, when I was younger, was a giant set of Legos,
you know, those small building blocks that are still popular today.
You see, my cousin David had the biggest collection of Legos in the world,
and I would go to his house and literally spend hours playing with them —
building spaceships and houses and other assorted projects.
I think I played with those Legos more than David himself did.
But year after year my hopes were dashed.
I never got those Legos I so desired and wanted.

When I was older for several years my hopes were set on receiving a combination microscope and chemistry set.
The one that came with at least 30 different chemicals and promised hundreds of experiments.
I envisioned spending hours learning the mysteries of the universe,
perhaps even making new discoveries with these tools of science and technology.
I saw myself as a young explorer on the way to becoming a renowned scientist.
I was sure that this microscope/chemistry set was all I needed to get me started down the path to my eventually winning the Nobel prize for Chemistry or Physics or Biology.
Remembering my experience with the Legos,
I became determined to make my wishes known in as many ways as possible.
I gave my parents birthday and Christmas wish lists,
with this set on the top of each one – underlined and circled to make it clear that this was what I really wanted more than anything else in world.
I cut pictures of the set out of catalogs and taped them the refrigerator.
I talked about how well I was doing in my science classes and how much better I would do if only I had a microscope and a chemistry set to further my education.
I begged and pleaded and cajoled my parents so much that one year for Christmas they finally gave in and I discovered a rather large box under the tree with my name on it.

Hoping against hope, I carefully and slowly unwrapped it,
and discovered that I now had the object of my desires.
To say I was thrilled is putting it mildly.
I couldn’t believe that I held in my hands the one gift I had wanted for so long.
Needless to say, my hopes were dashed again.
The microscope was some cheap plastic toy that looked nothing like the pictures in the catalog.
The chemical set, which promised hours of discovery and hundreds of experiments,
was also a disappointment.
After all, how many times can you mix chemicals to see them change color or foam before getting bored?
Not many times I soon discovered.
It was only a matter of days, or at most a week or so,
before I packed this once-prized and coveted gift away in my closest,
never to use it again.

Hope is a strange thing, isn’t it?
At one point in Romans chapter 5 Paul writes,
“and hope does not disappoint.”
Now I don’t know about you,
but this has not been my experience.
I have fou

nd that hope has often been disappointed in my own life,
and I am willing to bet that you have found the same to be true as well.
What are some of the things you have hoped for?
Think about that for a moment.
Have you ever found your hopes dashed against the rocks of reality?
I bet you have.

Because of this several individuals have had a rather negative view on hope.
The French philosopher Albert Camus talked about learning to live "without appeal."
To Camus, hope was a distracter, a dilutor, a sop.
It distorted any clear comprehension of reality,
and Camus was convinced that hope was an illusion, and therefore inadvisable.
The infamous athiest Nietzsche went even further.
For him, not only was hope a waste of time,
it was an instrument of avoidable cruelty.
Nietzsche called hope "the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man."
And then there are the opening lines of Woody Allen’s parody, “My Speech to the Graduates,” which read:
"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

And yet we continue to hope.
In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul tells us that three things endure:
faith and love and, you guessed it, hope.
The noted English author and man of letters, Dr. Samuel Johnson, once said,
"Hope is necessary in every condition."
And I think he was right in saying so.
My normal thoughts lie more with Johnson than with Camus or Neitzsche,
but there are times when I am tempted to agree with them.
There are times when hope seems hopeless.

Take our passage today from Romans 4.
In it we read about Abraham and the faith he had that God would fulfill God’s promises.
Paul writes about Abraham:
“Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’
according to what was said,
‘So numerous shall your descendants be.’
He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body,
which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old),
or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.
No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God,
but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,
being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Now I don’t know how Paul knows all that about Abraham,
having lived himself hundreds of years after the man in question.
And the stories about Abraham in Genesis show us a man who is often impatient when it comes to waiting for God to fulfill God’s promises,
and he also seems, at times, to be filled with doubt.
For instance, at one point Abraham lies to Pharaoh about his wife Sarah,
fearing for his life.
Does this sound like a man filled with faith?
Or how about the time he takes matters in his own hands and tries and succeeds in having a son with his servant Hagar,
thinking that this will be the solution and answer to his concerns about an heir?

In fact, the one thing that Paul seems to get right, as far as I am concerned is that very first phrase: “hoping against hope, . . . [Abraham] believed.”
“Hoping against hope. . .”
Now that is a curious phrase,
and when I looked it up online, here is what I found:
hoping against hope is . . .
“to have hope even when the situation appears to be hopeless;
to hope very strongly that something will happen,
although you know it is not very likely;
or to hope with little reason or justification.”
Now that sounds about right to me.

The Akedah – Kierkegaard and Protecting God

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Note:  If you haven’t already done so, you may want to read the first post in this series:

The Akedah – The Binding of Isaac

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Perhaps the most famous of reflections on this passage of scripture comes from Soren Kierkegaard in his book “Fear and Trembling.”  After an introduction, four “retellings” of the story are given, each with it’s own emphasis and peculiarities.  At the end of of each vignette, Kierkegaard also includes a short description of how the story ties to a mother weaning her child.  Today, I post Kierkegaard’s introduction and his first reflection.

Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard that beautiful story of how God tested Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the testing, kept the faith, and contrary to expectation, got a son a second time. When he grew older, he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had fractured what had been united in the pious simplicity of the child.  The older he became, the more often his thoughts turned to that story;  his enthusiasm for it became greater and greater, and yet he could not understand the story less and less.  Finally, he forgot everything else because of it; his soul had but one wish: to see Abraham; but one longing: to have witnessed the event. . .

His craving was to go along on the three day journey when Abraham rode with sorrow before him and Isaac beside him.  His wish was to be present in that hour when Abraham raised his eyes and saw Mount Moriah in the distance, the hour when he left the donkeys behind and went up the mountain alone with Isaac – for what occupied him was not the beautiful tapestry of imagination but the shudder of the idea.

This man was not a thinker.  He did not feel any need to go beyond faith . . .   Neither was he a biblical scholar.  He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, perhaps he would have more easily understood the story and Abraham.

“And God tested Abraham and said unto him, ‘Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee.’ “

I.

It was early in the morning when Abraham arose, had the donkeys saddled, and left his tent, taking Isaac with him.  Sarah watched them from the window as they went down the valley – until she could see them no longer.

They rode in silence for three days. On the morning of the fourth day Abraham said not a word, but he raised his eyes and saw Mount Moriah in the distance. He left the servants behind, and taking Isaac’s hand, went up the mountain alone. But Abraham said to himself, “I will not hide from Isaac where this journey is taking him.” He stood still, he laid his hand upon the head of Isaac in benediction, and Isaac bowed to receive the blessing.  And Abraham’s face epitomized fatherliness: his gaze was mild, his speech encouraging.

But Isaac was unable to understand him, his soul could not be uplifted. He grasped Abraham’s knees, he pleaded at his feet, he begged for his young life, and for the fair hope of his future, He called to mind the joy in Abraham’s house, and he called to mind the sorrow and the solitude. Then Abraham lifted the boy up and walked on, holding his hand, and his words were full of comfort and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. Abraham climbed Mount Moriah, but Isaac understood him not.

Then for a moment Abraham turned away from his son, and when Isaac saw his father’s face again, it was changed, his gaze was wild, his whole being was sheer terror.  Abraham seized Isaac by the throat, threw him to the ground, and said, “Stupid boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you think that this is God’s desire? No, it is what I want!”

Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his anguish, “0 God in heaven, have mercy on me. God of Abraham, have mercy on me. If I have no father on earth, then you be my father!” But Abraham said softly to himself, “0 Lord in heaven, I thank you. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster than he should lose faith in you.”

———-

When the child is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast. It would be hard to have the breast look inviting when the child must not have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed, but the mother – she is still the same, her glance is as loving and tender as ever. How fortunate the one who did not need more terrible means to wean the child!

In this story  Kierkegaard seeks to show Abraham as being protective of God and God’s image to his son Isaac.  Isaac is shown begging for his life, imploring his father not to kill him.  “He begged for his young life, and for the fair hope of his future.”  Isaac does not, cannot understand how his father could do such a a terrible thing, and Abraham is unwilling to place the blame for his actions on the God who has commanded them. “Stupid boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you think that this is God’s desire? No, it is what I want!”

Isaac’s terror in this short story is palpable, and he begs for mercy not only from his father, but also from his father’s God. The later brings a quiet response to Abraham’s lips, “0 Lord in heaven, I thank you. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster than he should lose faith in you.”   Abraham seeks to hide from his son the terrible thing that God has asked him to do.

In another reflection on this passage of scripture, Dan Clendenin, on his website journeywithjesus.net writes:

Abraham faced at least four inter-related challenges to believing the command of God and then acting upon that belief. First, he would have been entirely reasonable to conclude that he was being deceived by malign influences—sickness, demons, hallucinations, infirmities of his old age, etc., and that the visions and voices that he heard originated not with a loving God but from a temptation of the worst, evil sort. If that was the case, he would have “obeyed” by dismissing the voices as delusions. Similarly, we can imagine praising Abraham if he concluded that he somehow deceived himself through religious zealotry couched in pious platitudes. Today we invoke this rationale to condemn in the harshest terms suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq, or Christians who bomb abortion clinics, all who claim that God told them to commit some atrocity. Third, at a simple, rational level, the command of God challenged Abraham to embrace the absurd, the irrational, or the unintelligible. What sense does it make to murder the son of promise through whom God had promised to bless all the earth? Fourth, Abraham had to transcend normal ethical expectations. Good parents love and nourish their children, they do not murder them in religiously-inspired violence and claim that “God told me to do it.”

Clendenin goes on to give voice to some of the questions the story raises:

  • What are we to make of a God who commands child sacrifice? Might God ask me to do something similar today?
  • How would we respond to a believer who invoked this passage to abort her baby as an act of obedience to what she heard as God’s command?
  • Does the Bible sanction religious violence?
  • What about the divine bait-and-switch in this passage, where God asks Abraham to do the incomprehensible, and then at the last minute provides an alternative (which smacks of psychic torture)?
  • How could Abraham possibly have known whether Isaac would be spared (as it so happened), whether he might kill Isaac only to have God raise him from the dead (the interpretation of Hebrews 11:17–19), or whether God might have him murder Isaac only to provide him with yet a third son of promise after Ishmael and Isaac?

And as many others have asked, I too ask the following:  How do we worship and serve a God who asks everything, absolutely everything and anything, of us?

Genesis 12:1-4a – My Paraphrase

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The Lord said to Abram, "Leave behind your country and your family and the home of your father and go to the land that I will show you.  And I will make you into a great nation, and make your name great, and you will become a blessing.  And I will bless those you bless you, curse those who curse you, and through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

So Abram departed, as the Lord had commanded him.

 

My Paraphrase of Genesis 2:15-17 and Genesis 3:1-7

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The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work and attend to it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Now the serpent was more cunning than any land animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” And the woman said to the serpent, “God said, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, you shall not eat, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You shall not surely die, for God knows that on the day you eat of it, you eyes shall be opened, and you shall become like God, knowing good and evil.

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasing to the eyes, and a tree to be coveted to make one wise; so she took from its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. The eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves clothes.

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