Second Sunday in Lent Year B 2009

02 Lent B 09
March 8, 2009

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
1 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. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." 3 Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, 4 "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5 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. 6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7 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.
15 God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 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."

Psalm 22:23-31
23 You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
24 For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.
25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.
28 For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.
29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.
30 Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

Romans 4:13-25
13 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. 14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

16 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, 17 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. 18 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." 19 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. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." 23 Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Mark 8:31-36
31 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. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 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."

34 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. 35 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. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

Impossible

I have to say I am struggling with this passage. It seems so unrealistic, so idealistic. It’s as impossible as peace in the Middle East. It’s as impossible as having twenty black people join Philippi. It’s as impossible as a chronic drunk making a full recovery and being sober all his life. It’s as impossible as having a big gay wedding at a Southern Baptist Church. It seems as impossible to me, well, as a ninety-year old couple having a child.

Impossible.

I’m wondering if all the real evil in the world is not done in the distance between what is right and what is wrong but in the distance between what is possible and what is impossible. It is possible to be less selfish, but it is impossible to love one’s enemy. It is possible to be obedient to human rules, but it is impossible to obey God when God’s will countermands those rules. It is possible to help some people, but impossible to help them all. It is possible to believe in a God limited to our personal lives and problems, impossible to believe in a God that condemns our global culture.

Let me tell you a parable. A certain woman who was a popular TV guru with a huge audience went to the National Cathedral during an Easter service, tore the American flag off the altar and started beating the pastor with the flagpole in the middle of his Easter message. She then knocked over the altar and threw the offering in the trash.

She then stood before a cheering crowd in front of the Washington Monument and preached that it would soon be destroyed, and then invited everyone to give up on the United States and join her newly forming nation.

How do you feel about this woman? What do you think would happen to her?

I’m not suggesting anyone do such a thing. But I want to help you get a sense of the effect Jesus had when he marched into Jerusalem and started whipping people in the temple and knocking things over and announcing that the temple would be demolished. He wasn’t teaching about personal morality; he was teaching about public life.

When Jesus predicted he would die on a cross, it wasn’t because he had some mystical or supernatural insight. It was because he knew exactly what rules he was going to break and he knew exactly what the punishment would be. He knew exactly who he was going to offend and what they would do about it.

He knew when he healed and forgave the diseased and the sinful, particularly on the Sabbath day, he would offend the priesthood who depended on sin offerings for their income, and he would offend the Pharisees who depended on the law for their status in the community. He knew when he condemned the religious leaders that ran the temple for collaborating with the Romans and predicted the destruction of the temple, he would be signing his own confession of blasphemy. He knew that when crowds of people called him Messiah that Herod, duly appointed Messiah by the Roman Empire and the priests, would want him dead.

But he also believed that, if he did these things, if he renounced every possible institution, every realistic solution, every reasonable option and trusted in God’s unreasonable, impossible and unrealistic promise, God would not allow his death to be the end of the story. He believed God would raise him from the dead. He believed God would vindicate his faith. And he believed that because God would raise him from the dead and glorify him, others would follow him, give up on the possible, and embrace the impossible. He believed we would take up our crosses and follow.

Impossible.

Is it possible that I could come to believe in this God? Could I believe in a God that really can transform not only me but many other people into something much greater than they are? Can I believe that God can really bring about a kingdom among the broken and struggling nations of the world that would stand as a light and an inspiration to them all? Can I renounce my culture for the sake of something as unreal and impossible as a culture of love and grace and peace ruled only by God?
And would I die rather than back down?

Impossible.

There was a stretch there when a bunch of new members joined Philippi, and almost immediately were invited to join the Lions’ Club. We ran into the problem of asking people to come to Bible study or a committee meeting and being told, “I can’t. I have a Lions’ club meeting.” I started saying, “The Christians are being eaten by the Lions.”

Christians being eaten by lions is one of the iconic images we have of the early church. It is in fact true that one of the ways Christians were executed were in the Roman version of reality TV. They were led into an arena where lions and other carnivorous wild beasts who had been starved for days, were set loose upon them. The Romans were apparently entertained by violence.

The martyrs had families and jobs. They had mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and spouses and children. They were ordinary people who were living lives not much different, though perhaps somewhat harder, than we are living today. But they were disciples of Jesus, born anew into the kingdom of God the Father, but the Roman authorities believed their nation was divinely founded and that its emperors and dead heroes were themselves gods. So they demanded everyone under their power acknowledge Rome as the real Kingdom of God. The disciples of Jesus refused, even when it would cost them the grief and financial ruin of their families and their own lives.

Those Christians who were thrown to the lions were known to kneel and loudly praise and thank God for the opportunity to give their lives for the kingdom. The made a point of forgiving the Romans before they were killed. This sounds crazy, suicidal. But for every one that so died, ten more were reborn. The more the Romans killed, the larger the church grew. Someone said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The church has not fallen yet, but Rome has.

They believed, truly believed that the path of renunciation even unto death was the path to eternal life in the coming kingdom of God. They went to their deaths believing the impossible, that God really could build his kingdom without a shot being fired, without a prison being built, without a single judge or courtroom, and with no government save the Messiah Jesus and no law but love. They loved their enemies even though it was impossible. They forgave their executioners, even though it was impossible. They were the true children of Abraham, believing God could do what God promised, even if it was impossible.

The church is far from perfect. It is in fact badly compromised. The chief mistake the church has made has been in trying to baptize the empire, trying to somehow make violence and oppression fit into the message of Jesus. It was a terrible mistake and it continues to plague us to this day. The good news for us in North America is that we have the freedom to assemble, the freedom to practice our religion of choice and the freedom to speak our minds. Even my TV guru would probably not get end up getting tortured to death as Jesus did, however many people might want her to be. She might just die in the ratings.

But there is a cost, even in our free society, to going against the flow of your family or your community or your culture. And if you don’t have any weapons with which to fight back except love and forgiveness, you will be vulnerable to those who freely use whatever weapons they can find. You could lose customers for you business. You could get cut out of the will. You could be socially ostracized and isolated. You could be demonized, all your personal faults and shortcomings publicly trotted out to discredit you.

The cross is the uncrossable chasm between the ways of the world and the ways of the kingdom of God. The biggest mistake the church ever made was trying to cross that chasm. Whenever the values of the kingdom are backed by violence of any kind, however seemingly legitimate, whether it be the violence of warfare or of economic oppression, the cross of Christ has been abandoned.

Many in the world-wide church would still be happy to accept the poor, non-violent, forgiving Jesus as long as he stays out of politics and the economy. They’d be happy to limit his importance to heaven and keep him out of this world. They’d be happy to make him a private matter and keep him out of issues like warfare and business where his impossible demands are truly ridiculous. They’d be grateful if he had the good grace to stay in the tomb, and not keep coming back to confront us with the insanity we call reason, the injustice we call workable, the oppression we call fair trade, the violence we call peace-keeping.

But he won’t. He hasn’t. He’s alive.

Impossible.

Amen.