Three weeks ago Bishop Shaw told us that God is a risk taker.  He also told us that, as we are created in God’s image we are also risk takers. In both our Old and New Testament lessons this morning we are shown examples of God as a risk taker. In the story known as the binding of Isaac, God speaks directly to Abraham and tells him to sacrifice his heir, his son. What a risk!  In the Gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that he, God’s son, is going to be sacrificed. That is an ultimate risk! Jesus then goes on the issue the call to each of us to follow him, to become his disciples. In doing this Jesus is telling us to take risks in order draw close to Him, close to God.   But what risks? How do we know what risks God wants us to take?  We take risks in our lives all the time. But what guides us? How do we take risks that enhance our relation with God and advance the cause of God’s kingdom? There are risks in our personal lives every day.  As a Parish we will be taking a risk in the coming months in calling a new Rector? That is inherently risky, but how will we know which risk to take, which person to call? As a nation we are taking momentous risks. Will our choices move us closer to God?  How do we hear God speak to us? It is said that God always speaks in ways his people can understand. In the Old Testament God often just spoke to his people plainly and directly and personally, as with Abraham. In the New Testament Jesus, true man and true God spoke directly to his disciples and others. We live in a different time. We live in an the “communication age.”  How does God speak to us today? Does God send e-mails? Not to me. Scripture, however, provides a basis for understanding how God speaks to us today. 

In our reading from Genesis 22 God spoke clearly to Abraham, calling him by name he said, “Abraham.” Abraham spoke back. “Here I am.” Nothing out of the ordinary. God and Abraham had been speaking directly to each other for decades. But, first a little about Abraham, who you may remember made the cover of Time Magazine last year on the occasion of the publication of Bruce Feiler’s inciteful book simply titled Abraham.  When we first meet Abraham in Genesis 12 he is already 75 years old. God speaks to him then for the first time and asks him to take a risk.  Abraham is in the 20^th generation after Adam and Eve and God sees in him a way to make his third start in his relationship with humans.  Adam and Eve fell by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and God became displeased and sort of absented himself for 10 generations. Then he chose Noah to restart his relationship with humans. All except those on the ark were destroyed and God planned to start over with Noah, but Noah preferred the bottle to God. He became a drunk. Again God absented himself for ten generations and then he found Abraham. In Genesis 12 God poses that risk to Abram (his initial name) “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” God asks Abram to take a big risk. To leave everything and move to some undisclosed location and start life over. But with that risk comes a promise. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all of the families of the earth shall be blessed.” But how will God make of him a great nation. He is seventy five and childless. Twenty four years later God asks Abram to take another risk. At the age of 99 God speaks to Abram and says, “No longer shall your name be Abram but your name shall be Abraham (which means father of nations). I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you. And I will give you, and your offspring after you, the land of Canaan.” This time the promise came first, then the demand. “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between you and me.” So Abraham circumcised himself, without even the benefit of Novocain, and circumcised all the males including slaves in his household. The sign of the covenant with Noah was a rainbow, as we heard last week. Now the sign of the covenant has become circumcision. The covenant has become more personal. And then God tells Abraham’s wife Sarah that she would have a child in her very old age and she laughed at the premise of that promise. That child, circumcised on the eighth day was Isaac whose name means he laughs, an answer to Sarah’s earlier laughter. Isaac would be the heir of God’s promises to Abraham.  

In our reading this morning God asks Abraham to do something outrageous and, to us unthinkable, an abomination. God said to Abraham, “Take your 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 will show you.” Without a second thought Abraham took Isaac and a couple of servants and firewood and set off to do what God had asked. What do you suppose Isaac was thinking? He knew they were going to make burnt offering.  Isaac finally asks “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” He must have been getting nervous as he watched Abraham build an altar and arrange the firewood. Finally it became clear. Isaac was placed upon the firewood and bound to the altar.  We are not sure how old Isaac was but he was somewhere between his late teens and thirty years old.  Did he struggle? Then just as Abraham took the knife and is about to cut Isaac’s throat, God spoke to Abraham through an angel. “Do not lay hands on him.” Abraham had passed the test, he showed that he was totally obedient.  Abraham then looked over his shoulder and saw a ram caught in a thicket. He unbound Isaac and sacrificed the ram.  In many depictions of this story in Christian art the ram is positioned in the thicket much as Jesus was on the cross. 

Why would God take such a risk, testing Abraham as he did? One possibility arises out of God’s want to be in a relation of love and closeness with his creation. Remember that his previous two attempts at such a relationship failed.  Adam and Eve fell out of that relationship by eating the forbidden fruit. Noah fell out of that relationship by preferring strong drink to the love of God. Now God is making another attempt, but he is probably not sure that Abraham is any better than Adam, Eve and Noah and though he desperately desired to relate through love to humans he had been burned badly and so devised this extreme test of Abraham. Abraham passed the test and God continued the covenant with his people, albeit with some ups and downs, through out the Old Testament. 

For many Christians  the story of the binding of Isaac  prefigures the sacrifice of Jesus. But there is more to it than that. Abraham was asked by God, beginning at the age of 75 to take risks. God spoke directly to Abraham and he moved his family to a new land, circumcised himself and his household and finally was willing to even sacrifice his son Isaac, just because God told him to and because Abraham and God lived within a  relationship of love. Abraham exhibited, what we have come to call, discipleship. Abraham accepted that call to discipleship through his obedience grounded in a relationship of mutual love with God. And because of that  Abraham became the father of the “tribes of the world” and he was given the very fertile kingdom of Canaan for his own people. 

God no longer speaks so directly, personally and clearly to most of  his people. At least not to me and those I know. But God still speaks to us. God still wants us to take risks which bring us into a closer loving relationship with him. How does he do that and how do we hear him? In our reading from the Gospel of Mark this morning Jesus first tells his disciples “the Son of Man (Jesus) must undergo great suffering.... and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This is the consequence of God’s love for his people, his desire to again be in close and loving relationship with his people. In return for God’s love, Jesus asks his followers enter into discipleship. This involves taking risks in our lives and in that risk of discipleship we move closer to the love of God. Jesus said in our reading, “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.”  Here Jesus is not necessarily talking about physical life and death but rather gaining one’s life spiritually, moving more deeply into the love of God, through losing ones earthly participation in what he then calls “this adulterous and sinful generation.”  Those who do not follow will not be recognized  “when Jesus comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”  But those who take up discipleship will be recognized and rewarded as was Abraham by living within the love of God. 

Knowing which risk to take requires that we be in the relationship of discipleship with God, with Jesus Christ. That sounds good, but it is pretty vague. How does that actually work? I could let myself off the hook with the old chestnut “God works in mysterious ways.” That’s what my mother would say. But let me try to do better.  In the Baptismal vows that we take or others take on our behalf, we promise to “seek and serve Christ in all people, loving your neighbor as your self.” When asked later in the Gospel of Mark by the scribes “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Discipleship is based within the unbounded love of God and neighbor. Within that relationship of discipleship with God when we are presented with risks we need to ask ourselves which choice moves us into a deeper and more loving relationship with God.  Then through the power of the Holy Spirit we know which choice that is. In this time when Christ has risen and the Holy Spirit is present we are able to enliven this love in our daily lives through unbounded, wasteful, shameless love of God and by recognizing Christ in all people, in our neighbors and loving them as ourselves. When we are living, permeated in God’s love and returning it abundantly, when we take the right risks within that relationship of love, they are existentially sound and pleasing to God and in taking them we move ever closer to God and God moves closer to us. 

Paul, who often writes in syntax and grammar that make the meaning difficult to glean, in our reading today from his letter to the Romans  speaks clearly and beautifully of that love and its power to keep us in relationship with God. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

Lord take our hearts and set them on fire with your love so beautifully described by Paul, that being permeated with your love, the risks we take as individuals, as a parish and as a nation may be guided by the Holy Spirit. 

Lord take our hearts and set them on fire with your love that the risks we take will further your purpose and the glory of your kingdom here on earth and deepen and sustain our love for you. 

Lord take our hearts and set them on fire with your love. Amen

Return to Sermons Page