Lament and the Lamb

Readings for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8 – Year A)

Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 13
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday June 28, 2020. Worship Program here. (Sermon begins at 21:48)

“The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23).

In our Scripture readings this morning, there is this movement from death to life, from morbid theology to self-giving life and love. The readings invite us into this movement, a movement that God invites us into every time we gather to humbly pray and worship him. In our prayer and worship, God urges to let go of our morbid theologies and our unhealthy ways of thinking in order to embrace Him and be transformed by His abundant life. May we heed this divine invitation now (today and every day) because there is way too much death; and there is also too much bad theology out there that seems to thrive on death. As the Rev. Dr. William Barber preached at the National Cathedral a few Sundays ago, “Accepting death is not an option anymore.” He was addressing our country, when he said, “America, accepting death is not an option anymore.” Accepting and adopting ways of thinking that feed on the death of others (who are vulnerable) is not an option anymore.

In our reading from Romans, St. Paul describes this movement from death to life, saying that the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life. And later on in Romans, he says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds (have the mind of Christ), and stop conforming to the death-dealing ways of the world.” Transform your life. Don’t conform to death. Don’t conform. Transform.

And how do we do this? We do this through prayer, the kind of prayer that we see in the Psalms, specifically this morning’s psalm (Psalm 13). Prayer that is brutally honest with God while also expressing to God a willingness to be changed and transformed by Him. The psalm this morning, which is considered a psalm of individual lament,[1] includes that quintessential question of lament, asked four times: “How long? How long will you forget me, Lord? How long will you hide your face from me? How long will we have to have our faces from each other, behind these masks? How long must I grieve? How long will we need to stay in lockdown? How long will it take until there’s a vaccine? How long will the wicked and corrupt continue to prosper?” These brutally honest questions of anger and despair are brought to God in prayer and laid before his throne. And then the psalmist says, “Pay attention, God! Wake up! Shed some light on this darkness or else death is going to win.” This is the kind of prayer that we are encouraged and even expected to pray during this time of crisis.

Anglican bishop N.T. Wright recently published a book titled God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury) and in it, he says that the proper Christian response during this time is to pray, to pray prayers of lament. Why? Because when we give ourselves fully to God through prayer (warts and all), God gives himself to us. That’s what C.S. Lewis says in his Reflections on the Psalms: God doesn’t command us to worship him because he’s insecure. God wants us to worship him because it is through worship that God gives Godself to us.[2] And that is how we can move from death to life. We bring to God our anger, our fear, our grief, our inner violence and our need to find someone to blame; and we give it all to God, even if that means blaming God, as the psalmists so often do. God can handle it. In fact, God seems to appreciate that kind of authenticity. In the Bible, God seems to prefer it when we give our bitterness and violence to him rather than spread it amongst ourselves (which only makes things worse); because it is only God who can truly take our bitterness and our need to blame and respond with healing love and forgiveness. It is only God who can receive our destructive and death-dealing ways and respond with life overflowing. At the end of the Psalm, the author has experienced a divine response that has transformed him and so he says, “My heart is joyful because of you. I will sing to the LORD for he has dealt with me richly” (13:5b-6). Through prayer and worship, God moves us out of death and into life, inviting us to let go of morbid theology in order to embrace his self-giving love.

And I see that same movement from death to life in this morning’s challenging reading from the book of Genesis, in which God puts Abraham to the test. Generally people assume the “test” is to see whether or not Abraham is willing to sacrifice the life of his beloved son Isaac in order to prove his complete devotion to God. Now there are indeed times when God expects us to make serious sacrifices and to let go of things that we feel like we can’t live without. That’s an important part of maturity and growth in Christ. However, as I read this Scripture in light of Christ, I see God testing Abraham not by calling him to sacrifice his son Isaac, but rather by calling him to sacrifice and let go of his morbid and death-dealing theology in order to more fully embrace God’s self-giving life and love. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Whenever God says or does something in the Scriptures that might appear to be violent and abusive towards innocent victims (especially children), we are called to read, mark, learn and interpret more carefully, creatively and prayerfully, in light of the Jewish prophets and Christ’s explicit mission to protect and liberate the oppressed. He makes that mission clear in his first sermon in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 4:18-19). That’s what he’s all about. And in case that’s not enough, just look at this morning’s Gospel when Jesus says, “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to a little one will be rewarded” (Matthew 10:42). Christ reveals God as a God who cares especially for the poor and the vulnerable and who gives them life and protection so that they can thrive.

So let’s look at this story as a movement from death to life. It’s helpful to understand a little bit about the Ancient Near Eastern world in which Abraham lived. During Abraham’s time, there were many Ancient Near Eastern cultures who performed child sacrifice because they believed that such a sacrifice pleased their gods. They essentially believed that their gods were bloodthirsty deities. But God called Abraham out of those cultures and set him apart to be holy (that’s actually what “holy” means to be “set apart”). God called Abraham to be transformed by the renewing of his mind and to no longer conform to the death-dealings ways and theologies of the world in which he lived. This morning’s story from Genesis is about Abraham realizing, just moments before doing something horrendous, that the true God is not a bloodthirsty deity who demands child sacrifice, but rather a God of self-giving life and love. Later on, the Jewish prophet Jeremiah makes this abundantly clear when he tells the people of Israel that child sacrifice is “a shocking perversion of all that he commands” (7:31). Abraham learned this truth in the nick of time and moved from death to life, like the psalmist in Psalm 13.

“And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” A ram, as we know, is a male lamb and the Lamb is the great Christian symbol of God’s self-giving love, which we believe to be revealed most fully in Christ the Lamb of God. So Abraham brings his death-dealing theologies to God along with a willingness to be changed and God responds by transforming him, by revealing himself as a God of life, and by giving himself to Abraham in the form of a lamb, thus saving the life of his son Isaac. Abraham lets go of his morbid theology to embrace God’s self-giving love.

And it was this foundational story of Abraham that inspired the people of Israel hundreds of years later, at the first Passover, when they were surrounded in Egypt by a deadly theology. Like their father Abraham, they knew God was not a bloodthirsty deity, but rather a God of life who gives himself to us in the form of a lamb to nourish us. So during Passover, while the threat of the “Destroyer” loomed over the streets of Egypt, the Hebrew families were actually enjoying a delicious lamb dinner with their beloved children. They were enjoying the lamb of God, whose sacrifice and whose blood saved the lived of hundreds (if not thousands) of young children, just as that ram caught in the thicket saved the life of Abraham’s son Isaac.

This is why Jesus Christ identified as the Lamb of God, the great symbol of God’s self-giving love, the One who rescues his people from death and deadly ways of thinking, the One reveals God as a God of life overflowing not a bloodthirsty deity; a God who cares especially for the poor and the vulnerable and the oppressed. This is why the Lamb is such an important symbol for us here at Christ Church. This is why I wear it proudly on my face.

We continue to live in a world of death today, a world driven by death-dealing theologies that come to expression in racism, violence, and greed. Our job is to pray, to lament, to bring our anger, our complicity, and our violence to God in prayer and to be renewed by the transforming of our minds as God responds by giving Godself to us; and as God empowers us to love, to nourish and to care for the most vulnerable; and as God moves each of us individually and collectively from death to life, as we continue to pray, day by day, and see more clearly that God has always been a God of life, who always responds to death in all of its manifestations with self-giving love, as a Lamb. Amen.

[1] Hermann Gunkel described Psalm 13 as “the model ‘lament of the individual’…, in which the individual components of the genre step forth most clearly.” Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen. Handkommentar zum Alten Testament (Gotteningen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1926), 46.

[2] “[F]or many people at many times the ‘fair beauty of the Lord’ is revealed chiefly or only while they worship Him together. [I]n Judaism the essence of the sacrifice was not really that men gave bulls and goats to God, but that by their so doing God gave Himself to men; in the central act of our own worship of course this is far clearer—there it is manifestly, even physically, God who gives and we who receive.” C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Harper Collins, San Francisco, 2017), 108.