The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 8, 2009

2 Lent – B
Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 8:31-39
Mark 8:31-38

Jesus asked Peter who Peter believed Jesus was, and Peter got the right answer. “You are the Christ,” he said, ”Messiah, the Chosen of God.” But when Jesus then told Peter that the Messiah must suffer and die, Peter’s faith did not follow his creed. Peter began to rebuke Jesus, telling Jesus that he, Jesus, must have the wrong answer.

Jesus then rebuked Peter. He told Peter that he was talking like Satan, and Jesus said that if Peter or anyone else would be his disciple, he must deny himself and take up his own cross and follow him, Jesus, into the unknown, that he must move on into the future in faith, and that whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for his sake and the Gospel will save it.

Jesus, in other words, began to teach his disciples what it means to be chosen of God. He began to teach them what it means to live by faith, what it means to live by trusting in the promise of God, not by trusting creeds or the answers or expectations of the world, not even the creeds or answers or expectations of religion.

Actually, the Scriptures had begun to teach this long before Jesus, at least as long ago as Abraham. You remember what God said to his ancient chosen one, Abraham. “Abraham,” the Lord said, ”take your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah and sacrifice Isaac there as a burnt offering.”

And Abraham did it, the Scriptures tell us. Without so much as the blink of an eye, Abraham obeyed. He gathered the wood and loaded the donkeys for the trip, and he took his only son Isaac, whom he loved, the son God had promised him as a blessing, and he bound Isaac to the altar and offered him to the Lord. Abraham then took out his knife and raised his hand to sacrifice his son, just as God had told him to do. And he would have, too, would have sacrificed him, if God himself had not told him to stop.

But why?

You remember how Isaac was born in the first place, how God had called Abraham when he was seventy-five years old, how God had called him to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees and move across the wastelands to Canaan, and how God had promised Abraham that his descendants would be a great nation, and how Abraham waited in Canaan for twenty-five years for God to keep his promise, and how, when Abraham was ninety-nine years old and Sarah was ninety, God told them that he would keep his promise now. Sarah would have a son.

And you remember how Sarah laughed at God’s making such a ridiculous promise to her at her age. “It was surely a joke,” she laughed, ”not a promise to be taken seriously.” But you remember how, sure enough, nine months later, when Abraham was one hundred, Sarah bore him a son, Isaac. And you remember how God promised that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky, more than Abraham could count.

Isaac, the child of God’s promise, was born in chapter 21 of Genesis. But no sooner do we get to chapter 22 than the rug is pulled right out from under Abraham. God tells Abraham to bind the promised Isaac and offer him on the altar as an offering.

What are we to make of this? What are we to make of Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac as a burnt offering because the One who had given Isaac to him in the first place told him to do so?

And what are we to make of that other Chosen of God, Jesus, whom God sent as Savior of his people Israel? What are we to make of Jesus’ saying that, contrary to Peter’s expectation, and contrary to all the answers and expectations of the elders and the priests and those who taught religion, contrary to all that, God’s own Son would soon be bound to a cross, where he would suffer and be killed?

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “it was by faith that Abraham offered up Isaac, even though Abraham had yet to receive what had been promised.” That’s the right answer. But what are we to make of it? What does that mean for us?

It means this, I think – that faith is something that doesn’t even begin until all our answers run out. Faith doesn’t kick in until all our explanations fail. Faith is what carries one along when all the doors are marked “No Exit” and all our answers make no sense.

A god who gives us all the answers to life is a god that’s easy to accept and believe in. But what about when all the right answers turn out to be unacceptable answers, dust and ashes?

Accepting the promise of Isaac was a joy for Abraham. But when, on what must have seemed to Abraham almost the very next day, God insisted on Abraham’s giving up the very blessing and promise he had just received, what then for Abraham?

And accepting the promise of Messiah? Well, that was hopeful and upbeat to Peter. Always had been. Made all the sense in the world. It was the right answer for Israel. But what about now? What about now when the promised Messiah, the Son of God himself, stands before us and tells us that he will be bound to a cross because he must suffer and die, and that if we want to be his disciples and live, we must take up our own crosses as well, contrary to everything we’ve ever expected and hoped for as good, upstanding Americans? What about now, this morning, when Jesus calls us to follow him in his sacrifice, in his suffering and in his death? What now, for us? Well, now is either when faith kicks in or now is the time to turn in one god and get another. Or time to forget God altogether.

Isn’t that the way it is?

It was with beliefs and creeds and lots of answers about God that C. S. Lewis wrote some wonderful and insightful books about Christianity. That was before he fell in love and bound himself to Joy. Before Joy came into his life, Lewis was a well-known writer, a professor at Oxford who spoke and wrote with eloquence about God, about faith and hope and love and about suffering as a means of awakening the soul. But Lewis spoke and wrote these truths with a knowledge that was almost purely intellectual. Rather than bind himself to other people, he had insulated himself from emotional involvement. Even in class, his students recall, Lewis’s life consisted mainly of asking only those questions to which he already knew the right answers. Intellectual certainty appealed to Lewis more than faith.

But in 1952, Joy Gresham, having read Lewis’s books, came to Oxford to meet him when he was a middle-aged bachelor. Despite Lewis’s initial reluctance, they became friends. But Joy’s life was as passionate and messy and complicated as Lewis’s life was cool and ordered and cerebral. When Joy moved into Lewis’s life, she brought emotional ties and, bound to him as he was to her, Joy taught the teacher what he had so long understood in his head but not in his heart – that love is not a four-letter word in the Bible, but a possibility of life.

As a boy, you may recall, Lewis had grieved hard when his mother died, and as an adult he strove to avoid such pain; he protected himself from personal relationships and bonds and from the grief they can bring. His friends were his mind, his books, and his answers.

But with Joy Gresham Lewis found that love was happening to him once again, and that he couldn’t fend it off with logic or writing or lectures.

Then, almost as soon as Joy happens to him, Joy is taken away. She is stricken with cancer and dies, and she is taken from him. And Lewis, who had more right answers than both Abraham and Peter together ever thought of having, was once again thrown big time out of the world of books into the world of pain and grief and faith. What was he to do now? What was he to do now that life hurt so much? Now that all his right answers about religion had turned out to be just that, answers, but not life? Now that love was more to him than a word in the Bible?

Before Joy, beliefs and creeds and answers had carried Lewis a long way. Now, with Joy gone, Lewis had to learn to live by faith, to live with only the promise of God to go on. Like Abraham. Like Peter. Like Jesus.

It is one thing, isn’t it, to respond to God’s promise of blessing. It is quite another to answer God’s call to go to the mountain of sacrifice in the region of Moriah with the blessing bound and bewildered in our arms and with tears in our eyes and grief lying heavy on our hearts, or to go to Calvary with Jesus with the question “Why?” on our lips. “Why, Lord? Why have you abandoned me?” That’s the question of faith.

I don’t tell you any of this this morning from deep personal experience. In fact, I’m going to pray later, and so are you, that God will not bring us to the test! That’s what we pray when we ask that God will “deliver us not into temptation.” Who wants it?

In the 17th-century translation of the Bible, the King James Version, chapter 22 of Genesis begins with ”Then God tempted Abraham,” whereas our contemporary translations say that “God tested Abraham” or “God put Abraham to the test.” That’s because in modern English the word “test” is closer to the meaning of the Hebrew than is the word “temptation.” So later this morning, when we pray “Deliver us not into temptation,” what we will mean, as the newer translations put it, is that we pray that God “will not bring us to the test,” or “to the time of trial.” Who would want it?

I speak this morning as Peter and C. S. Lewis spoke. I speak with the answers. I speak asking questions I already know the answers to, all the answers save the answer to one question – and that is, ”What will my faith be when the test comes and the sacrifice is demanded?”

And it will come. It will come for me and it will come for you, if not sooner, then at the hour of our deaths, when all our creeds fail and all our answers to life turn out to be no answers at all and we are left with only the promise of God to go on.

Lent is a time for facing facts. It is a time for moving into the depths of life rather than continuing to live on the surface of things. So I want to close with a story and a poem.

In the story, Pete Velander tells about the depths of life, about sin and the depths of sin, and about our need for reconciliation with each other, and with God. It’s a story that reminds us that sin is not a three-letter word in the Bible. It reminds us that sin, like love, is one of the realities of life.

“I remember the day I learned to hate racism,” Velander says. “I was five years old. The walk home from school was only about four blocks. I usually walked with friends. But on this day I walked alone. I was happy and had a whistle on my lips. Happy, but in a hurry, I decided to take the shortcut through the alley. Without a care in the world, I careened around the corner. Then I looked up, too late to change course. I had walked in on a back-alley beating.

“There were three big white kids. Probably they were no more than sixth graders, but they looked like giants from my kindergarten perspective. There was one black kid. He was standing against a garage, his hands behind his back. The three white kids were taking turns punching him. They laughed; he stood silently, except for the involuntary groans that followed each blow.

“And now I was caught. One of the three grabbed me and stood me in front of their victim. ‘You take a turn,’ he said. ‘You hit the nigger!’ they demanded. I stood paralyzed. ‘Hit him or you’re next,’ the giant shouted at me.

“So I did. I feigned a punch. I can still feel the soft fuzz of that boy’s turquoise sweater as my knuckles gently brushed his stomach. I don’t know how many punches there were. I don’t know how long he had to stand there, backed up against that garage. After my minute participation in the conspiracy, they let me go, and I ran. I ran home, crying and sick to my stomach. I have never forgotten.

“Thirty-five years later that event still preaches a sermon to me every time I call it to mind. One can despise, decry, denounce, and deplore something without ever being willing to suffer, or even be inconvenienced, to bring about change.

“If there is one thing that Jesus taught us, it was how to suffer with and for others, ”Pete Velander says. “Jesus walked the way of the cross. He taught us the meaning of suffering as a servant. [He taught us that love is not a four-letter word in the Bible, but a part of real life deep below the surface of things, a reality of life that makes it possible for us to choose to bind ourselves to another and to suffer with him, to stand beside him in his pain just because you love him. And he taught us that sacrifice and pain like that are redemptive. They bring new life.] Perhaps my first chance to follow that example,” says Pete Velander, ”came in the alley by a garage thirty-five years ago.

“I don’t know if that black boy from the alley grew up, or where his lives, or what he does today. I never knew his name. I wish I did. I wish I could find him. I need to ask his forgiveness, not for the blow I delivered, for that was nothing. I need to ask his forgiveness for the blows I refused to stand by his side and receive. [I need to ask his forgiveness so that I can live].”

Love is not a four-letter word in the Bible. And sin is not a three-letter word in the Bible. Love and sin are realities of life. The one binds us to others in their pain and suffering as well as in their joy, the other separates us from them, and kills us.

Like sin and love, forgiveness and faith and hope are not words in the Bible. Forgiveness and faith and hope, like life itself, are realities, gifts from God. Faith and hope are gifts God gives us which offer life in the face of things we cannot understand and do not know the answers to, gifts which sustain us when we happily turn some corner of life on the run with a whistle on our lips and are suddenly faced with the fact that all our right answers turn out to be no answers at all. Faith and hope are gifts which sustain us at those moments of decision when God calls us to sacrifice all our answers to life, gifts which sustain us when there is nothing left for us to stand on but the promise of God.

Now here’s the poem. It’s entitled “Stuff You Should Know.” Judith Hugg wrote it about life below the surface of things, about sin and love and faith, about Abraham and Jesus and C. S. Lewis and Pete Velander, and about you and me:

God is with you all the time,
but floods and death,
and earthquakes,
plagues and death,
and sickness,
government and death
still happen to the best of us
and also to the rest of us.

You will go through life phases ‘til you die,
and if you do it right
you won't remember who you were.

You will never be good enough,
and half of what you thought
was good enough at 20
will be displaced
when you are 40.

Parents die and best friends
change and move
and generally create heart havoc
when you think it’s all forever.

You almost always have a choice,
but sometimes
the best choices
feel the worst.

Not everyone thinks like you do,
and many think better than you,
and many think ill of you;
some think
not at all.

You can be bought,
and you will be amazed
at prices nowadays.

The things of which you’re most sure
will break your heart
and challenge all you know
and see and can’t see,
and leave you stranded
just to see
if you are really sure.

For a dream
to come true
takes more work
than you would ever dream
or might be able
to ever stand.

Reasons and answers
are not in the book
and you don’t have the rights to them.

Sometimes there are no stars
and the storm gets worse
and the wind
will tear your soul,
you’re sure.
And Jesus
is asleep in the boat.

You would be surprised
at all that really happened
in your life.


In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.