The Dysfunctional Family of God

Proper 9A 2014
Grace Lutheran Church
Adel, IA
July 9, 2014

Our first reading this evening is part of a grand family saga that makes up the book of Genesis and, really, the whole Old Testament. You could call the family “The Adam Family,” or, more properly, “The Adam and Eve Family.” The saga, of course, began in the Garden of Eden and told of God’s creation and our human parents’ disobedience and sin. The story told of their children Cain and Abel and how that original sin was passed on to successive generation.

Generation after generation it continues until God chose Abraham and Sarah to give his blessing. God bestowed promises on them. In spite of their being childless in their 90s, God promised to give them an heir, a land, and descendants as numerous as the stars in heaven. God had begun to make good on the promises. They’d moved to the land of Canaan, which God gives them. And at last they had a son – an heir to receive his father’s worldly goods, but more importantly one who would receive God’s blessing.

We only know a few details about that son, Isaac.  Abraham had had another son with his slave girl Hagar when he and Sarah let go of their trust in God to deliver on the promise. Isaac was born when they actually sat back and watched God operate on his own schedule. And when Isaac finally arrived, he was the apple of their eye. Whether that means he was spoiled rotten, I leave it to you to decide. But you might have a clue in an old joke. Question: Why did Abraham sacrifice Isaac when he was twelve years old? Answer: Because a year later it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.

We can see that, although God wanted to be the center of their lives, Abraham and Sarah had made their son their be-all and end-all. In the story of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son, we see God taking away the gift that had become an idol and returning it in its proper place. Isaac couldn’t be the thing Abraham and Sarah bent all their energy toward. But when they demonstrated their trust, God delivered Isaac and provided a ram to be sacrificed instead.

At this point in the saga, Abraham was recently widowed, and Isaac had taken it hard and could find little comfort. Abraham knew he was so old that it was likely he’d be gone before long, too. He didn’t want Isaac marrying a local girl from among the Canaanites, because they worshiped a false god. So he sent his servant Eliezer of Damascus home to the kinfolk in Haran to find a wife for Isaac. The people who put together the lectionary leave out most of the fun details about the servant taking ten camels with him and that the woman who watered the camels would be the gal God intended.

When Rebekah’s brother Laban saw the gold nose ring and two gold bracelets the servant brought as a bride price, the conniving began. Laban saw the possibility of a nice haul for getting his dad to marry off his sister. And Rebekah proved to be something of a “B” from the tent next door, when she herself connived to get Isaac to bless her twin son Jacob whom she favored over her other first-born twin, Esau.

We begin to get an inkling of a major theme in the book of Genesis: people acting under their own power and assuming they have perfect knowledge to create their own future. Back in the Garden of Eden, God told Adam and Eve that they were forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The disobeyed God and refused to trust in what God had promised, so they were cast out east of Eden.

At the end of Genesis we find Isaac’s grandson Joseph who had become the second-in-command to the pharaoh in Egypt. His conniving brothers who had come to Egypt to beg for grain in a time of famine, now begged for Joseph’s mercy when they met the brother they’d sold into slavery. Joseph told them he couldn’t presume to know the difference between good and evil. They had done him dirt, but God actually used their evil for good and wound up saving the lives of thousands of people.

Genesis tells us that when you assume the high quality of your own judgment skills, things are bound to go bad. It’s because you place yourself in God’s position, a spot that God zealously guards as his own. When you act like your own god, even your best choices go bad. It’s why Jesus teaches in the Lord’s Prayer to pray against ourselves by saying “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

And how does this sinful, self-centered, self-deifying bent turn out in the Old Testament family saga? It’s not much different from the families on Days of Our Lives or, worse, The Maury Povich Show. Bickering. Back-biting. Illicit affairs. Bloodshed. Baby daddies. It’s all there in the Old Testament story of The Adams-and-Eves Family. Isaac’s wife Rebekah helps her son Jacob cheat, and Jacob has to run for his life. The other son Esau winds up as an outsider. Jacob’s own sons throw their brother Joseph down a well. They tell their father he was killed by wild dogs, and they sell Joseph into slavery. Moses comes down off the mountain to see his brother Aaron has crafted an idol from the Israelites’ gold for them to worship. The great judge Samson loses his power because he’s in thrall to the enemy woman Delilah. King Saul sinks into out-and-out paranoia. King David forces himself on Bathsheba and has her husband killed when it appears there’ll be a baby on the horizon. And if none of that is bad enough, the Israelites, the people chosen by God, who are blessed to be a blessing to others, start chasing after what they think are gods who’ll give them what in their human wisdom they think they need. By the end of the Old Testament the Israelites’ kingdom has broken apart, their armies conquered, and the people who haven’t been killed in battle are carted off into exile.

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, once said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There’s not a single family among us that’s completely happy. Neither yours nor mine. We all have our quirks and characters. We all have baggage and brokenness that we work to keep from showing to the rest of the world. Look honestly at your family and you’ll know which category you fall into, happy or unhappy. And our forebears in the Old Testament are no different.

Though Tolstoy says we’re all unhappy in different ways, what we all have in common is the unhappiness that Paul talks about in the reading from Romans. He argues that we consistently get it wrong. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Sin dwells within me.” Paul means that we are so caught up in ourselves and in protecting our own interests that we constantly take control of life. We try to twist and change things to our own advantage. And ultimately we hold God accountable by our standards, which is something God wasn’t entirely pleased with when Job demanded an explanation for his woes. Even though we can talk a good line about being good Christians, our actions speak louder than our words. As Paul says, there is “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin.”

For all his good intentions and good works, Paul knows that all of it has a single foregone conclusion: the wages of sin is death. From the first bite of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God has known the outcome of our fruitless efforts. In this life, we won’t get out alive. Although the culture around us declares us to be autonomous, independent actors, who are the very solution to our problems, exerting our free will and choosing to take control of our lives is not the solution. The Independence Day we celebrated less than a week ago is just a tiny bit of freedom from tyranny compared to the release we need from the tyranny of sin that runs roughshod through our days.

There’s just no escaping the power of your own will. How can you ever simply choose to not be you, to not act as you do, to not have the history you have, to not create the wake you spread out behind you for others to water-ski over? Paul looks deeply at himself. He does what AA calls, a “fearless and searching moral inventory.” He sees himself coming up short – no different from any of his Old Testament ancestors. He’s at the end of his rope and at the end of his illusions. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” “Help me, God. I like to present myself as powerful, secure and in control, but I’m powerless, and I can’t escape. It kills me to say it. And it kills me to live with it. Rescue me.”

In our gospel reading, Jesus says something curious, but it connects with what we’ve been talking about. In his prayer, Jesus says, “I thank you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” What he’s saying is that our life-management initiatives and success strategies, and our self-continuity projects only get us in trouble. We look at the way our world is, and it doesn’t meet our standards. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.” We want God to be at our beck and call. We demand that God suit our preferences like some Facebook friend we can message when it’s convenient or unfriend when they post something that challenges our politics or lofty good taste.

So Jesus is grateful that God’s power isn’t revealed to the powerful. They’d just abuse it. But Jesus revels in bestowing God’s almighty and eternal mercy on the mess-ups and failures, the middle school nerds, on the girls-gone-bad, on the bankrupt and the bereft, on the scatterbrained and the slipshod, on the broken, on the sinful, on those who know the frailty of this body of death, on those who hope against hope that someone will rescue them. These are the ones who have ears to hear. No, we are the ones he comes for. We are the infants, unable to stand on our own, dead meat but for a caring hand. We are the people who are ready to get what Jesus has to give.

And boy, does he ever have something for you. He says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Do you hear that? All things. Including a judgment of mercy, forgiveness, deliverance from sin, death and the devil, salvation, and eternal life. It’s all in his hand to dole out. And it’s his good pleasure to deliver it to you, deserving or not. He makes the most gracious invitation to you: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Oh, how tired the Israelites must have gotten of their family saga over the thousands of years that are the Old Testament. Oh, how weary of himself Paul was, with all his striving toward excellence in his purpose-driven life. Oh, how close we are to the grave – closer every day – and how hard the slog is for us. Oh, how sweet it is to have a Lord who makes the criteria for your salvation not your actions, your intentions, or your careers of failed good works. Oh, how free it is that he makes his own death and resurrection your gate into a new life. You’ve been living your life with strings attached, maybe even cords, ropes, or cables. But Jesus cuts through it all. He slices through the Israelites’ long history of faithfulness, through Paul’s body of death, and through your own attempts to justify yourself before the rest of the world and before God. And he says, “Well, that’s all over now. The Old Testament that is your own history is done now. I have a New Testament to give you, a new and last will and testament. I’m giving you myself. I’m giving you everything God graciously has in store for you.”

In 1518 Martin Luther, whose name this congregation bears, said, “The law says, do this, and it is never done. But the gospel says, believe this, and it’s done already.” The world around you says, “Do this. Be this. Act this way. Accomplish this.” And it’s never done. Your history bears it out. But Jesus says, “Trust me. I’ve got it all in hand. And I’m bringing it all round right.” And it’s already done. Ain’t nothing to do, there’s just Christ to trust. Given how my own past has gone, it’s the only option I have left. And I don’t even have to choose it, because it’s already been given to me. And when the burden of Jesus’ freedom and faith is placed on me, all I can say is, “It’s like toting air. Give me more. Lay it on me.” Amen.