Church Unbound
June 29, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 13, Genesis 21:1-14
As I consider the passage that Vicky read from Genesis, I am reminded of the old bumper sticker, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” This is, to quote one commentator, an appalling story. From our perspective, both God and Abraham behave badly here – God for creating such an evil test, and Abraham for acquiescing without protest. How is it possible that Abraham wouldn’t argue with God for his beloved son, his only son, Isaac? Although Abraham is supposed to be the model of faith, his isn’t a passive faith – he has argued with God about other things. By the way, for those who have been following the saga each week as we have been learning the story of Abraham, isn’t it interesting that Isaac is called Abraham’s only son? We know that there is another son, Ishmael, whom Abraham has sent away with his mother, the slave-woman Hagar.
Nonetheless, at this point, effectively Abraham has one son, and when God asks him to go and sacrifice him, Abraham goes with nary a murmur. The response is as offensive to us as God’s request. This episode is known as the binding of Isaac, and if we’re not careful, we can get ourselves pretty tied up – we can get stuck asking what kind of a god tests people, and in such emotionally manipulative ways?
Yet, this is a great opportunity to take a serious look at how we read the Bible, how we interpret the Bible, how we let the Bible speak to us. This story is one I remember studying with my first Old Testament professor, Sister Dianne Bergant at Catholic Theological Union where I took 4 classes before starting fulltime at McCormick. Professor Bergant is the one who taught me to ask the question, “What did this story mean to the original hearers of the story?” and this story is the one around which she first made that point. Before we get outraged, before we get stuck, let’s first try to understand the meaning of this story at the time it was written.
Certainly throughout the Old Testament, and clear up to the time after Jesus when the early church was developing, there was a sacrificial approach to religion and spirituality – it was also a transactional approach –there was a sense among some of God’s people that God required humans to offer sacrifices in order to create earn God’s favor. In some cultures at the time Genesis was written, child sacrifice was still practiced. Perhaps the significance of this story that is so uncomfortable for us was actually a Good News story for folks at the time, as they heard in this story that the God of Israel is not a god who desires child sacrifice. Perhaps this is similar to the parables of Jesus, where the surprise twist comes at the end – God DID provide the sacrifice! This approach, looking at the history and culture of the period in order to learn what the story meant at the time is called the “historical-critical method” of studying the Bible.
Another tool that can aid in our understanding is a literary approach to the Bible – and please don’t confuse this with a literal approach. The literary approach to studying the Bible looks at the Bible as literature, and studies the form and language of a passage in order to dig deeper. For example in this passage, Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann points out that there are three pairs of summons and response, each followed by another action. [This is going to get a little involved, and you may find it easier if you follow along, the passage is in your pew Bibles on page 14.] In verse one, God summons Abraham and Abraham responds, then God commands in verse 2. In verse 7, Isaac summons, and Abraham responds, and the Isaac asks a question. In verse 11, the angel summons Abraham, Abraham responds, and in verse 12 the angel gives release. However, this set of three parallel structures is not perfect, for in the middle set, instead of summons/response/action, there is a fourth piece: Abraham’s response to Isaac’s question. I know this is complicated, but bear with me here. So from a literary perspective, the three segments of the passage are:
1 2 3 (4)
summons/response/command;
summons/response/question/response;
summons/response/release.
The response of Abraham in the middle set, in verse 8, disrupts the pattern. The scholars tell us that this helps us to know that verse 8 is a key verse – the structure of the passage, in which this verse is anomalous, was essentially highlighting the verse in which Abraham says to Isaac “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
So the literary study of the passage underscores what we learned from the historical-critical method: this God of Israel (unlike, perhaps, the gods worshipped by some other people) is not asking people to sacrifice their children.
So perhaps the full message of the story to the original hearers is: God is not asking people to sacrifice their children; but God IS asking people to trust him totally. God had given Abraham the gift of his son in order to secure Abraham’s legacy, and Abraham trusted the Giver of the gift rather than the gift itself. God has proven faithful to Abraham. Abraham has learned that he can trust this God.
As we look at this story using two different methods of understanding how the text spoke to its original audience, we now are better equipped to discern how indeed the text might speak to us as well.
In fact, another level of meaning in this story may be in the contrast between a transactional approach to a relationship with God and a covenantal approach. I have used these terms before in referencing therapist David Schnarch who describes two different approaches to relationships as transactional versus covenantal. In fact, throughout the Bible there is a tension between the transactional relationship with God versus a covenantal relationship with God. Or in the more familiar terms: law versus grace. In the transactional approach – we do things for God, such as offer sacrifices, or obey laws, and in return God grants us a relationship. The relationship is based on what we do. In the covenantal approach, God initiates a covenant with us (such as the covenant with Abraham) and the relationship comes when we respond to God's initiative. When we use the word grace, we are describing a relationship that comes from God's initiative: God loves us first, and we respond. The covenantal relationship is based on what God does. Instead of earning God's love, we receive and respond to it.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the challenges facing our church – not only Frame Church, but the PCUSA. Indeed, the challenges that Frame faces, which many of us perceive right now as being primarily financial, are just our version of the challenges facing the denomination.
The PCUSA loses 40,000 members a year – and this is very similar to other mainline denominations. We don’t really know how to compare to evangelical churches and the Catholic church, because most of them don’t measure membership in the same way we do. In any event, there are other challenges facing the national church – not only does it lose 40,000 members each year, but it is becoming less representative of the general population. Our denomination is 92% white in a country whose population is only 2/3 white. Also, the average age of a PCUSA member is almost 60, and younger adults feel less and less connection to a highly institutionalized and bureaucratic church such as ours. About two years ago we began a significant restructuring of our national staff – it resulted in some layoffs at the national office, but the denomination felt that it was necessary to face the financial and organizational realities.
This is some of the reason that our national church is working to develop a more flexible Form of Government, and is increasingly focused on mission – people get excited about learning from and helping other people in the world. We’re finding that more and more people want to participate in direct mission – and that’s a good thing! Those of us who have had the experience of being on mission trips know that they can be life-changing, and not just for youth. And increasingly, the staff of the national church, and of local congregations, finds that the role of staff is to help members participate in ministry themselves, instead of members contributing money to hire staff to do the ministry.
An example here at Frame is the way we are restructuring Christian Education and developing a new, more dynamic curriculum, along with some different approaches to classroom structure. We are hoping that the changes will make it easier for folks to embrace their own ministry as part of Christian Education, and that it will be fun, and feed the faith of the volunteers as well as the children.
Like Abraham, who was challenged not to cling to his son but to trust God, we Presbyterians are being challenged not to hold on too tightly to our familiar experience of church, but to trust God. Instead of relying on the forms and procedures that are familiar to us, we are being challenged to build trust in community and in God so that a more fluid and flexible organizational style can serve us better. Maybe there are lessons in the binding of Isaac that can help the church to become unbound.
At Frame, we have many of the same challenges as the church nationally, although we have some differences – for example, our median age is 50 rather than 60. We are younger than the national church. And rather than relying on rules and procedures, like many local churches our stability has been more in worship style, educational and organizational traditions. We’ve done church, Sunday School, and committees mostly the same way for a long time. Perhaps we need to hold less tightly to some of these traditions, and trust God to help us develop some new approaches. Maybe, like Abraham, we can learn that when we trust God, God is able to surprise us with unexpected solutions to our challenges. It may mean that we don’t do things exactly the same way all the time. Two weeks ago, Will played one of his compositions on the synthesizer, and accompanied it on the piano. Someone told me on the way out that they hadn’t expected to like it, but they did. That’s a great way to be – being open to being surprised by a new way of doing things. And newness can come alongside of our traditions – after all, we are buying this wonderful new piano, and we will enjoy its gifts in the music of the ages as well as in music that has never yet been heard. Tradition and innovation can be side by side…as indeed they often are in the story of God and God’s people in the Bible. God calls us to new ways of doing and being, as God nourishes us in the faithfulness of God’s ongoing love.
And by the way, let’s not fall for the mistaken idea that those who are older are always the most resistant to change. While it is sometimes that way, often older adults have learned that change is part of life. Some of our older members have learned to develop a remarkable capacity for change, and a resilience and adaptability that is not always shared by some of us who are younger. After all, we’ve just spent four weeks reading the story of Abraham who left his home at 75 and became a father at almost 100.
And the happiest members I know are those who have been able to hold the treasures in their lives loosely, trusting that God is able to make a new way when there is no way, understanding that God is still alive and well and working in the world.
In Biblical times, one of greatest temptations was idolatry – worshiping things instead of God. We, too, can have idols – in the fundamentalist camp, there can be an idolatry of the Bible, trusting the Word of God more than the living God. In our tradition, perhaps the greater temptation is to worship our worship tradition rather than the One we are worshiping.
It’s easy, when facing challenges, to become fearful instead of hopeful. The new Stated Clerk of the PCUSA, Rev. Gradye Parsons as he spoke to General Assembly last week said that when we look to the future with eyes of fear we often see no options, but when we look with eyes of faith we see hope. Just as the tension between law and grace, between a transactional faith and a covenantal faith, continued throughout the Bible, so too does it continue today – do we rely on what we do and have always done to give us a sense of God? Or can we trust that God is alive and well and able to provide an unexpected gift if we are open to it? The challenge is to trust God instead of ourselves, to have courage instead of being discouraged, and to be open to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing what God’s people have been called to through the millennia, in the words of the prophet Micah that were the theme of this year’s General Assembly: doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God.
Albert Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that created the problem. And there is an old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Sometimes if we are open to new ways of thinking, a challenge has within it the opportunity to respond in a new way. Let me give you a small example of that, which one of our members shared with me. Many of you may have experienced a door-to-door evangelist coming to your home. For most of us, that falls somewhere on the scale between a minor intrusion and a moderate annoyance. We send them on their way, perhaps grumbling a little about arrogance and self-righteousness. Well, the last time that the Mormons came to call at Steve and Ginny Carlton’s home, the Carltons thought about how little those young men get to relax as young men. They invited them in to play ping pong, and after an hour or so of playing, they shared lemonade and cookies with them and sent them on their way. Steve and Ginny were able to look at the young evangelists in a different way – instead of seeing them as intrusive and perhaps self-righteous or annoying, they looked at them as persons who were not getting to play and relax much. Steve and Ginny were open to a different way of thinking in that moment. It’s a small example, but it can be a good example to all of us.
As the PCUSA, or Frame Church, is facing challenges, what opportunities lie within these challenges? Maybe if we are open to thinking differently about the challenges we have, we can find opportunities for new life, for new ways to be creative, for new ways for God to move in, among and through us. This is really what is at the heart of resurrection, and it is the center of God’s story with the people of God from Abraham, through the Old Testament, and on to the present: God is the One who can make a way where there seems to be no way. God is the One who can bring life when hope seems unreasonable. Can we be open to the dreams of God for Frame Church and for the PCUSA? Let us be open to the imaginings of God, in this and every age. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 13, Genesis 21:1-14
As I consider the passage that Vicky read from Genesis, I am reminded of the old bumper sticker, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” This is, to quote one commentator, an appalling story. From our perspective, both God and Abraham behave badly here – God for creating such an evil test, and Abraham for acquiescing without protest. How is it possible that Abraham wouldn’t argue with God for his beloved son, his only son, Isaac? Although Abraham is supposed to be the model of faith, his isn’t a passive faith – he has argued with God about other things. By the way, for those who have been following the saga each week as we have been learning the story of Abraham, isn’t it interesting that Isaac is called Abraham’s only son? We know that there is another son, Ishmael, whom Abraham has sent away with his mother, the slave-woman Hagar.
Nonetheless, at this point, effectively Abraham has one son, and when God asks him to go and sacrifice him, Abraham goes with nary a murmur. The response is as offensive to us as God’s request. This episode is known as the binding of Isaac, and if we’re not careful, we can get ourselves pretty tied up – we can get stuck asking what kind of a god tests people, and in such emotionally manipulative ways?
Yet, this is a great opportunity to take a serious look at how we read the Bible, how we interpret the Bible, how we let the Bible speak to us. This story is one I remember studying with my first Old Testament professor, Sister Dianne Bergant at Catholic Theological Union where I took 4 classes before starting fulltime at McCormick. Professor Bergant is the one who taught me to ask the question, “What did this story mean to the original hearers of the story?” and this story is the one around which she first made that point. Before we get outraged, before we get stuck, let’s first try to understand the meaning of this story at the time it was written.
Certainly throughout the Old Testament, and clear up to the time after Jesus when the early church was developing, there was a sacrificial approach to religion and spirituality – it was also a transactional approach –there was a sense among some of God’s people that God required humans to offer sacrifices in order to create earn God’s favor. In some cultures at the time Genesis was written, child sacrifice was still practiced. Perhaps the significance of this story that is so uncomfortable for us was actually a Good News story for folks at the time, as they heard in this story that the God of Israel is not a god who desires child sacrifice. Perhaps this is similar to the parables of Jesus, where the surprise twist comes at the end – God DID provide the sacrifice! This approach, looking at the history and culture of the period in order to learn what the story meant at the time is called the “historical-critical method” of studying the Bible.
Another tool that can aid in our understanding is a literary approach to the Bible – and please don’t confuse this with a literal approach. The literary approach to studying the Bible looks at the Bible as literature, and studies the form and language of a passage in order to dig deeper. For example in this passage, Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann points out that there are three pairs of summons and response, each followed by another action. [This is going to get a little involved, and you may find it easier if you follow along, the passage is in your pew Bibles on page 14.] In verse one, God summons Abraham and Abraham responds, then God commands in verse 2. In verse 7, Isaac summons, and Abraham responds, and the Isaac asks a question. In verse 11, the angel summons Abraham, Abraham responds, and in verse 12 the angel gives release. However, this set of three parallel structures is not perfect, for in the middle set, instead of summons/response/action, there is a fourth piece: Abraham’s response to Isaac’s question. I know this is complicated, but bear with me here. So from a literary perspective, the three segments of the passage are:
1 2 3 (4)
summons/response/command;
summons/response/question/response;
summons/response/release.
The response of Abraham in the middle set, in verse 8, disrupts the pattern. The scholars tell us that this helps us to know that verse 8 is a key verse – the structure of the passage, in which this verse is anomalous, was essentially highlighting the verse in which Abraham says to Isaac “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
So the literary study of the passage underscores what we learned from the historical-critical method: this God of Israel (unlike, perhaps, the gods worshipped by some other people) is not asking people to sacrifice their children.
So perhaps the full message of the story to the original hearers is: God is not asking people to sacrifice their children; but God IS asking people to trust him totally. God had given Abraham the gift of his son in order to secure Abraham’s legacy, and Abraham trusted the Giver of the gift rather than the gift itself. God has proven faithful to Abraham. Abraham has learned that he can trust this God.
As we look at this story using two different methods of understanding how the text spoke to its original audience, we now are better equipped to discern how indeed the text might speak to us as well.
In fact, another level of meaning in this story may be in the contrast between a transactional approach to a relationship with God and a covenantal approach. I have used these terms before in referencing therapist David Schnarch who describes two different approaches to relationships as transactional versus covenantal. In fact, throughout the Bible there is a tension between the transactional relationship with God versus a covenantal relationship with God. Or in the more familiar terms: law versus grace. In the transactional approach – we do things for God, such as offer sacrifices, or obey laws, and in return God grants us a relationship. The relationship is based on what we do. In the covenantal approach, God initiates a covenant with us (such as the covenant with Abraham) and the relationship comes when we respond to God's initiative. When we use the word grace, we are describing a relationship that comes from God's initiative: God loves us first, and we respond. The covenantal relationship is based on what God does. Instead of earning God's love, we receive and respond to it.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the challenges facing our church – not only Frame Church, but the PCUSA. Indeed, the challenges that Frame faces, which many of us perceive right now as being primarily financial, are just our version of the challenges facing the denomination.
The PCUSA loses 40,000 members a year – and this is very similar to other mainline denominations. We don’t really know how to compare to evangelical churches and the Catholic church, because most of them don’t measure membership in the same way we do. In any event, there are other challenges facing the national church – not only does it lose 40,000 members each year, but it is becoming less representative of the general population. Our denomination is 92% white in a country whose population is only 2/3 white. Also, the average age of a PCUSA member is almost 60, and younger adults feel less and less connection to a highly institutionalized and bureaucratic church such as ours. About two years ago we began a significant restructuring of our national staff – it resulted in some layoffs at the national office, but the denomination felt that it was necessary to face the financial and organizational realities.
This is some of the reason that our national church is working to develop a more flexible Form of Government, and is increasingly focused on mission – people get excited about learning from and helping other people in the world. We’re finding that more and more people want to participate in direct mission – and that’s a good thing! Those of us who have had the experience of being on mission trips know that they can be life-changing, and not just for youth. And increasingly, the staff of the national church, and of local congregations, finds that the role of staff is to help members participate in ministry themselves, instead of members contributing money to hire staff to do the ministry.
An example here at Frame is the way we are restructuring Christian Education and developing a new, more dynamic curriculum, along with some different approaches to classroom structure. We are hoping that the changes will make it easier for folks to embrace their own ministry as part of Christian Education, and that it will be fun, and feed the faith of the volunteers as well as the children.
Like Abraham, who was challenged not to cling to his son but to trust God, we Presbyterians are being challenged not to hold on too tightly to our familiar experience of church, but to trust God. Instead of relying on the forms and procedures that are familiar to us, we are being challenged to build trust in community and in God so that a more fluid and flexible organizational style can serve us better. Maybe there are lessons in the binding of Isaac that can help the church to become unbound.
At Frame, we have many of the same challenges as the church nationally, although we have some differences – for example, our median age is 50 rather than 60. We are younger than the national church. And rather than relying on rules and procedures, like many local churches our stability has been more in worship style, educational and organizational traditions. We’ve done church, Sunday School, and committees mostly the same way for a long time. Perhaps we need to hold less tightly to some of these traditions, and trust God to help us develop some new approaches. Maybe, like Abraham, we can learn that when we trust God, God is able to surprise us with unexpected solutions to our challenges. It may mean that we don’t do things exactly the same way all the time. Two weeks ago, Will played one of his compositions on the synthesizer, and accompanied it on the piano. Someone told me on the way out that they hadn’t expected to like it, but they did. That’s a great way to be – being open to being surprised by a new way of doing things. And newness can come alongside of our traditions – after all, we are buying this wonderful new piano, and we will enjoy its gifts in the music of the ages as well as in music that has never yet been heard. Tradition and innovation can be side by side…as indeed they often are in the story of God and God’s people in the Bible. God calls us to new ways of doing and being, as God nourishes us in the faithfulness of God’s ongoing love.
And by the way, let’s not fall for the mistaken idea that those who are older are always the most resistant to change. While it is sometimes that way, often older adults have learned that change is part of life. Some of our older members have learned to develop a remarkable capacity for change, and a resilience and adaptability that is not always shared by some of us who are younger. After all, we’ve just spent four weeks reading the story of Abraham who left his home at 75 and became a father at almost 100.
And the happiest members I know are those who have been able to hold the treasures in their lives loosely, trusting that God is able to make a new way when there is no way, understanding that God is still alive and well and working in the world.
In Biblical times, one of greatest temptations was idolatry – worshiping things instead of God. We, too, can have idols – in the fundamentalist camp, there can be an idolatry of the Bible, trusting the Word of God more than the living God. In our tradition, perhaps the greater temptation is to worship our worship tradition rather than the One we are worshiping.
It’s easy, when facing challenges, to become fearful instead of hopeful. The new Stated Clerk of the PCUSA, Rev. Gradye Parsons as he spoke to General Assembly last week said that when we look to the future with eyes of fear we often see no options, but when we look with eyes of faith we see hope. Just as the tension between law and grace, between a transactional faith and a covenantal faith, continued throughout the Bible, so too does it continue today – do we rely on what we do and have always done to give us a sense of God? Or can we trust that God is alive and well and able to provide an unexpected gift if we are open to it? The challenge is to trust God instead of ourselves, to have courage instead of being discouraged, and to be open to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing what God’s people have been called to through the millennia, in the words of the prophet Micah that were the theme of this year’s General Assembly: doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God.
Albert Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that created the problem. And there is an old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Sometimes if we are open to new ways of thinking, a challenge has within it the opportunity to respond in a new way. Let me give you a small example of that, which one of our members shared with me. Many of you may have experienced a door-to-door evangelist coming to your home. For most of us, that falls somewhere on the scale between a minor intrusion and a moderate annoyance. We send them on their way, perhaps grumbling a little about arrogance and self-righteousness. Well, the last time that the Mormons came to call at Steve and Ginny Carlton’s home, the Carltons thought about how little those young men get to relax as young men. They invited them in to play ping pong, and after an hour or so of playing, they shared lemonade and cookies with them and sent them on their way. Steve and Ginny were able to look at the young evangelists in a different way – instead of seeing them as intrusive and perhaps self-righteous or annoying, they looked at them as persons who were not getting to play and relax much. Steve and Ginny were open to a different way of thinking in that moment. It’s a small example, but it can be a good example to all of us.
As the PCUSA, or Frame Church, is facing challenges, what opportunities lie within these challenges? Maybe if we are open to thinking differently about the challenges we have, we can find opportunities for new life, for new ways to be creative, for new ways for God to move in, among and through us. This is really what is at the heart of resurrection, and it is the center of God’s story with the people of God from Abraham, through the Old Testament, and on to the present: God is the One who can make a way where there seems to be no way. God is the One who can bring life when hope seems unreasonable. Can we be open to the dreams of God for Frame Church and for the PCUSA? Let us be open to the imaginings of God, in this and every age. Amen.