Consider the Cost
June 28, 2020, Year A: Proper 8
The Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle
Dallas, Texas
Allen M. Junek, Seminarian-in-Residence
+ In the name of the one, holy, undivided Trinity. Amen.
First, I want to commend Fr. Christopher, our clergy team, and our vestry for allowing a seminarian to preach who has yet to take even a single course in homiletics, but even more for their bravery in allowing a seminarian to preach who just completed a course in public theology and public policy!
But either way, I am immensely grateful to be able to think about these passages with you today. And with that, I want to share something with you that happened earlier this week.
A few days ago, I was on Facebook, and I made the mistake of reading the comments under a post by the national church about the importance of DACA, praising the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Dream Act. And in the comments — which, if you don’t know, NEVER read the comments — person after person was expressing their disappointment that their church would make such a political stance.
- One person said that the Church has become too partisan in recent decades.
- Another lamented that we couldn’t go back to the “good old days when religion and politics were kept separate.”
- Here an there were a few misplaced comments about our undocumented friends and neighbors, but at this point I had my fill and was done with Facebook for the day.
The Church is composed of people, all members of one Body, and if it’s about people, it’s political. For many of us our civil rights have been decided by the courts. Not freely given. Not assumed, without first having been taken. And I suspect, for so many to assume a clear demarcation between the religious and political spheres goes to show that their lives have not been politicized on the basis of what they look like, how they love, or what bathroom they use.
I have the privilege of the Rev. Dr. Shelly Matthews being my professor of New Testament and one interesting thing she pointed out last fall to her bright-eyed class of young seminarians is that the New Testament doesn’t use the word “church.” Now this might sound obvious, because we know that what would become the New Testament was not written in English. Rather the original word the Greek text uses is “ekklesia.”
- Paul writes to the Corinthians because he gets word of division in the ekklesia.
- To the Ephesians, he writes that Christ is the head of the ekklesia.
- And it is this same ekklesia that the author of Acts says Paul so furiously tried to stamp out before his conversion.
You see, calling something an ekklesia is significant because in the ancient world, the ekklesia was a political assembly. In Athens, a sizable portion of citizens came together–excuse me, male citizens–to make decisions regarding the polis, that is, the city, where we get the word politics from. So for Christ and the apostles to have instituted an ekklesia, a political assembly, was important and dangerous. And it remains so today.
That Christ and the apostles established the Ekklesia is no accident, and I think this is the case because we follow a politically minded God.
And let me explain what I mean by that. Going all the way back to Genesis, the first book of the canon, we learn of a God who called a man (Abram) out of his city, his homeland, to be a foreigner, even an immigrant. This same God rained fire upon the cities of the plain (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim) because these cities did not welcome migrants and had grown decadent at the expense of the poor and needy. Next in this saga, and in today’s lesson, we learn of a God who called a man up a mountain demanding the life of his son, only to seemingly change Their mind just in the nick of time. I want to present for your consideration today that the sacrifice of Isaac was a political act.
You see, in the world of the text, child sacrifice was not uncommon among Israel’s neighbors — that’s right, I’m talking about you, Phoenicians — and it was not altogether uncommon among Israelites during certain periods in their history either. I’ll spare you the details, but this was a religious act done for several reasons. Examples include success in battle, or for the health of the city and monarch, and so on. These are all political motivations for religious acts, especially considering that monarchs, upon their deaths, were often deified — becoming the very gods to this these sacrifices were made. So this leads me to wonder if Abraham half expected God to ask for his son.
Now, many of us know that Abraham has a history of talking back to God, and rather than rinsing Abraham’s mouth out with soap, God humors him, hearing him out. But here, unlike he did when God set God’s mind out to destroy the cities on the plains, Abraham obliges, without backtalk. I find this troubling, and I hope you do too.
Perhaps Abraham realized that he needed to keep this Deity happy, otherwise what would become of Abraham? Of his wife, Sarah? The wealth they had acquired? I think Abraham’s obedience to God is equally about keeping God happy, as it is abouting maintaining his status and affluence. In other words, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is both religiously and politically motivated. Yet in the sacrifice of Isaac, God’s political claim is much greater than whatever claim Abraham is making.
In God’s refusal of Abraham’s sacrifice — in God’s sparing of Isaac — God effectively is communicating to Abraham (and to us), “We do things differently around here. I am not like those other gods who strip children away from their parents. There is a new social order — a new politic — and it begins with you and your kin.” The day Abraham led Isaac up that mountain, something changed — obviously Abraham put the fear of God in Isaac (pun intended) but also, God proved to Abraham that he could trust God and that God was worthy of this trust.
In our baptismal covenant, we swear ourselves to this new way of doing things. We swear ourselves to the company of the prophets and apostles upon whom the Church, the community of this new order, is built. And above all, we swear to pattern ourselves, our lives, and our world after the God, in Abraham, who does not take our sons, but rather in Christ, gives the Son on our behalf.
We have come to call this “Good News” — and it is — but to the world, the old way of doing things, this is very, very bad news. You don’t have to be an economist to see that our society is driven by profit margins and the myth of productivity. In fact, we have so bought into this myth — this myth that our value is determined by our output — that some elected officials have suggested that during this pandemic we should consider sacrificing the elderly for the sake of the stock market. We will not be doing that here at St. Thomas, but don’t be fooled: the god of capital is much more bloodthirsty than the God about whom the prophets speak. Likewise (and this might ruffle some feathers) we don’t have to be sociologists to see the discrepancy between policing in black neighborhoods versus policing in white neighborhoods. Only one of these are labeled “high crime” and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of these it is; yet, do not forget that it was Caesar, the god of the state and the militarized enforcers of Caesar’s laws, that have killed the martyrs and, as our patron Thomas the Doubter, said, crucified both “Our Lord, and Our God.”
Last month I was on my “daily sanity walk” about my neighborhood, I passed a classmate of mine who was out walking with his spouse. We stood there, at least 12 feet apart talking for about 10-15 minutes or so–but, as someone who absolutely hates small talk, it felt like at least an hour. Towards the end of our conversation he shared with me that he was dissatisfied with the church he has been going to in Fort Worth. “They’re just so political,” he said, “When I go to church I don’t want to have to think about politics.” Now, if you know me, then you know I can be a little snarky. So there I was, standing in the middle of the road — hot, tired, sweaty — so without thinking, I said, “Well, I hope you never meet Jesus then.”
For a moment I was embarrassed, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I meant it. Following Jesus is political, and because of that, it contains a promise. In today’s Hebrew Bible reading, we find that same promise, and it is the promise that faithfulness will cost us something — perhaps something we hold most dearly. For a moment, it cost Abraham his son. You see, the gospel will demand something of us, and if it doesn’t, then it might not be the gospel. Perhaps it will cost us our comfort, our wealth, or both. It certainly will require us to wear a mask out of love and care for our neighbor, there’s simply no way around it. Perhaps, as Fr. Christopher so often reminds us, it will cost us our privilege. For a white person, like me, it might look like using our very bodies as shields between our Black siblings and those who would wish them harm, so that their voices might be heard. All I know, all we know, is that a great man once said, that it is in losing our lives that we will find them. In fact, it is because of this very man that we gather — to remember the life he lost despite the wealth and comfort he deserved; to remember the privilege he renounced; the life he forsook, and in this forsaking, he now lives, never to die again. May God grant us such a holy foolishness to believe this is true, and to live it, with reckless abandon.
Amen.
