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is the Duncalf-Villavaso Associate Professor of Church History at 51视频.  Passionate about sharing the story of Christianity with his students, he is also active in Jewish-Christian relations.

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Good Friday Sermon 2013

Christ Chapel

Dr. Steven Bishop

         The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the most disturbing stories in the Old Testament.  Its matter-of-fact, stripped down narration heightens to its disconcerting contents.  Few words are spoken in the scene, the focus is on the action.  There is no reflection on the consequences or meaning of the action. We don鈥檛 know what any of the characters think or feel. There is not even a sign of a psychological or moral dilemma.
What we have is a knowing father who takes an unknowing child to an unknown place to commit an unthinkable act.  Even more troubling is that the God who orders this sacrifice is the God who, later through the prophets, will condemn child sacrifice as an abomination so vile its practice brings down nations. Some have tried to recast the story so that it has to do with something other than sacrifice.  But this is what it is鈥攖he words 鈥榦ffering鈥� and 鈥榢nife鈥� are identical to the sacrificial language of Leviticus and other portions of the Old Testament.  The killing intention is clear.
We are told that this sacrificial command is to be a test for Abraham.  But what kind of test?  We are not told, but a plausible explanation is that it is a test to prove that Abraham believes the promises God made to him can be fulfilled in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  Isaac is the child of promise, the one through whom progeny will grow and land will be settled.  Abraham passes the test by demonstrating through his actions that he trusts that the death of the promised child will not interfere with the fulfillment of the promise.
But this does not change the fact that the story is empty of human feeling.  Compare our other readings.  John鈥檚 portrayal of Jesus鈥� final hours of life moves us because of the dying attention Jesus pays to his mother.  A compassionate and devoted person is revealed by John鈥檚 description.  Even the reflections of Hebrews on Jesus鈥� sacrifice show pathos and attention to the human cost of suffering.  In stark contrast, the narrator of Genesis presents the story with what appears to be a sense of detachment.
Abraham鈥檚 lack of reaction is shocking.  His speech is sparse and without affect.  Contrast his reaction to the news that Sodom and Gomorrah would be destroyed.  Abraham leaps into a mode of pleading with God to be just.  鈥淲ould God kill the innocent with the guilty?鈥� he questions.  鈥淲ill not the judge of all the earth do justice?鈥� He pleads for the innocent and he appeals to God to spare the cities by basing his argument on the injustice of killing the innocent.  He doesn鈥檛 just ask but he pleads and bargains and keeps pressing that fewer and fewer innocent would need to be found in order to spare the city.  But here, in the matter of his own son, he is strangely, uncharacteristically and hauntingly quiet.
When I was in high school my Sunday School teacher once imagined out loud what Abraham鈥檚 demeanor must have been like.  My teacher was reacting to a made for TV movie that showed Abraham wandering alone in the hills of Judea, screaming out to God and agonizing over the command to kill Isaac.  My Sunday School teacher preferred the stoic Abraham, the one the text reveals, going about God鈥檚 business.  This Abraham refuses to question God鈥檚 command.  Sacrifice your child Abraham, just as you would a goat or lamb or bull.
Abraham is silent about the sacrifice of his son.  He does not reveal it to his servants who travel with them nor to Isaac.  The narrator too is silent about the sacrifice of Isaac.  We do not know if Abraham contemplated what he was commanded to do.  We have no insight into his mind, the very thing a narrator could give us.  There are no details to give us a hint about the feeling that such a commandment would inspire: no sights, no sounds, no description of the attire of the travelers on their journey, no description of the villages they passed through or by, nothing about the heat of the day or the coolness of the evening.  The monstrous event unfolds while everyone is unaware of its relentless momentum.  All we get from Abraham or the narrator is a determined silent march toward death.
A vision of pathos finally emerges at the end of the scene.  The knife is in Abraham鈥檚 hand ready to cut the throat of his sacrifice when an angel of God intervenes with a message from God.  Abraham has demonstrated that his adoration of God knows no limits.  Abraham, like the very texture of this text, was determined.  He was going to the bitter end to prove himself to God, even if it meant killing Isaac.  But Isaac was spared by the timely intervention of a heavenly messenger and all ends rather well.
In spite of its ending we are still left face to face with the brutality of human sacrifice.  The story ends well for Abraham and Isaac but it does not end well for countless others who are considered expendable on the altars of sacrifice for reasons as unclear to us as Abraham鈥檚 were to Isaac.  So often the victims are like Jesus or Isaac: innocent, young, obedient.
On this day, it does not end well for Jesus.  Isaac鈥檚 sudden and divine escape from the thirsty knife of sacrifice makes it startling that Jesus hangs upon the cross and heaven is silent.  There is no one to stay the executioner鈥檚 hand.  No voice from heaven to stop the savage butchery that is crucifixion.  And no angelic messenger to say 鈥測ou鈥檝e proven how far you are willing to go, your adoration of God is clear.鈥�  Abraham said nothing in the face of sacrificing Isaac.  God says nothing as Jesus dies upon the cross.  Today, when Jesus is dead, we are left, like so many who see brutality and death, who experience torture and abuse, who die as innocents, appalled and silent.
 

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… for he gives the Spirit without measure.

Measuring, weighing, analyzing, counting, verifying, certifying, judging…

So many of our common activities require us to figure things out.

We get the picture of day upon day spent in trying to arrive at conclusions that will allow us to live another day.

Of course, living another day seems to be a metaphor to those who are healthy and wealthy.

Only for the dying or those in greatest peril does the metaphor fail and become an existential question.

I am blessed to be back in the parish working a lot of hours right now.

At 10 last night I got a call telling me that a parishioner who befriended me about four years ago had finally passed away. Russell.

Thursday a week ago, I got a frantic call from his wife to come deliver the last rites of the church, so this was not unexpected.

And before that, he had taken his best effort to attend his last Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s.

Both my predecessor and I benefited from Russell’s unqualified love and support for us. He was always ready with a compliment, always quietly making funny remarks, always a great smile, firm handshake and an open look.

You will meet Russell in your parish: He’s not simpleminded in his praise, not just fair words without hard work, not just going to answer “yes” to every idea you have: But he is openly admiring of the ministry of the ordained in general, and HIS minister in particular.

Old School.

When his mind was beginning to be affected by the disease, he still would wake up to my visits, he still would make some smart crack, and he would seriously and openly tell me he loved me.

He and I plan on meeting again on the other side.

I bring Russell to you today for a measure of the phrase that was applied to Christ:

… for he gives the Spirit without measure.

The ordinariness of good people in your parish may seem to be overshadowed by the controversies and the conflicts between people and ideas that characterize our seminary life.

It may be the pursuit of intellectual discipline and inquiry that creates such an atmosphere for this community.

Such discipline and inquiry are needed to make us ministers in the church of God, disciples with some discipline to back up their role as those set apart.

Nevertheless, I remind you that the daily life of the parish is mostly a joy filled place where sorrow is real, but does not overcome. Darkness exists but it has not vanquished the light.

The Parish is where single, solitary sinners gather into a body of saints precisely made holy precisely because they love and support one another.

As a minister in the congregation, you are sent, you speak the words of God, and you assure all that Christ has given the spirit without measure.

You will affirm that the Spirit is alive and well in the Church today.

Every so often a saint will provide his or her testimony to the faithful body, and Russell did that as the end approached.

His serious and open affirmation of his trust in God was known to all members of the church.

He even made it a point on Easter Sunday to say good-bye to the Latino congregation with some help from me.

The community will gather Monday to celebrate the passing of Russell’s earthy remains into the ground, and to petition God to fulfill his promise and raise his spirit to the exalted place where Christ is.

We have seen He whom God has sent, who speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.

To this we testify, thanks to Russell and all the saints in God’s church.

Amen.

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            For centuries the Christian church has celebrated Easter Sunday as a joyful event.  For Christian believers all over the world Easter Sunday is the time to celebrate, remember, and glorify God’s victory over death manifested in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The empty tomb is empty only in so far as it does not contain the body of Jesus Christ.  But the empty tomb is full of God’s expression of reconciling love, radical forgiveness, and a new era of being in relationship with the world and with God’s people.
As a Christian believer I can say this because I lean upon the faith and tradition of the Christian church that has articulated, interpreted, and taught the joy of Easter for centuries.  However, for the women at the grave, the disciples, and all other followers, the joyous reality of Easter morning and the empty tomb was not so obvious.  The scriptural account of resurrection in Luke tells us about the shock and bewilderment of the women, and about the doubts of the disciples upon hearing the news from the women.  The empty tomb presents us with the real tension of the resurrection event: on the one hand the empty tomb shocks and bewilders.  On the other hand it fulfills God’s promise, grows hope, and revives memory.
When we joyfully celebrate the Easter season, we are not quite in solidarity with the sad, bewildered, and fearful women at the empty tomb.  Their joy over Christ’s resurrection is not spontaneous; their understanding is not automatic; and their mission is not clear, much less accomplished.  The angels by the empty tomb remind the women to remember what Jesus taught while he was still alive.  The reality of the empty tomb calls the followers of Jesus to remember the order of salvation, to proclaim it, and to hand it down.  It also challenges these followers to find a life-giving purpose to their lives after Christ’s death.  The empty tomb calls all followers of Christ-whether those at the empty tomb or those of us who remember and celebrate the empty tomb today-to an exclusive task: the task of imagining the shape of our faith.
When we lose a family member or dear friend to death, we are faced with an extraordinary task: What shape will we give to the memory, to the spirit, to the voice, and to the presence of the person who is no longer among us?  We may walk to this person’s house, to her or his bedroom, we see a bed which can still preserve the contours of the body.  We open our beloved’s closet, touch the clothes and shoes; we smell the fragrances and perfumes, we browse through the books, we feed the lonely pet, and we look out the window.  We see the street life as usual, and while all the material objects might still breathe life, the emptiness of house presses upon our minds the most painful sting of death.
Such an empty house and the empty tomb call us to a task: What shape will we give to our memories and to our faith?  When the body is not here to touch, to interact with, what shape will we give to the bodyless reality; how will we reconstruct the form, how will we put flesh on the spirit?  Jesus’ disciples are confronted by this task of reconstruction: they need to have a vision for their faith.  Before the crucifixion, Jesus was physically present with them, eating with them, healing them, journeying with them, even calming nature’s storms.  Thus, in a paradoxical way, the resurrection event shook the frame of their faith: Jesus died and was resurrected-and his body was gone!  And the empty tomb called disciples to construct a new frame of their faith, of their relationships and practices: a frame that will be able to hold their faith and the faith of the generations that come after them.
So, what is the post-resurrection frame of faith?  The passage from Luke tells us that there are three shapes for this faith: the shape of the body, the meal, and the catechesis.  When Jesus appears to his disciples in this narrative, at first their hearts are filled with fear at seeing the apparition of Jesus.  Jesus sees their fear and doubts and asks them to look at his arms and legs.  “Touch me and see;” he says “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”  The bodily presence of Jesus conveys to his disciples the first clue about the shape of their faith.  Faith in Jesus Christ is an embodied faith.  Jesus Christ encourages us to embody our faith in his body-in his flesh, in his wounds, in his arms.  The theologian Sally McFague reminds us that when we talk about the body of Christ in its spiritualized form only, we can easily forget the needs of our hungry, naked, or wounded brothers and sisters.  This means that we can easily ground our human interaction and relationships in the abundance of rhetoric.  And in doing so, we might create relationships that surf on the waves of theological language, but do not take a deep dive into the reality of brokenness, loneliness or estrangement from one another and ultimately from God.  The resurrected flesh of Jesus Christ denies us an escapist spiritualized faith.  The resurrected flesh instead grounds us in the embodied and palpable shapes of our faith.
The resurrected Jesus asks his disciples: “Have you anything here to eat?”  The disciples offer Jesus a piece of broiled fish.  Jesus takes it and eats it.  Having a physical need such as hunger, Jesus shares with his disciples and all human beings the real needs of the body.  As Christ’s body has become the universal body, it is morally normative: it shows us what hunger, thirst, pain, cold and heat feel like for us and for all other human beings.  The body is formational: it prompts us to offer each other practices such as hospitality, forgiveness, or sharing resources through which we can soothe and alleviate the various needs of the human body at large.  And the body is mystical: through breaking the bread as the fellowship of disciples with Jesus Christ, we join in the sacramental union with the Trinitarian God and foretaste the eschatological banquet of divine hospitality.
When Jesus eats with his disciples, he also teaches them.  He repeats his teachings and the interpretations of Mosaic law, prophecy, the order of salvation and makes his disciples understand.  He opens his disciples’ minds so that they can understand and indwell the Word of God.  In Luke’s account, the meal and the teaching are not two separate, disjointed functions of the body.  Rather, having a meal and teaching combine as a sacramental catechesis that initiates believers into the true understanding of the Word of Scripture.  The disciples’ or our understanding of the Word is not mainly the matter of intellectual assent; it is the matter of God’s transformative grace through the Holy Spirit.  The Trinitarian God dispenses God’s grace through the body and its life-giving rhythms such as proclaiming the Word, administering the sacraments, teaching, and other ministries.  The third shape of faith that Luke’s narrative offers is that of teaching, of handing down the faith as a practice that is always accompanied by instructing clearly, interpreting truthfully, and imparting faithfully in the paradigm of table fellowship.
The shape of faith that we are called to form is neither exclusively theoretical nor practical.  It is not exclusively what we think or what we do.  It has to do with forming the body, drawing the corporeality of faith so that it becomes a joined property at which everybody has an equal share.  It is about togetherness and creating the circle of faithful friends in Christ.  When we sit down together to have our meals in the Weeks Center, when we come together to this place of worship, when we sit together in the classroom, we embody and draw the shape of the resurrected body of Christ.  We experience, teach, and reenact the life-giving and life-sustaining beats of this body.
First, we experience the sacramental transcendence of this body in Eucharist.
Second, the meal and the Word unify us with creation and the commonly shared tradition of the Christian church.  Our shared meals become catechetical tools.  Through them we hand down tradition and cement our rootedness in divine praxis of sustenance and hospitality.
And finally, our practices such as chapel time, community hour, composting and recycling, pizza nights, or faculty picnics create embodied expressions of our faith.  Through them we reenact God’s act of befriending us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus will ascend to heaven but not before he tells his disciples that they are witnesses to the event of the resurrection, that they have a unique mandate to tell and proclaim the Gospel, and that they will be filled and equipped with the power of the Holy Spirit.  The resurrected body of Christ is embodied in the fellowship of disciples and fifty days later solidified as a spiritual and physical entity called the church.  The post-resurrection faith is God’s oikos-or house-in which we break bread together, share stories together and till the garden together.  Life in God’s house is a life abundant in the fullness and richness of our relationships with God, with God’s creation, and with one another.  Making God’s house full, however, begins with the emptiness of another space.  It is this reality of empty tomb that is bewildering, hopeful, and joyful because it calls us to imagine-as faithfully as we can-the life with and in the resurrected Jesus Christ in the household of God.

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