Fifth Sunday after Pentecost - July 2, 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost July 2, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

One of the more important statements about God in my life is made by Fr. Robert Capon. Episcopal priest, food critic for the New York Times, and author of many wonderful books, Capon is an unabashed theologian of radical grace. He’s deeply suspicious of all the ways we like to place earning, winning, gaining, and self-improving our way to always already freely-given love of God. He’s suspicious, that is, of turning the path of discipleship into another instance of that with which we are all so familiar: getting what we think we lack by effort and will power.

In most other arenas of human endeavor, the one who tries the hardest, puts in the most hours, and combines that with a healthy dose of specialness, wins. The trouble, of course, is that when we apply this model to the Christian life, it creates a world where there are people who succeed, and people who fail. Where there are those on the top and those on the bottom. Winners and losers. Insiders and outsiders. Clean and unclean. Salvation is reserved for the elite spiritual athletes and the rest of us schleps are out of luck (or worse!).

Now as much as we say we would like to live a life with God that is not determined solely by our efforts, as much as we say we would like to believe in a God of unconditional love and freely-given grace who meets us as we are and where we are, the truth, if we are honest with ourselves, is that this picture of God, the living God of Holy Scripture, runs entirely counter to almost every assumption we have about how to navigate life. Capon puts it like this: “Free grace, dying love, and unqualified acceptance might as well be a fifteen-foot crocodile, the way we respond to it: all our protestations to the contrary, we will sooner accept a God we will be fed to than one we will be fed by.”

I spent a long time in the spiritual life held prisoner by a picture of Capon’s fifteen-foot crocodile God. Drunk on The Lives of the Saints and florid stories of ascetic feats and heroic sacrifices, I became despondent that my own feeble efforts would ever amount to anything. “I’ll never do it!” I moaned, until with Thérèse of Lisieux's help, I realized I never had to in the first place. In a letter to her mother Thérèse writes,

You know, Mother, that I have always wanted to be a saint. Alas! I have always noticed that when I compared myself to the saints, there is between them and me the same difference that exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and the obscure grain of sand trampled underfoot by passers-by.

Poor, weak, little tubercular Thérèse knew she could never climb the mountain, so she did the only sensible thing. She acknowledged her imperfection. She let Jesus be her perfect elevator. She sought only to be imperfectly little in Jesus’ perfect arms and let Him do the work. I will look,” she writes, “for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight. It is your arms, Jesus, which are the elevator to carry me to heaven. So there is no need for me to grow up. In fact, just the opposite: I must become less and less.” This is the little way of trust. Being childlike enough to let Jesus be the elevator. Saved from thinking salvation is a work we do, rather than sheer receptive openness to God’s work in us. And discovering perfection in the midst of imperfection–the holy smack dab in the midst of the ordinary.

Now, something similar, I think, is happening in our story from Genesis. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is one of the best-known stories of Holy Scripture. And more than a few people have been traumatized by it. It is literally the stuff of childhood nightmares. Abraham thinks he hears God say that he has to sacrifice his son Isaac—the Laughter of God–in order to prove his love. The party line goes that we have to put the love of God first–above all things–even those most dear to us, no matter the cost. So God takes the thing Abraham loves most and tells him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah.

But something else must be going on here. Is a God who demands human sacrifice a God worthy of worship? Is a God who asks us to plunge a dagger into a child’s breast and roast him over the coals a God you can trust? This is literally a God to whom we feed our children. That might work for a Goya painting, but it’s not an effective parenting strategy, and it can’t be what faith entails. So, if God doesn’t want human sacrifice, what does God want? How do we hear this story in such a way that the God who meets us in the night of our deepest need, who stoops and kneels, washes and feeds us comes to the fore?

The key, I think, is to hear the story of the sacrifice of Isaac as an enactment at the psychological level of what it means to live from the reality of givenness and gift. Fr. Thomas Keating was fond of talking about the development, or emergence, of a non-possessive attitude toward all of reality that is the fruit of prayer and the very nature of the self-giving love of God. There’s a reason that poverty of spirit is the crown jewel of the Beatitudes–poverty of spirit points us in the direction of receiving life, experience, and the other as gift to be celebrated, rather than possession to be manipulated and controlled.

The Irish philosopher and theologian Richard Kearney puts it this way: “Abraham has to lose his son as a given in order to receive him back as gift; he has to abandon Isaac as possession in order to welcome him back as promise. Isaac is not his (as extension, acquisition, projection) but another’s, another, an Other.” Kearney has his finger on something very important here. Abraham has to sacrifice his idea of Isaac as a possession in order for the gifted, laughing miracle of Isaac to be revealed, appreciated, wondered at, and celebrated. More than that, Abraham has to sacrifice his idea of a God who demands sacrifice in order to receive his life back as what it truly is: sheer gift.

One of the troubles with bad sacrifice is that it tends to solidify into a system where there is always someone performing the sacrifice. And they can build up quite an identity as a “performative sacrificer.” In Canada, we have a turn of phrase for such situations–”Get off the cross, we need the wood.” Stop building up your identity as a performative sacrificer so that we can all get on with fixing this porch rail. These are the real sacrifices in the Abraham and Isaac story: the death of Abraham’s notion of his child Isaac as his possession, the death of Abraham’s identity as heroic sacrificer, and the death of an image of God who demands sacrifice in the first place.

“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” the prophet Hosea says. “Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls,” asks the Psalmist, “or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High.” Thanksgiving is the natural response to non-possessiveness. Thanksgiving is the wow that arises from seeing and living from giveness and gift. Thanksgiving is what arises when the truth of “All things come from thee, O Lord. Of thine own have we given thee,” comes home to roost. Thanksgiving—stilled, quiet wonder as often as noisy, wordy praise—is what burbles up when we realize that even the thing we think we are sacrificing to God has been provided by God–hanging there like the ram by its horns. Sacrificer, sacrificed, and the one sacrificed to all fall away on Moriah, on the mountain of “The Lord Provides.” If you want to call it a “sacrifice” that’s fine, I guess, but none of it was ever ours to begin with!

Capon’s rapacious, fifteen-foot crocodile God who wants to eat us is actually what needs to be sacrificed, so that the Living God, the feeding God, the provisioning God, in whose mercy we can trust, can flower forth as a joyful heart. Perhaps we could even say that sacrifice itself is what needs to be sacrificed, so that our life can be received, welcomed, as gift. It’s really the simplest thing in the world–all we have to “do” is open our hands and receive. Like at the altar rail–open palms into which drops Jesus’ body. Open lips into which is poured Jesus’ blood. Not grabbed at. Not taken. Not pinched between the fingers. Received. Welcomed.

But we’re so practiced, aren’t we, at the being the doers, the actors, the sacrificers, the ones running the show and parading about as the heroes of our own stories. The very last thing we want as the doers, the actors, the show-running heroes, is to simply receive the freely given grace of God, to consent, open, and surrender to God’s unconditional acceptance like everybody else. What an affront to our specialness! But the movement–sometimes perplexingly painful, sometimes a joyful unburdening release–from being the doer to letting it be done us is the crux of it all. Not an easy thing to let oneself be fed. To welcome instead of win. To allow instead of acquire. To stop climbing the stairs and opt instead for Thérèse’s graced elevator–giving ourselves to Jesus and letting him take us to the Father in the Spirit. The ram–caught in a thicket by its horns–already provided. The only sacrifice the sacrifice of a non-existent crocodile god hungry for sacrifice.