Sermon – To Life

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 - I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

Psalm 22:22-30 - O offspring of Israel; all you of Jacob's line, give glory.

Romans 4:13-25 - The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

Mark 8:31-38 - "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

My wife and kids are sick this morning, at least they claim to have colds and couldn’y come to church. But maybe it is because I told them I was going to do this:

[Singing]

Father Abraham had many sons

Many sons had Father Abraham
I am one of them and so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.

That is a wonderful old camp song and fits in well with our lessons this morning from Genesis and Romans. In fact, it fits in so well you might even think that Paul wrote the words. But of course, if Paul had written this campfire song today he would have used inclusive language and sung it something like this:

[Singing]

Father Abraham and Mother Sarah
had many sons and many daughters
Many sons and many daughters
had Father Abraham and Mother Sarah
I am one of them and so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.

Abraham and Sarah started the great nation of Israel and part of the point that Paul’s making is that we are a part of the Promise, the Covenant that God established with Abraham and Sarah, and their descendants, for ever.

The essence of the Covenant is two-fold; it can be boiled down to two basic components. First, God promises that God will be God and that Abraham and Sarah’s descendants will be God’s children. The second part has to do with nationhood – community. The children of Abraham and Sarah will always have a nation, a community to belong to. Belonging and relationship are the two essential components of the Covenant, the promise God establishes with Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. The Covenant is about community and that the community will always have God, God will always be present in the community.

This is Good News of the Highest Order

Paul is saying in the letter to the Romans that this Covenant, this relationship was reckoned to Abraham by faith. In other words, it was not about blood-line. Abraham and Sarah were the first, their parents were not Jews, Abraham and Sarah were the first. And Abraham and Sarah were before Moses, before the Law. So, Paul’s point is that if God can reckon this relationship because of their faith, their absolute trust in God to fulfill the promise, then God can do the same for us (even if our parents were not Jewish, even if we don’t follow the Law as strictly as the Pharisees, even if we weren’t circumcised). It is by our faith and God’s grace that we are made a part of the Covenant, that we too are reckoned as descendants of Abraham and Sarah.

[Singing]

I am one of them and so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.

The truth is that nothing’s more exciting than a wedding and the prospect of descendants. In our wedding service we pray for children and we say things like, “...that they may be blessed in procreation, care and upbringing of children.”

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of seeing my favorite musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” I say that with a bit of humour, because I’m not much of a musical-lover. When I say it’s my “favorite” musical I’m really thinking, “there are other musicals?”

Now my favorite part is when, at the curtain-call, Matthew Cuthbert comes out and it turns out he didn’t die at all… Wait a minute… that didn’t happen… maybe there are other musicals!

There is a scene in “Fiddle on the Roof” when Reb Tevye agrees to let his eldest daughter be married to the butch, Lazar Wolf. To sort of seal the deal they drink a toast, “to life!”

[Singing]

To life, to life, l'chaim.
L'chaim, l'chaim, to life.
Life has a way of confusing us,
Blessing and bruising us.
Drink, l'chaim, to life!

My favourite couplet in the song is:
[Singing]

May all your futures be pleasant ones,
Not like our present ones!

But this song isn’t just a drinking song. It is not just a bunch of men in a tavern singing and drinking. It is a theological statement. I don’t think this verse is in the movie version, but it’s in the stage play and it is kind of like a creed, a theological statement, it elevates the scene from a drinking song to a question of what is believed about God:

[Singing]

God would like us to be joyful,
Even when our hearts lie
panting on the floor.
how much more can we be joyful
When there's really something
to be joyful for?

To say that God wants us to be joyful is to make a theological statement, but, given our Gospel lesson today I have to wonder if Jesus helps. Does Jesus really help God’s hope that we be joyful when he tells us to, “take up our cross”?

Now, to anyone who thinks that the Bible is to be taken literally, here’s a perfectly place for showing that Holy Scripture is NOT to be taken literally.

Jesus is not telling us to head on down to our local Crosses-R-Us store and buy a big old honkin’ wooden cross – and take it our to the trash heap – because that’s where they crucify people and nail ourselves to the cross. This isn’t to be taken literally.

The death of Jesus was a horrible thing, it was unjust, and cruel, and truly unbelievable: unbelievable that humans could stoop so low as to commit such an awful degree of pain and suffering on another human being.

But the story of the death of Jesus Christ is not really about his death, even though the bulk of the Gospels tell of it. Over 1/3^rd of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – over 1/3^rd of the Gospel describe the Passion of Jesus Christ, the events leading up to his death and his death. But even so, the story of his death is really about his life – the things he taught and said. It’s about how he lived.

If all we knew about Jesus is that he died on a Roman cross – well, so what? He and thousands of other people died in exactly the same way. And that week-end was a time for the Jewish community to celebrate their liberation. No wonder the political and religious leadership were nervous. It seems unlikely that only three people were crucified that week end. Probably hundreds were. Jesus was one of many put to death in such a torturous manner.

He was put to death because of the way he lived, that’s the point of the story, it is about how he lived, what he did, how he healed, what he said, what he taught. It is because of all of this that both the political and religious authorities wanted to silence Jesus and conspired against him and had him crucified.

It is his life, the way he lived that resulted in his death and that lead him to the cross.

So, the commandment, “take up you cross” is not a call to martyrdom but a call to life, L’chaim!

[Singing]

God would like us to be joyful,
Even when our hearts lie
panting on the floor.
how much more can we be joyful
When there's really something
to be joyful for?

To life, l'chaim! We are called to life – to abundant life, to find joy in that most precious gift given to us by God – our very existence, the live God has blessed us with.

The Church, the building we’re in, the part that you’re sitting in is known at the nave and from that word we get words like navel and navy, having to do with ships. You can see many church building in the Maritimes built by people whose day job was building ships and the ceiling looks like the hull of a ship.

Now I grew up near Halifax harbour and I tell you that the boats that were built for tooling around the harbour are very different from the ships that came in from the sea, from the ocean. Those big ships were not built for the harbour, they were hard to manoeuvre around the harbour, they were built for the ocean, and they were built for storms.

And now I’m no longer talking about this building or ocean-going ships, because it is the people, you and me, that really makes up the Church, the body of Christ. Remember that nursery rhyme, “open the doors and there’s all the people.” That’s the Church, we’re the Church.

Just like the ships we are not built for tooling around here once a week, we were built for the ocean, for life, for going out there into the world and expressing the source of our joy, the very thing that give us reason to celebrate our very existence, that by God’s grace:

[Singing]

I am one of them and so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.

Amen.