Abraham - The Legacy

Tonight I had the pleasure of giving the final reflection in the Lent Study Programme at St Martin-in-the-Fields. In this year's course we studied Meg Warner's book Abraham: A Journey Through Lent, where the final chapter considered 'Abraham - The Legacy':

Meg Warner writes in the final chapter of our Lent book that with Abraham's death, we are in a position to explore his legacy. Abraham grew during his life, both in maturity and in faithfulness to God. Over time he seems to have 'become' the special person God chose him to be. His obedience has long-term consequences which apply not just to Abraham and his immediate descendants but to the whole world. That is his legacy, and I want to briefly explore three aspects of that legacy now.

First, that the maturing of Abraham’s relationship with God included learning to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate and in argument with God, in order that Abraham could find God for himself and actually embody God’s characteristics and interests. We see this most dramatically in Genesis 18. 16-33 where Abraham argues and negotiates with God in relation to saving people who live in Sodom. God chose Abraham to “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”. Abraham throws that phrase, “what is right and just” back in God’s face in the course of their argument – “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” - “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?". Through their debate, God teaches Abraham to argue passionately for what is right and what is just. As he learns to do so, Abraham becomes more able to do what is right and just with his children and household.

The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, says that the legacy of this is that there then began that ‘dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years’; a dialogue in which God and human beings find one another. Only thus, he suggests, ‘can we understand the great dialogues [found in Scripture] between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job.’ As with those key figures in scripture, arguing or debating with God in prayer can also be a vital and vitalizing part of the maturing of our relationship with God.

A second part of Abraham’s legacy relates to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Here the key to understanding its legacy is the realisation that child sacrifice was the norm in the religions of the day and that the reason Abraham obeys God so unquestioningly may have been because, horrific and distasteful as it seems to us, there was nothing at that time unusual about the idea that the gods required human sacrifices in order to be appeased. The stories in Genesis about Abraham are foundational stories for the People of Israel. Imagine for a moment that you want to create a foundational story for a group of people that will change their understanding of sacrifice from the understanding with which they have grown up to one which is completely different from the religious practices of all the people that surround them. What kind of story might you tell? It may be that you would tell a story in which the person founding this new nation is taken all the way to the brink of child sacrifice and then dramatically and suddenly pulled back from taking that step.

The legacy of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the philosopher and anthropologist René Girard has suggested, is that Israel developed a system of animal sacrifice that continued until shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus’ crucifixion, Girard suggests, was both about God identifying himself with all the victims – the scapegoats – who have been sacrificed down through the centuries and also, because in Jesus God himself was scapegoated and sacrificed, the ultimate demonstration of the reality that, as Hosea first stated and Jesus then repeated, God requires mercy, not sacrifice.

The final area of legacy that I want to briefly explore is in relation to the common origins of Jewish, Christian and Muslim peoples; all descended, as Meg Warner reminds us, from one ancestor, Abraham. In his book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence Jonathan Sacks examines our common origins in the story of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac and gives us a reading of these stories which ‘is an ingenious and often moving turning upside down of a rhetoric of “chosenness.”’

Sacks notes ‘the extraordinary length to which the text goes to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God.’ He notes too that because of the way the story is written ‘our imaginative sympathies are with Hagar and her child’. ‘That is what gives the story its counter-intuitive depth’. Further, he notes that Isaac spends time at Beer Lahai Roi, the place of Hagar in the desert, and that Ishmael and Isaac are together when Abraham is buried. Finally, he makes us aware of a Rabbinic tradition based on these aspects of the story to the effect that Keturah, who Abraham marries after the death of Sarah, is actually Hagar returned to Abraham by Isaac as his wife.

Sacks concludes his chapter on the story of Ishmael and Isaac by saying this: ‘On the surface, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is about sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder by the younger. Beneath the surface, however, the sages, heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story: the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael. To be sure he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God.’

The futures of the two brothers diverge, ‘but there is no conflict between them, nor do they compete for God’s affection, which encompasses them both.’ ‘This reading becomes all the more powerful when, in the Midrash, it is extended to the relationship between Judaism and Islam.’ ‘Brothers can live together in peace’ this counter-narrative implies and Sacks notes that it perhaps ‘needed the twenty-first century, with its ethic and religious conflicts, to sensitise our ear to the texts’ inflections and innuendoes’ and to then grasp this aspect of Abraham’s legacy.

Through this Lent Course and Meg Warner’s book, we have seen Abraham undertake a significant journey. The whole way along the journey he struggled with his faith in the God who had chosen him so unexpectedly. At the same time as all of those struggles, Abraham appeared to grow in his responsibilities and in his relationship with God, so that by the end of the journey he had become the person God chose him to be – a true patriarch, whose faith and obedience had consequences for everybody around him. In a similar way, we can benefit from struggling with these three aspects of Abraham's legacy, as they constantly need claiming and reclaiming, both in our individual lives and our world, particularly because of the ways in which populism and nationalism are currently being used to shape politics and social structures.

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T. Bone Burnett - Every Time I Feel The Shift.

Turn our eyes from deficits to assets

Bible reading:

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live … and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

… I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them … I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.” (Ezekiel 37:1-14)

Meditation:

Ezekiel’s vision was for those in the whole house of Israel in exile who were saying, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ During Lent we actively choose to go into the dryness of the wilderness, together with Jesus, to be cut off in order to pray but there are also times and seasons in our lives and in our society when we think and feel that we are in a Valley of Dry Bones.

Politically, that may be how some of us feel following the unexpected election results of last year. We are, after all, witnessing the death of environments and species around our world. Poverty and conflict are forcing mass movements of people across our world and we are perhaps witnessing the death of compassion in response to those who are migrants. Austerity measures are increasingly causing crises in education, healthcare, prisons, and social care. ”Recessions can hurt,” David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu write in their powerful book, The Body Economic, “But austerity kills."

On a more personal note, ‘It may be that you are stuck in the depths of Lent, perhaps facing an impossible choice, or perhaps feeling that there are no choices open to you at all … You may simply be carrying the weight of an unfulfilled longing for something that appears to be quite impossible … Your longing may be for work, for home, for intimacy, for a child, or for a number of other things which you lack and without which life feels unpalatable or pointless.’ (M. Warner, Abraham)

Ezekiel speaks prophetically into these situations of sterility and death because that is where he and the People of Israel found themselves. His prophecy is a word of life; the Lord God will cause breath to enter the dry bones so they shall live. This shows us God working with what is there. There is no replacement of the dry bones and no move to a better valley. God starts with what is already there - the dry bones - so this is about recognising, valuing and using what we already have.

By contrast, our consumer society constantly tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside of our immediate community. Instead, we need to reweave the social fabric that has been unravelled by consumerism and its belief that however much we have, it is not enough. To recognise that in ourselves and in our communities we already have the capacity to address our human needs in ways that systems, which see us only as interchangeable units, as problems to be solved, never can. We can do unbelievable things by starting with our assets, not our deficits. We all have gifts to offer, even the most seemingly marginal among us. Using our particular assets (our skills, experience, insights and ideas) we have the God-given power to create a hope-filled life and can be the architects of the future where we want to live. (J. McKnight & P. Block, The Abundant Community)

Following Ezekiel’s prophecy further we see that the individual dry bones are joined together to form skeletons on which sinews and skin grow to form living bodies. This suggests that we can do unbelievable things if we do them together; if we start with one another’s assets not our deficits. Sharing our particular assets with others will foster a wider understanding and model the practice of hospitality towards others. By doing this we will find our way to becoming abundant communities that open space for generosity and cooperation.

We may well, in some senses, inhabit a Valley of Dry Bones personally or socially. All is not lost, however, as in Ezekiel’s vision by starting where we are with our assets and by coming together to release and share our gifts we find the power to create a hope-filled life and be the architects of the future where we want to live.

Prayers

O Risen Lord, be our resurrection and life. Be the resurrection and the life for us and all whom you have made. Be the resurrection and the life for those caught in the grip of sin and addiction. Be the resurrection and the life for those who feel forsaken. Be the resurrection and the life for those dying of malnutrition and hunger. Turn our eyes from deficits to assets and show us the gifts that will bring us to life.

O Risen Lord, be our resurrection and life. Be the resurrection and the life in us who know the good but fail to do it, who have not been judged but still judge, who know love but still live for self, who know hope but succumb to despair. Be the resurrection and the life for anyone anywhere who knows suffering and death in any form, and for Creation itself, which groans in travail. Turn our eyes from deficits to assets and show us the gifts that will bring us to life.

We pray for Easter eyes – Eyes that will allow us to see: Beyond death into life; Beyond sin to forgiveness; Beyond division to unity; Beyond wounds to beauty; Through the human to the divine; Through the divine to the human; From the ‘I’ to the ‘You’. And - enabling all of this – The totality of Easter energy! Turn our eyes from deficits to assets and show us the gifts that will bring us to life.

The Blessing

Be the resurrection and the life in the life we share and the fellowship we enjoy, that filled anew with the wonder of your love and the power of your grace, we may go forth to proclaim your resurrection life to a world in the grip of death. And the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Gungor - Dry Bones.

St Martin-in-the-Fields Lent Programme 2017 – Abraham: A Journey Through Lent

This year at St Martin-in-the-Fields, using Dr Meg Warner as our guide, we will be journeying with Abraham, through his challenges, doubts, false turns and unbelievable promises. Our Lent Study will begin on Wednesday 8 March with an informal Eucharist in which Meg Warner will be joining us to introduce her book, Abraham: A Journey through Lent, followed by simple Lenten supper and study groups.
The cost of the course is £15 which includes a copy of the book and the study materials (or £8 if you already have the book). Join us for the 6 week programme: March 8, 15, 22, 29, April 5, 12.

Week one – An Introduction with Meg Warner
8 March: The Call: Genesis 12.1-18 (Chapter 1)

Week two
15 March: The Promise: Genesis 15 (Chapter 2)

Week three
22 March: The Visitors: Genesis 18.1-15 (Chapter 3)

Week four
29 March: The ‘Other': Genesis 21.1-21 (Chapter 4)

Week five
5 April: The Choice: Genesis 22.1-19 (Chapter 5)

Week six
12 April: The Legacy: Genesis 26 (Chapter 6)

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John Coltrane - Spiritual.