Genesis 22:1-14 Psalm 13
Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:40-42
We call our Holy Bible, the inspired word of God. We call it revelation. Many Christian like to treat the Bible as their possessing the correct meaning or interpretation. I would like to see it as revelation which means that within language, we have an unveiling of meanings for our lives to help us please and obey God.
As I have read the Bible, and not pretending that I could have been there when it came to it textual form, I read it for unveiling of meaning and promotion of what the wholistic health of salvation means for us in our lives.
As foundational as the story about the sacrifice of Isaac is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, for me it represents a story from the pre-historic era when people came to realize that God is not a God who requires human sacrifice in some cosmic justice system. A substituted animal was allowed in the sacrificial system because people needed the sacrifice of physical life in how they perceived a cosmic system of justice.
The Psalmist and the prophets wrote that God didn't need or want the blood and sacrifice of animals. By the time Jesus had died on the cross, it came to be understood that God did not desire death but life. Sacrifice as a universal principle of the behaviors of living for each other and for God is something that God was trying to teach humanity all along. And for St. Paul, the death of Jesus became the spiritual and mystical mode to die to oneself and be initiated into the way of being a living sacrifice.
One can easily see in St. Paul's writing to the Roman church the basis for the 12 Step Program analysis of addiction. Paul understands sin to be addiction. Sin is the force of habits formed by repeatedly doing wrong things, and the habits can get so entrenched that they put a person in the state of slavery known as addiction. The 12 Step people cite an encounter of grace with a higher power to help them interdict their bad habit and become empowered agents able to build one sober moment at a time to reform one's behavioral habits.
Paul used the "Instrument" metaphor; all facets of our personalities are instruments which can be employed for wickedness or for righteousness. The event of the grace of Christ in being able to die to selfish self in the power of the death of Christ, also means to ride the power of the identity with the resurrection to a new free agency, to attain the freedom to make new choices of righteousness.
One of imbalances in spiritual practice in the church is that we make salvation a very private and individual things. We regard sin to be a very individual thing. But the individual is also a member of a larger corporate body of people.
The well-known psychiatrist Carl Menninger wrote a book entitled, "Whatever Became of Sin?" And he was not so much concerned about individual sin; he wrote about corporate and social sins. He wrote about the things that are done in the name of the group, for which each individual does not have to take individual responsibility. Racism is one such social sins which has remained in various forms since the lack of full inclusion of Black persons into the full promise of the American ideals after the bloody end of the practice of slavery. The forty acres and a mule promised to Black persons was never fulfilled and Andrew Jackson overturned completely the practice.
We like to revert to individual responsibility and salvation and totally down play and discount the effects of social practice which does not give equal chance and equal opportunity to everyone in our society.
As a society we need to repent of our social sins and we need to have our social practice be transformed to the causes of righteousness in finding strategies of opportunity and justice for everyone.
What is the outcome of the transformation of personal capacity and social capacity to righteous practice.
The Gospel words explains it best with a wonderful word. Welcome. What if everyone in our country, state and local neighborhood could feel like they are people who are welcomed, in the name of all of us. Jesus said when we welcome each other we are welcoming him. And welcome and being welcomed is the self-reinforcing reward.
Let us not give up on the possibility for the hospitality of welcome becoming a delightful reality for the Black people in our country as we pray that all of us together will commit ourselves to the practice of mutual hospitality.
The Eucharist is the declaration of the practice of the hospitality of God in Christ. Sitting at the table of hospitality is the expression of our aspiring prayers that such experience of welcome can come to all of us, all of the time, and all together.
In our country today, we pray that each of us will be instruments of the welcoming love of Christ and it be received by people as the kind of welcome which they want and need to receive for their dignity.
Let be in the welcoming ministry of Jesus Christ today. Amen.
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