Psalm 139
Len Scales
July 23, 2017

A couple times a week, I make a detour through Prospect Garden. It’s my favorite spot on the University campus. I eagerly await the tulip blooms in the spring, and enjoy seeing the colors and textures change as the summer plantings grow.

My love for gardens, in part, comes from my great Aunt Nora. When she and my great uncle, Dr. John, lived in their Spartanburg home, they held garden parties in July at dusk every year. They would have 20 people over one evening, 12 another. Probably 100 people in total every season would arrive with folding chairs in tow to wait for darkness to fall. Always frugal, Dr. John would hand-pack ice cream parfaits in plastic cups that he would reuse for the entire season (maybe longer?).

It was always fun to visit them in July. The occasion for the gatherings were very simple—it is the season Evening Primroses bloom in South Carolina. Tall shoots of green carry delicate yellow flowers that open not for the light, but for the darkness. The blooms unfold before your eyes as night settles in.

Eagerly anticipating darkness is largely foreign to our experience in the modern, western world. Artificial light dispels darkness not only inside our homes, but also outside our apartments and along our streets. If an area is not well-lit at night, we are encouraged to avoid it, we peer around a dark corner apprehensively, walk a little quicker, call a friend, and lock the door as soon as we are inside.

Darkness has largely become synonymous with something we avoid, fear, or fight against.

This close association of darkness with evil, or at least lack of good, supports institutional racism and white supremacy. Even, if only, in our unexamined language and subconscious reactions.

What if we, like the Psalmist, knew God to be in both the light and the dark?

We might be surprised that “Surely, the Lord is [even] in [that] place.”^[1]

“Because the sun had set,”^[2] Jacob rests from his travels, lays down his head, and dreams. Jacob dreams of God telling him that he and his family will be blessed in order to be a blessing. When Jacob awakes, he takes his stone pillow and sets up a memorial, saying, “Surely, the Lord is in this place.” Surely, the Lord was with Jacob in the darkness.

God shows up, even when Jacob does not expect it, in the middle of the night, on his way to claim an inheritance that was originally meant for his brother.

Throughout Psalm 139, God shows up as well, in the places the Psalmist would go looking for God and in the places the Psalmist tried to flee from God.

Surely, the Lord is with the Psalmist. Surely, the Lord is in the sitting place, the standing place. Surely, the Lord is from the east to the west. Surely, the Lord is from mountain top to valley. Surely, the Lord is with the Psalmist and with us.

Even so, we do not always have the same assurance of God’s presence as Jacob did or as the Psalmist.

Throughout the first half of Psalm 139, we hear again and again how the Psalmist directly addresses God as “you.” It is a description of the Psalmist experience with God to God. The deeply personal interaction poetically relays God will accompany the Psalmist absolutely everywhere.

The Lord is familiar with all the Psalmist’s ways. God shapes the Psalmist behind and before. The Lord will travel with the Psalmist throughout time and location. The light and the darkness are God’s dwelling place, there is no difference to the Lord between the two.

What happens though when we encounter what feels like the absence of God?

We do not need to deny our experience or others, an empty wilderness feeling often occurs in the midst of deep suffering—at times of loss, betrayal, and confusion.

After acknowledging our experience, it is important to hear again though the stories of God’s faithfulness. These stories can be brought to us by objects that are catalysts to remembering. It is also important to remember these stories and make meaning of our experiences in trusted community.

Jacob understood the power of remembering—he setup a stone to mark the spot of his encounter with God and God’s promises.

Stones are used as memorials elsewhere in Scripture. Joshua has twelve stones taken from the dry riverbed of the Jordan. These rocks are set on end, like Jacob’s stone pillow, to mark God’s faithfulness. The stones serve as a witness to their children, to their community.^[3]

The Psalmist words are remembered, eventually written down, and read again and again as a witness of God’s presence that is as close to us as our very breath.

In this way the community has a reminder of how God has accompanied them.

This was not only helpful for the people of God then, but it is helpful for us now—to have symbols we return to again and again—the table, the font, a sung hallelujah.

We also need to hear the stories retold along with the objects, to have a trusted community that helps us make meaning of our experiences.^[4]

That is part of what Andrew and I are trying to create with Princeton Presbyterians. It has been especially evident during the evening worship service, Breaking Bread. We gather in Niles chapel weekly during the academic year to hold one another in prayer, to listen to Scripture, and to be welcomed to Jesus’ Table.

It is in that place that students are able to reconnect with faith when they’ve experienced rejection by religious communities after they came out as LGBTQ; others try on the language of Christian faith for the first time, being able to share prayer requests and consider Scripture. We gather in times of joy and times of stress. It is there we are able to honestly name the tragedies of life, and remember that God too knows the deepest of suffering.

Surely, the Lord is present in that community.

Surely, the Lord is present in this community too.

It is not only God that meets us in the hardships of mental illness, divorce, grief, and failure; community may meet us there too. And through this companionship of God and community, we are sustained to carry on, to be transformed, to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.

We practice remembering together in the light and in the darkness.

One of several contemporary voices seeking to recover positive associations with darkness is Barbara Brown Taylor, author, professor, priest. In her latest book Learning to Walk in the Dark, she encounters the dark in a variety of ways. At one point in her research process for the book, she goes caving. It is there that she contemplates the existence of the dark tomb in the resurrection story anew. You see, Jesus rose from the dead while in a dark cave.

Taylor writes,

As many years as I had been listening to Easter sermons, I have never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way. If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air.

Sitting deep in the heart of [a] Cave, I let this sink in: new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.^[5]

Reading Taylor’s account made me pause and consider too the darkness that was not only present at the cross but the darkness that was present at the resurrection.

Resurrection occurs in the dark. God meets the Psalmist in the dark. It is in the dark trusted community reminds us, “Surely, the Lord is in this place,” even, especially when we don’t feel it. It is in the dark Evening Primroses bloom.

^[1] Genesis 28:16

^[2] Genesis 28:11

^[3] Joshua 4

^[4] Nishioka, Rodger. “New Ways of Knowing for the NEXT Church” keynote delivered at the NEXT Church 2017 National Gathering (https://youtu.be/JlSV6BTurV4)

^[5] Brown Taylor, Barbara Learning to Walk in the Dark (Harper One, 2014) p.129

© 2017 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Andrew Scales
July 16, 2017

When I was a sophomore in high school, I played exactly one season of football, and I was very bad at it. I was a few inches shorter than I am now, and about twenty-five pounds lighter, which meant that I was essentially thrown around like a rag doll on the practice field. Some of my teammates were two hundred and fifty, three hundred pounds, and I had basically no hand-eye coordination. It became evident to me and everyone on my team very quickly that this was a bad idea.

For weeks, I went to every practice and ended up becoming a tackling dummy for the guys on the defensive line. I suited up for every game, and spent the whole time on the sidelines. I never got better, I never really learned the plays, I kept showing up and failing hard.

Halfway through the season, we had our usual Friday night game, followed by a 7 a.m. Saturday morning practice. I wasn’t quite sixteen yet, and so my dad would drive me over to the field. But on that Saturday morning, I sat in my dad’s car and broke into tears. Why am I still doing this when I don’t get to play? Why train, and get hit all the time, and put my best effort into it, when I just end up on the sidelines? I told my dad I wasn’t going to practice that morning, I wouldn’t be going to practice anymore at all. I quit.

My dad sat there for awhile and listened to me sobbing in the car, and then he said, “Andrew, you may not realize it right now, but this is a very important moment in your life. You made a promise to your teammates and your coaches that you would be there, no matter what. You have to finish this season; you don’t have to touch a football ever again after that, but you need to finish what you start. I promise you, you’re not going to do it alone; I’ll be there with you.” So I nodded, and wiped the snot from my nose, and we drove to practice.

Late in October, I suited up yet again for a Friday night home game. The air was getting chilly, the bleachers were packed with parents and schoolmates in their scarves and coats. Sometime in the first quarter, it started to drizzle a little bit. By the second quarter, the rain came down hard in icy sheets. Everybody in the bleachers started the familiar exodus up the steps to the gym to wait out the storm while the game continued on the field.

I was on the sideline, freezing cold in the rain. But when I looked out in the stands behind me, there was one person left. My dad was sitting there, holding his umbrella, nodding at me. Coach didn’t end up putting me in that night; in fact, I hardly watched the game at all. I just stood there, back turned to the field, watching my dad, my dad watching me, nodding at each other, understanding each other.

I think my dad thought he was teaching me the value of hard work, that if you try hard and practice, you’ll be rewarded with becoming good at something. But I didn’t get good at football, I never played again after the awards ceremony that year. I learned something else though: even though I tried and failed miserably, it didn’t change my dad’s love for me.

Jesus tells a story in Matthew’s Gospel, too, about following him as disciple, encountering failure, and discovering that we are loved beyond our ability to understand.

Jesus’ parable of the sower is frustratingly frank: failure is an inescapable part of the Christian life. His call to discipleship is not easy; it can be frustratingly hard. Sometimes bearing witness to the Kingdom of God takes root and flourishes; sometimes it doesn’t. But God is faithful still. That, Jesus explains, is how proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven works.

Let’s step back and get our bearings for a moment. Matthew writes that great crowds have followed Jesus throughout Galilee to hear him preach about the Kingdom of Heaven. It was so suffocating in the house where Jesus was staying that he heads out to the shoreline to teach in the open air. The beach gets too crowded, so Jesus climbs into a boat and his disciples push him a little ways off the shore. Everyone is waiting, watching, listening. This is Jesus’ moment to make his mark as a teacher, a Jewish rabbi who talks about the reign of God breaking into their lives.

Jesus begins with a story from their everyday experience: a sower scatters seed around in her field. The sowing does not go well: the more time passes, the more problems arise. Some of the seeds land on the footpath, and the birds get to them and gobble them up. A few seeds have a promising start and shoot up quickly, but the soil turns out to be shallow. The plants look good at first, but their roots cannot deepen to draw enough water. The little plants burn up under the pitiless sun before they can put forth a flower.

A few days pass, the growing season continues, and even more promising plants start to lose out to competing thorn-bushes. The sower either doesn’t have the time to dig out those nasty weeds, or she knows that doing so will uproot and kill both the good and the bad plants. So those plants don’t make it either; they end up stunted in the shadow of plants that are useless. So far, not so good. The count at this point is failure, failure, failure.

Can you imagine the sower going out into her field every morning at dawn, checking to see if her crop is still there? That bag of seed she scattered was probably all she had from last season’s harvest. There isn’t a Lowe’s she can go to and buy new seedlings if all the ones she started with die off, like Len and I have been doing with our herb garden this summer. This is the only option—this has to work; a harvest must come, or she won’t have crops to sell. She might not have enough to eat or plant next year. There’s more riding on these plants’ survival than we hobby gardeners realize. This is a matter of feast or famine, life or death.

But in some places, the soil is good, the seeds take root, and they grow up in spite of all the threats we can imagine. Some plants flourish and bring forth an abundant harvest. The sower will be able to eat, to sell in the market, to set some seeds aside for sowing in the new planting season.

As the sower puts her grain in the storehouse, the rhythms begin all over again with the same challenges as before. Failure, failure, failure, and yet… wildly abundant harvest beyond imagining. That’s the end of Jesus’ story. That’s what God’s Kingdom is like.

The folks who gathered on the beach to hear Jesus are scratching their heads; the disciples take Jesus aside and say they could use a little more explanation: “Come on, Jesus! Make it plain!” But Jesus has made it plain: love other people, knowing that we will fail, and trusting that God will make that love grow, even if it comes to fruition beyond our ability to see.

Sometimes the more we try to love people, the harder it can be to do so. For the past few weeks, Len and I have been meeting with about ten to twelve of the graduate students and young adults involved with Princeton Presbyterians for a summer book club here at Nassau Presbyterian Church. We’ve been reading Sara Miles’ book Take This Bread, which is about Miles’ experience of conversion to Christianity. Sara, who grew up without a religious tradition, has a powerful spiritual experience sharing the Eucharist during worship as a visitor at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church. But more than that, the book chronicles her continuing evolution as a believer as she founds a food pantry out of that parish in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Before she converted to Christianity, Sara lived as a journalist in Central America through civil wars in El Salvador and Central America during the eighties. She worked as a cook in various kitchens in New York City. She lived much of her life mostly unaware of what church was or why it mattered to people. And yet, somehow, in her forties, the experience of sharing in the bread and wine at Jesus’ Table, surrounded by fellow human beings who are both sinners and unfathomably loved by God, was this transformative moment that changed the course of her life forever. She discovers in taking that bread and cup that she was hungering, longing for something that she could not name, and she is stunned to find what she longed for was Jesus Christ.

Communion, the Lord’s Table where all are fed, inspires Sara to start a food pantry at her church. Much of the book focuses on Sara’s work running that pantry, attempting to serve anyone who comes without barriers to entry. And one of the things that impresses me so much about her writing is that she does not hide how frustrating it can be to love and serve other human beings.

There are times when she is startlingly honest about her failure to love folks who come to the pantry. Life at the pantry is messy, and she has bad, rotten days like everyone else because she’s in a bad mood, or because she’s fed up with the stresses of keeping a small non-profit afloat. Sometimes the supply of food runs short, and they have to turn hungry people away. Sometimes her own pride gets in the way of listening to people who disagree with her about how the pantry should be run. Sometimes she lets her work get in the way of life with her daughter, Katie, and her wife, Martha. There are failures and shortcomings and frustrations that bubble up in almost every chapter.

The book Take This Bread talks so much about failure, but at the same time it’s about the beautiful way God nourishes people through the Lord’s Supper. Communion happens at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church not just during Sunday services, but on the Friday afternoons when people line up to take home bags of rice, an armload of vegetables, a loaf of bread. God takes up ordinary human things like bread and wine, a food pantry, a gathering of neighbors who otherwise don’t know one another, and transforms them into a sign of the feast of the Kingdom of God. It’s a story about failure, failure, failure, and yet… wildly abundant harvest beyond imagining.

Jesus’ parable of the sower, and Sara Miles’ book Take This Bread made me realize this week how much of the Gospel is about God’s faithfulness and steadfast love beyond our ability to respond successfully. The disciples are the “good fruit” in this story, the ones who supposedly hear the word and understand. But as the story of Matthew’s Gospel goes on, the disciples try their best to follow Jesus, and fail spectacularly. The disciples! The people who knew Jesus best, and followed him everywhere from Galilee to Jerusalem, and preached alongside him, and healed crowds of sick persons with him, and fed five thousand with him. The disciples go all the way to the hill of the cross with Jesus, and abandon him when he needed them most. What hope can we have if we know the story of even the best disciples ends in failure?

I think the parable makes sense when we pause to remember that it’s Jesus telling us the story. The biblical scholar Ulrich Luz writes in his Matthew commentary that this parable can only be understood in light of the risen Jesus’ last words to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus says to them, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Jesus promises to be faithful in love, never to forsake us, even when we fail and fall short as his disciples. Jesus, who was rejected in his hometown, deserted by his friends, crucified alone in shame, stands risen from the dead in front of those same friends in Galilee, speaking a promise of steadfast love despite their shortcomings.

Yes, God has a way of doing something with works of love that turns the world inside out. Yes, friends, I’ll say it again another way: amid the struggles and failures and catastrophes of our lives, God brings the Kingdom into this world through God’s own steadfast love. The risen Jesus calls us to be faithful in loving our neighbors regardless of whether it looks like a success or not. And some of us may be a part of something that bears abundant fruit; some of us may struggle in serving others with little to show for it.

And the more we try to love people, as Sara Miles tried with all her heart to love people at her food pantry, the more we become aware of how we fail at trying to do so. The risen Jesus loves us just the same. Jesus calls again and again, “Follow me!” without condemnation. The flourishing is up to the living God, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

The freedom of a Christian lies in this: we persevere and fail, and yet there is a faithful God who welcomes us, even us, into the Kingdom life of joy, love, and peace. Anyone with ears, let them hear. Amen.

© 2017 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

Matthew 11:28-30
David A. Davis
July 9, 2017

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Quite a quote. A memory verse of all memory verses. When it comes to the words, the teaching, the promise of Jesus, it has to be near the top, way out front, a greatest hit. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. It’s the nectar of faith. The heart of the gospel. It goes right to the core. A fundamental. A basic. Right from the primer when it comes to life in Christ. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light. Iconic. Epoch. Seminal. Classic Jesus. “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

I’ve never preached a sermon on these verses, this quote from Jesus. That seems odd to me. I checked the Excel sheet that keeps track of all my sermons here at Nassau. No sermon on Matthew 11:28-30. I went back through my card catalogues of the first 14 years. No sermon on “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I’ve used it over and over again as an invitation to the Table. I’m sure I have read it as the scripture lesson in worship many, many times. It has certainly been a part of the scriptures that tell of God’s promise and comfort at memorial services and in cemeteries. But no sermon. No sermon on this remarkable, memorable, quotable text. It’s just kind of weird.

One could argue that there’s simply nothing more that needs to be said. You stand up. You read it. You say, “This is the Word of the Lord,” and you sit down. It more than speaks for itself. But I have preached Psalm 23 plenty of times. I have preached on “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” and “for God so loved the world” and “by grace you have been saved” and “faith without works is dead.” That gaggle of “hall of fame, say no more” verses. I bet I’ve preached them all. Not this one! “Take my yoke upon me and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for our soul.”

It can’t be that Davis just avoids tough scripture passages. Most of us don’t save Matthew 11:28-30 in our Bible memory file in a folder that says “difficult text.” Like that difficult passage in Matthew about the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus seeking help for her daughter. Jesus tells her, “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Or the more challenging parts of the parables in Matthew 25 when the bridegroom tells the late-to-the-party bridesmaids that he doesn’t know them. Or the servant who buried the one talent because he was afraid is called worthless by his master — who then orders that the servant be thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Or the Son of Man sending the goats at his left hand into eternal punishment because they didn’t care for him when he was hungry and thirsty and a stranger and naked and sick and in prison. This promise of Jesus etched in our soul doesn’t seem to fall into the “scripture parts to avoid” pile. And by the way, last week I preached the sacrifice of Isaac and the week before that it was Hagar and Ishmael being sent to the wilderness to die. So I don’t avoid tough passages, yet no sermon from me on “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Just too difficult? No. Nothing more need be said? No. It’s that when you read the rest of Matthew, when you read the rest of the gospel, Jesus never make it all sound so easy. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t make the life of discipleship seem all that light. You remember, don’t you? “…[U]nless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven… if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also… love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… you cannot serve God and mammon… enter through the narrow gate… for the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life and there are few who find it.” And of course, after the Sermon on the Mount and more than once in Matthew, Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

To use the language of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the extraordinary promise of Jesus about rest, rest for the soul, and an easy yoke and a light burden, it just seems contrary to, it bumps up against, it’s not consistent, it doesn’t resonate with the “cost of discipleship.” The cost Jesus so vividly describes throughout Matthew’s gospel. Bonhoeffer himself put it this way:

To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenseless, preferring to incur injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way. To see the weakness and wrong in others, and at the same time refrain from judging them; to deliver the gospel message without casting pearls before swine is indeed a narrow way. The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger of straying from it. If we regard this way as one we follow in obedience to an external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we shall not go astray.

That’s Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship.

Beholding Christ going on before. Believing the life of discipleship is not some kind of external command. But a life that is lived out with Christ who is within, Christ who is beside, Christ who goes on before. Beholding Jesus Christ going on before step by step. Or to use Jesus’ own image: being yoked. Yoking. The life of discipleship and being yoked to Christ himself.

I remember going to the church summer picnic as a young solo pastor. The picnic planners had decided to play some of those good, old-fashioned picnic games. So there were some relay races with teams that intentionally avoided families being together so that folks could get to know new people. Races like passing the apple from neck to neck, two people holding a balloon between them without using their hands and running down the way. As I watched people in unexpectedly intimate contact trying to win a race with balloons and apples in awkward places, I wondered why no one in seminary told me that good, old-fashioned picnic games might not be appropriate for a church function.

And of course, there was the three-legged sack race. Two young people frantically hop-scotched and promptly fell in a fit of laughter. Another couple tried to run fast but the sack quickly fell away like a beach towel that drops from someone running toward the ocean. But then, there were the two older folks. The two women up in their 70’s. Friends since before WWII. Their technique was slow and steady. With one arm they clung to each other, hanging on for dear life, and with the other hand they each held up the sack. And they didn’t run. They walked, with long, determined strides. Laughter, joy, love, it just dripped off them as they went. Step by step by step. With that embrace, they were kind of… yoked. They won going away.

It wouldn’t be until later in my ministry in that congregation that I understood that their lifelong relationship, and others in that congregation, had some of the same characteristics. Supporting one another when their husbands were in the war, raising their children, burying their parents, struggling when money was tight, losing a child, growing old, becoming widows, praying for one another, worshiping together, 50, 60, 70 years. Long determined strides, hanging on for dear life, helping one another when the stumbles came, step by step, beholding Christ Jesus, going on before.

Yoked to each other, yes. Even more, yoked to Christ.

Jesus never said that this life of discipleship would be easy. There is a cost. The rest, the rest for the soul, comes with his presence. The promise of ease and lightness is in Christ with us, Christ for us. Long determined strides in the life of faith and hanging on to him for dear life. Allowing his grace to sooth you, his peace to fill you, his strength to lift you, his love to wash over you. Rest. Rest for your soul. Step by step by step. Your steps and his. His steps are your steps. Your steps are his steps. Yoked for the life of discipleship. Yoked in the life of faith. Beholding Christ going on before. Yoked for service as his followers. Yoked to work for the kingdom of God.

The weariness comes from being tossed around in the world’s mixer of greed and selfishness and spite when you know full well Jesus’ path is one of putting others first and watching out for the most vulnerable and loving even those whom no one loves. The burden comes from believing deep in your heart his concern for the poor, his teaching that there are no longer strangers, his own bold embrace of those so, so different from him, and then finding yourself almost helplessly pulled down the world’s path of injustice, and hatred, and condescension.

The weariness comes when you understand yourself called by Christ to a life of forgiveness, and giving from what you have, and helping to make this world a better place, that his kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven, and yet finding yourself pretty much smothered by a culture defined by meanness, and winning at all cost, and respect tossed out the window. The burden comes as you and I are measured by how much we have, and how great we look and how better we are and how together we have it all. That burden, that weight is shoved on us until we pretty much believe it too, forgetting that his grace is sufficient, that his peace passes all understanding, and that while we were yet sinners, he died for us. The weariness comes from praying constantly for those who are sick and the grieving and the dying, seeing all too often the relentlessness of death and clinging to that resurrection hope that proclaims with his steps Christ stomps on the grave and leads to eternal life.

There are those times when every one of us is tired. And there are those long nights when the heart is heavy. But this weariness, these heavy burdens? The weariness and heavy burdens that Jesus is talking about? That’s the weariness that comes from doing his work. Doing the Lord’s work. It’s the cost of discipleship.

And Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

© 2017 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

Genesis 22:1-14
David A. Davis
July 2, 2017

Have you ever had one of those mornings? One of those mornings like Abraham, as in “Abraham rose early in the morning.” One of those early morning encounters with life that has little do with the time on the clock. One of those moments when the knot in your stomach is larger than the courage in your heart. An early morning when you’re not so sure whether your lips are about to offer God praise or curse, when the intersection of life and faith, question and understanding, assurance and doubt, hindsight and vision, when that intersection gets so crowded that you just have to shout. One of those undesirable spots when the call and cost of discipleship clash with the raw limitations of what it means to be human. You certainly can’t sleep, so you get up. Because it is “early in the morning.” And you find yourself looking deep into the mystery of God.

“Abraham rose early in the morning.” The psalmist assures us that “weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30). It is the writer of Lamentations who proclaims, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3). But this “early morning,” the early morning in this story of the sacrifice of Isaac, this “early morning” for Abraham, feels a lot different than that. “Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac.” You will remember in the chapter before here in Genesis, when Abraham and Sarah sent Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness, that day, that morning, started the same way. “Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba.” That was early in the morning.

“Abraham rose early in the morning.” Only two times in the Book of Genesis. The sacrifice of Isaac and the exile of Hagar and Ishmael. Both times “Abraham rose early in the morning.” When it comes to the reading for today, some interpret the action at sunrise as a kind of bold-print, literary, symbolic exclamation point that emphasizes Abraham’s faith and obedience. At the fresh start of a new day, Abraham sets out with a determination and clarity of thought and faith that is as sure and certain as the rising of the sun. Of course the reader of Genesis never learns enough about Abraham’s thought. There is never enough commentary to really know things like doubt, certainty, questioning, faith, despair, confidence. And this whole scene starts with “After these things, God tested Abraham.” The space between the lines in these stories is just too much. Way too much space when you’re trying to read between the lines. The careful reader, the faith-filled reader, has to yearn for more.

“Early in the morning” may not come for Abraham with the promise and the assurance and the gift of a new day. Perhaps there is a fuzziness to “early in the morning,” like the grey time when it is not quite light but it is no longer dark. Those moments when it’s not quite daytime and the dark of night is not yet finished. Abraham casting Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. Abraham being commanded to place his beloved son Isaac there upon the altar. It was early in the morning. There is a distinctive ambiguity about that kind of early morning, an ambiguity of life and faith, life and death. When the piercing light of day and the blinding darkness of night are right there together, just for a moment. “Abraham rose early in the morning” to encounter the ever-present, constantly-puzzling, sometime-heartbreaking, once-in-a-while-even-punishing mystery of God. It was one of those mornings.

Abraham! Abraham! The careful reader wants to pull Abraham aside and ask a few question. The horrified reader wants to know that Isaac is okay on the inside when all that trauma is done. The note-taking, connect-all-the-dots reader remains frustrated by the absence of Sarah and her now suddenly-lost voice. And every reader ought to want to have a word or two with God about all this. As literary scholar Erich Auerbach has written, so much of the human drama in these biblical narratives is understated. “Thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed,” he writes. Interpretation only comes in the midst of “the silence and the fragmentary speeches.” So much is behind the scenes. And this particular biblical witness, Auerbach concludes, is “fraught with background.”

“Frought with background.” Which makes the ancient story all the more human. You and I, our lives are “frought with background,” too. Every one of us. “Frought with background.” A complexity, a thick description, a hot mess of faith and doubt and joy and sorrow and celebration and suffering. And along with Abraham and Sarah, there are those early morning encounters with the mystery of it all, the mystery of God. One of those kind of mornings. Standing between the promise of God and the raw reality of this life of ours. Rising early to greet a complex canvas of life, sometimes obediently, other times in sheer desperation, hoping that some Word from the Lord will make it all easier, knowing full well that sometimes the morning just gets longer as we once again encounter the ever-present, constantly-puzzling, sometime-heartbreaking, once-in-a-while-even-punishing mystery of God.

Artists and poets tend to do better with this passage they call “the Binding of Isaac.” You can find the scene in window at the National Cathedral. You can go over and look at the sculpture on Princeton’s campus. You can see Rembrandt’s sketch on display right now at the Frick Museum in New York City. Artists and poets do better than preachers because they don’t have to offer any answers. They don’t allow words to eat away, explain away, the dramatic, anthropological, theological tension. Unlike preachers who feel obligated to put a kind of rhetorical, interpretive bow on the story (which drains the life right out of the sacred text), unlike preachers, artists’ renditions of “the Binding of Isaac” invite you to a certain silence as you sit before God, Abraham, Isaac, and the Sarah-less trip to the land of Moriah. The invitation is to sit before the story of humanity’s encounter with the divine, squinting all the while to see into the background, into the mystery of God.

Squinting, looking, seeing. Abraham, in the story here in Genesis 22, he didn’t just rise, he saw. “On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away” (v. 4). “And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns.”(v. 13). Abraham looked. He saw. After Abraham saw the ram, after God intervened, Abraham called that place “the Lord will provide.” In Hebrew, that could also be translated “the Lord sees.” God provides. God sees. God will provide. On the Mount of the Lord it shall be seen. On that Mount, the Lord sees.

To rise up early in the morning, it rarely comes with a whole lot of answers. But it comes with an invitation to try to see. The story of “the Binding of Isaac” tells of one who was thrust into the mystery of it all. One who, by God’s grace, was given just a glimpse. Abraham saw just a glimpse of what God saw. To dwell somewhere between the promise of God and the raw reality of life and of death means that an encounter with the mystery of God is inevitable. Because God sees, God provides, and you and I are mere mortals. You don’t have to turn to artists and poets to ponder the world of death and sacrifice that confronted Abraham that early morning. Death and sacrifice, suffering and eternally unanswered questions abound this side of the kingdom. Some mornings you just look at the world and fall silent. Even then, the invitation comes to stare into the mystery of God, to enter into the life of God. To yearn to see what God sees. To learn again, that on this mountain, God provides.

In the current issue of The Christian Century magazine, President Craig Barnes of Princeton Theological Seminary very movingly and powerfully tells the story of a couple he had married about 20 years ago. In the pastoral conversations leading up to the wedding the groom had shared how frightened he was, scared of losing someone he loved so much. “What if something happens to you?” he said as he turned to his fiancé. Summoning all of the wisdom he could muster, Pastor Barnes said, “In my experience, 100% of marriages come to an end. You’ll never beat those odds.”

The point, of course, was that death was inevitable. In the essay, President Barnes went on to share how he learned not long ago that death did come to that marriage. The husband had died at 50 years old of a sudden heart attack, leaving his wife and two kids. The pastor was able to track down the widow and exchange some correspondence. This time the wisdom came from her.

“His death is inexplicable in any logical sense but I very much feel this is part of the mystery of life. In the six months that have passed, I can say I revere this mystery. I don’t want or need to understand everything about our lives on earth.” She attached a picture of her husband with her two young sons. “I would think one the pleasures of marrying young couples who are deeply in love,” she wrote, “is to see the product of that love decades later.”

President Barnes concludes, “When I read such words about revering mystery, I was pleased to know that she understands what can never be understood. It’s the only way she can carry on without him.” A widow, two young kids. I bet she wrote that email early in the morning, boldly pointing to something of what God sees.

If you stare into the mystery of God long enough, when you rise to meet the earliest of mornings, even then, you are rising into the life of God, which means God is present. God is with us. God provides. God sees. Beyond explanation. Beyond words. Standing before the mystery of God, you and I might fall silent again and again. But by nothing other than the grace and mercy of God, you may start to see, in the fuzziness of this life, in the dawn of the breaking day, you catch, if only a glimpse. You can see God’s provision. You can see another hill. Other wood being carried upon the shoulder. Another place of sacrifice. You can see. Another one bound. Another lamb. You can see. God provides. You can start to see what God sees. Another Son. You can see another Beloved Son. And you can see the broken heart of God.

© 2017 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.