Pentecost 5 - Year A

Who has problems with the Old Testament?  I think I have shared with you before that the reason I began bible and theological study was rooted in my lack of understanding of the Old Testament.  I couldn’t see why we needed it, and why we still included these ‘old’ stories in regular worship and study.  All those stories, admittedly some great stories, but also stories that included pillage and violence, of stories of people who were meant to be the heroes of faith and yet were so flawed…  how could this two-thirds of the Bible be essential to our understanding, and acceptance, of Jesus Christ as the living God, the salvation of us all?

This was reinforced in a way when learning about teaching very young children – don’t start with the Old Testament I was told.  Always start with the Jesus stories, the love of God.  There has been much research in this area and the reality is that that is a good pattern of learning.  That is, with the very young, to begin with the stories of God’s love alive in Christ, and then set further teaching in that context.  Certainly it is the model we use for Pram Service; each time is geared around a Gospel story.  Perhaps for many, including those coming to faith, this is the pattern of approach and learning…meeting and knowing community in Christ, Christ’s living body, and then moving into the “believing”, the whole story.

Teaching a Year 8 class at Hillbrook this year has really seen me challenged in this regard.  The curriculum is to include an introduction to the Bible as a whole, and then grounding in the stories of the Old Testament.  Well, we are half way through the year and so far have only done the Creation story!  So, I will have to get a move on.  But it has made me face again my own approach to the Hebrew Scriptures in the sense of connecting people with the whole story of God.  Because you just can’t leave people with single stories, can you – for example, Adam and Eve kicked out of the ideal creation; Moses wandering around for forty years; stories of revenge and God’s revenge; prophets who are obviously very weird and contrary to the world.  And so on. 

Today’s story of Abraham and Sarah is true to form in this regard – a story of ridiculing God and doubting God’s possibility.  And lying; Sarah lies to God.  “I didn’t laugh” Sarah denies.  “Oh yes, you did laugh”, replies God.  So here we have the great heroes of the Old Testament, Abraham and Sarah, the mother and father of the nations according to the teaching, through the life of their improbable child of old age, Isaac.  And the wonderful irony of Isaac’s name, in Hebrew meaning “he laughs”.  I mean, what is God going to do with such human flaw; what are we to do with this God story in our story?

We see what God does here; God keeps God’s promise.  We read that “the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.”  So the question is not what is God going to do with such human flaw, and indeed with all of the untidy and sometimes unsavoury nature of Biblical characters; rather, for us to realise that God is as much part of the messy history of that time as God is involved today in this world’s messy story.  There in the pages of Scripture is the story of salvation unfolding in and through the history of sex and violence, rape and massacre, brutality and deceit – there is no whitewashing of detail.  And there is no denial of the inclusion of all sorts of people in this story – and they are not held up as negative examples of humanity to be put aside.  No, even though there are punishing consequences, the fact is that all these people, good and bad, faithful and flawed, are worked into the plot of salvation. 

It turns out therefore, that God does not need good people to do God’s work.  There is a medieval saying which says..."God draws straight lines with a crooked stick."  God works with what God finds, whatever moral and spiritual condition we are in.  God, we realise, does God’s best work with the most unlikely people.

This is the revelation of the Hebrew Scriptures; God keeps working out God’s relationship with people to the advantage of God’s plan.  God does not therefore deny what God has created – all of us, and all who have gone before.  They are part of our story.  It is the story Jesus inherited, and came to build on and reinforce.  And here it is today in the Gospel, Jesus making apostles people who could be seen to be the most unlikely people.  Fishermen, tax collectors, women – people who were simple in their faith, doubtful in their belief, egotistical in their nature, arrogant in their relationships, who carried all the human realities of deceit and self-doubt. 

People just like us – and so, here is the call for the story to continue.  We can scoff, like Sarah, at the likelihood of divine intervention in our life; we can lie to rationalise our disbelief, like Sarah and Abraham.  We can  doubt at our capabilities, just like the first disciples… but we are still living and acting out exactly what God can and will work with.  Our very humanness does not constitute an ultimate obstacle to divine action in our own little stories, because it is all the little stories that are indeed part of the whole story.  We are part of the unwieldy material of God’s salvation history. 

Therefore these are not ‘old’ stories, nor are they dead in the sense of tradition gone and past.  The divine is moving through it all, and our awareness and challenge is to have a seamless grasp of the whole.  I came upon this concept of “seamlessness” in an article on curriculum and teaching in Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School newsletter last week, written by staff member Bruce Addison.  He claims that classrooms today have never been more seamless – and by that he means incorporating the duality of what has gone before in preparing young lives for what lies ahead.  I quote Dr Addison… we as teachers….must have a well-defined ‘rear-view’ mirror’ concept of curriculum.  This approach is essential to do justice to the grand narratives on which our society is built.  At the same time we must have a futures oriented dimension if we are to remain relevant to the world in which our students are to live and learn. 

I thought, hello, that is so relevant for the church, the people of God, now and always.  Our “well defined” rear view mirror of the concept of the Word of God must do justice to the stories it brings to us.  In other words, God’s word has always been a living revelation of the essence of God – that is at the heart of all the stories.  And they are grand narratives, and the living word of God is built on them.  Christ’s life and teaching was built on them, and continues to build on them.

Our “futures oriented dimension” is essential also; and we witness it today in the miracle of God keeping God’s promise to Sarah and Abraham.  We are to have the faith that God will keep all of God’s promises.  Therefore, Christ is with us always, and God’s promise of the fulfilment of the kingdom, the second coming, the end of time as we know it in God’s perfection – however we envisage the great promise and mystery of our faith, we are to live in it now to remain relevant to the world we live in.  The world expects this of us; to have the faith to believe in that future.  I can always remember the Australian academic David Tacey, whose courses at La Trobe university on spirituality attract huge numbers of students, saying society is angry with the church for not letting them, society, know of the wonder of God’s promises.  It is as though the church holds this to themselves and doesn’t share it with the world – surely a case for irrelevance.

I felt more confident for my Grade 8 class after reading Dr Addison’s article because he reinforced also the foundational role of the teacher being the role model for that which we teach.  In other words, to excite hope and a thirst for ideas, to present the many sides of the ideas we bring, to identify our bias, and to also acknowledge our failure when our own modelling does not live up to our own expectations.  In other words I, and all of us, to be one of the many flawed characters of the biblical tradition, messy in life, but absolutely certain that God is working with that messiness even as we mess and speak…..

My other confidence came in his final quote from a book he is reading, the title of which I also feel should belong to the church  “The home we build together – recreating society”  and the quote of the author Jonathon Sacks is…the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.

We who carry the faith, in whatever way we do this, are the carriers of the minutes of the last meeting.  We carry the story, and we carry it for God, for those who are the pages of on which the minutes of consequent meetings are to be written.  Amen.