I. Theme – Justification by Grace
"Get Behind Me Satan"- James Tissot – between 1886 and 1894
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
Old Testament – Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm – Psalm 22:22-30 Page 611, BCP
Epistle –Romans 4:13-25
Gospel – Mark 8:31-38
As Suzanne Guthrie writes this week
All the scripture readings for Sunday reference faith in some way. God initiates a reciprocal pact of faith with Abraham. The Psalmist remembers God’s former faithfulness in order to find faith in present distress despite the jeering of companions. Paul considers how Abraham’s irrational faith blessed him. Jesus asks his followers to follow him in faith to the Cross.
Commentary by Rev. Mindi Welton-Mitchell:
Continuing our journey of Lent, we are reminded of the covenants of God and God’s faithfulness.
Last week we remembered the covenant with Noah; this week, we remember God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah. Abram and Sarai were old, too old to have children as they had always wanted, yet God promised them there would be a great nation descended from them. Abraham and Sarah did live to see their son Isaac; they did not live to see their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, did not live to see the wondrous family of Israel. But in their lifetime, they saw the beginning of God’s great covenant being fulfilled, and we have yet to see the end. God’s faithfulness endures forever.
Psalm 22 begins with lament, abandonment and loss, but by the time we get to verse 23 where we begin, there is hope, there is remembrance of God’s covenant, especially for the poor and the lost–there is good news. God does not abandon or forget, but it may be that God’s covenant comes to fulfillment in “a people yet unborn” (vs. 31). Wait for the Lord.
Mark 8:31-38 tells of where Peter misunderstands who Jesus is and what the Messiah is about. Just before this, Peter had declared Jesus to be the Christ, the son of the living God. The Living God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as Jesus reminds the Sadducees in chapter 12 when they attempt to trap Jesus in a question about the resurrection. God is the God of the Covenant, which has begun but has not been fulfilled. Peter saw Jesus as his Messiah, and Peter’s view of the Messiah was not one who went to the cross, rejected, and died. Peter did not understand how God’s covenant would be fulfilled in this way, because Peter had his own version of who the Messiah was. Perhaps Peter though Jesus would be an earthly king, with an earthly kingdom. Being rejected and killed was not part of an earthly messiah plan. Peter rebukes Jesus, because Jesus does not fulfill the image of messiah that Peter believed in. How often do we set our minds on human things? How often do we want to see God’s covenant, God’s promises, fulfilled now and to our benefit? Or do we understand from the Scriptures, the story of our faith, that God’s covenant has been revealed, that promises have been made, but that what we see is a glimpse, and there is so much more to come. Even our understanding of Jesus is not full. But the disciples, who were with Jesus for so long, who were raised with the Hebrew scriptures, still did not understand. So we still only understand in part.
Romans 4:13-25 is Paul’s reflection on the covenant of God with Abraham, and that it all depends on faith. Faith supersedes understanding. To paraphrase Anselm, “I do not understand in order to believe; I believe so that I may understand.” Paul looks at Abraham, who in Paul’s opinion did not waver in his faith but trusted in God’s promises. So we, too, are to trust in God, and trust in Jesus the Christ and understand that what we see is not fulfilled yet.
As we journey through Lent to the cross, we know also that the Resurrection lies beyond the cross. We have yet to experience it though we believe it, and we know we have this promise in Christ. But we need to remember that at times we will be like Peter and get it wrong. We will get impatient, we will struggle, we will doubt. We are human, just like the disciples, and we will make false assumptions and jump to conclusions. But we need to be patient, we need to wait, and we need to know that we do not see the full picture yet. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Hold on. Wait for the Lord. We will see a glimpse in our lifetime, but know that we hope for so much more to come.
II. Summary
Old Testament Reading – Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
God makes a promise to Abram/Abraham and establishes a covenant with him and hisdescendants, and promises Sarai/Sarah that she will bear children.
Commentary by Paul S Nancarrow at "Process and Faith"
The covenant God made with Noah was universal, encompassing all humanity—indeed all land-based life—in a new kind of relationship with God, a relationship of co-creativity by which evil in the world will no longer be destroyed as in the Flood, but will be transformed to new potential for good. The covenant with Abraham, described in this reading for the Second Sunday of Lent, is more specific. In this covenant the human side of the relationship is to “walk before [God] and be blameless,” while the divine side is to make Abraham and Sarah the ancestors of “nations” and “kings,” and “to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”
In the covenant with Noah, the human side was simply to be “fruitful”; here that basic generativity is given more specific direction, an orientation toward God and an ideal of moral integrity. Human life is thereby given a deeper dimension, a clearer purpose in relationship to the source and goal of creative energy. The divine side of this new covenant is also more specific: more than simply a promise to be non-destructive, God in this covenant commits to an ongoing relationship with a human family, to be their object of worship and source of value, their enduring ideal of creative transformation through generations of growth and development.
The greater specificity of this covenant comes at some cost: rather than embracing all humanity, this covenant is made with Abraham and Sarah and their offspring, one particular human line. We can trace the beginnings of religious exclusivity to this covenant.
We should note, however, in this passage the number of times God stresses that Abraham and Sarah will be the parents of nations and peoples in the plural: not just a single ethnic group, but a multitude of human communities. Likewise, we can remember that God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, thought not quoted directly in this passage, is that through their offspring all the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:3, 28:14). So while this covenant is more specific and exclusive in its formulation, its intention and end result is still to embrace all human life, as in the first covenant with Noah. The passage invites reflection on the specific qualities of walking before God with integrity that are truly conducive to the creative transformation of evil into potential for new good.
Psalm – Psalm 22:22-30 Page 611, BCP
Commentary by Paul S Nancarrow at "Process and Faith"
A song of thanksgiving for rescue from danger, this psalm echoes the theme of creative transformation of evil and destruction from the Genesis passage, placing it now in a personal rather than an ethnic context. The poet had been in some state of affliction, from which he had prayed for deliverance; now no longer in danger, he uses his own experience as the evidence to persuade others of God’s saving power, God’s ability to take up the wreckage of suffering and from it to bring the possibility of new good. From his own experience, he can state with confidence that “the poor shall eat and be satisfied,” “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD,” and even “before him shall bow all who go down to the dust”: the saving help of God is not meant for one person alone, or even one people alone, or even the living alone, but encompasses all who have known life, and all who will know life, the “posterity” and “future generations” and “people yet unborn,” who will arise in a world where God’s transformative creativity is always already at work.
The human side of this transformative relationship is to “fear” (perhaps a better phrase in modern English would be “be in awe”), “praise,” and “worship,” paralleling Abraham and Sarah’s covenantal role to “walk before God and be blameless”: by orienting their lives toward God and striving for purity of intention in embodying divine ideals, humans lend their measure of creativity to God’s mission, co-creating with God new rescue from destructive affliction.
Epistle – Romans 4:13-25
Commentary by Paul S Nancarrow at "Process and Faith"
This passage takes up the hint of universalism in the Genesis reading and amplifies it, stating emphatically that Abraham’s being made “the father of many nations” means in fact that he is “the father of all of us.” The key for Paul is that descent from Abraham is not a matter of bloodline or biology, but consists in reenacting in one’s own life the quality of faith lived by Abraham.
Paul says that Abraham’s “faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness’”; a process approach invites us to consider both these key words in more than their typical modern meanings. “Faith” is often understood to mean the act of giving intellectual assent to a proposition, even through it cannot by proven by hard evidence or rigorous analysis. This very passage seems to invite such an understanding: God proposed that Abraham would have many descendants, and even though Abraham could see no evidence for that proposition, given his and Sarah’s advanced age, he nevertheless assented to it, and that was his faith.
Such intellectual assent is of course one component of faith; but more important than agreement with a proposition is Abraham’s disposition of his inner and outer life toward the fulfillment of the proposition, the way Abraham “hoped against hope” inwardly while outwardly going where God led him and doing as God guided him. It is this entire disposition of life, this shaping of the self by enactment of divine aims, that constitutes faith; and this is the faith that is reckoned as “righteousness.”
Here also, we must understand “righteousness” in a deeper sense that its typical modern meaning. The Greek word Paul uses here is dikaiosyne, which is based on the root dike or justice; “righteousness” thus includes both personal morality and social justice, in direct contrast to the way the word is often used today. Moreover, the root concept of justice in biblical thought is more than “lawfulness” or even “fairness”; justice in its root sense is “right relationship.” So righteousness before God means being in right relationship with God—and that right relationship is nothing other than to dispose one’s life toward the embodiment of divine aims and ideals—therefore faith is counted as righteousness.
Those who reenact the faith of Abraham walk before God as Abraham, and are therefore counted righteous and blameless as Abraham; they thus keep the human side of the covenant made with Abraham, receiving the same relationship with God as Abraham, and can therefore be considered descendants of Abraham. The covenant of co-creativity to transform the revolts of destructive evil into potentials for new good is thus carried on in new generations by those who believe (ie, “belove,” credere, commit their hearts to) “the God … who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” the God “who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.”
Gospel – Mark 8:31-38
After the astounded realisation on the part of the disciples that their teacher is the Messiah that the nation has awaited for generations, Jesus brings a cold dose of reality as he speaks of his suffering and death, provoking their incredulous reaction. His rebuke to Peter leads to his defining of his true followers as those who take up his cross. Those who want to save their life will lose it; what profit can there be in material security which costs one’s soul? Those who give their life for the sake of the gospel will save it.
Commentary by Paul S Nancarrow at "Process and Faith"
Where the Romans passage makes the connection between the faith of Abraham and faith in Christ, the Mark passage drives it home with an uncompromising definition of such faith: Jesus teaches, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”The word used for “life” here is psyche, which can mean the “animating principle” of bodily life, as well as meaning “soul” or “self” or “center of personal identity.” So the overall meaning is more than just the biological difference between living and dead tissue, but comprises the whole sense of being a living person.
We can therefore paraphrase this central teaching of Jesus as “the more one tries to protect one’s selfhood, the less a person one becomes; but the more one gives over one’s selfhood to Jesus and the gospel, the more a person one becomes.” An insight from process thought is particularly helpful here, namely the insight that the “self” is not a thing or object or some sort of reified essence “within” a person, but that the “self” is a thread of continuity or stream of influence running through successive moments of personal experience. What makes me me is a constellation of memories, qualities, and defining characteristics that each moment of my experience inherits from its predecessors and passes on to its successors, so that each moment of my becoming is recognizably connected to what came before, while also opening possibilities for new increments of experience. Central to this personal succession is a balance between novelty and continuity: too much novelty in a moment of experience could obscure the connection to previous moments and disrupt the sequence; too much continuity between moments could reduce the freshness of experience and degrade moments to mere repetition of their predecessors; either way, richness of personhood is lost.
With this operative notion of self, then, we could interpret Jesus’ teaching as saying that the anxious need to protect and save the self leads to an inexorable degradation of the self into triviality of repetitive experience, while entertaining aims and ideals derived from Jesus and his proclamation de-centers the self from its own preoccupations, initially experienced as a loss, but effectively opening new personal experiences to greater richness, depth, and more vital streams of influence.
Jesus’ own mission to be rejected, killed, and raised again demonstrates God’s faithfulness to creatively transform loss of self into new possibilities for greater personhood; those who follow Jesus, enacting in their self-constitution the divine ideals revealed by God in Jesus, will experience similar loss of self and rising into greater personhood. Taking the risk to de-center your self by entertaining divine aims for your enactment is the act of faith that, as the Romans passage says, is reckoned as righteousness and right-relationship with God; it is the call to walk before God and be blameless, as the Genesis passage says, that constitutes the human side of the divine-human covenant established in Abraham. Losing self-preoccupation for the sake of finding greater personhood in living the ideals of Jesus is the theme of all forms of Lenten self-denial and self-discipline.
III. Articles for this week in WorkingPreacher:
First Reading – Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm – Psalm 22:23-31
Epistle – Romans 4:13-25
Gospel – Mark 8:31-38