St. John’s, New Braunfels, TX
1 March 2015
Diocese of West Texas

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

As we gathered yesterday to affirm the election of your new bishop coadjutor, I looked out over the congregation and saw great joy and celebration. There were a surprising number of young people gathered, some of whom sang and led the music during the offertory. Others were doing a great job leading processions as acolytes – competent and dignified while they were serving, and delightfully uninhibited teenagers when out of uniform – taking selfies, ribbing each other, and being helpful when needed. Once we were all in place for the liturgy, I noticed a little boy sitting on the floor in the middle aisle near the front. He was probably 6 or 7 years old, and rapt with attention most of the time. During the offertory, and during communion, when there were other people using the aisle, he went back to his father’s lap. I found myself wondering what sort of world and church he will inherit.

Abram and Sarai are looking even farther down the strand of time, still hoping, but not yet knowing if there will be offspring to wonder about. They hear that they’re going to be not just parents, but the progenitors of multitudes. No wonder that in another version of the story Sarah laughs. ‘Right, God! We’re old enough to be great-grandparents and now we’re going to have a baby?’ ‘Abraham and Sarah, you will produce whole nations, and kings to lead them.’

It’s a minor miracle that Abram and Sarai don’t split up long before they have that baby. Soon after God calls Abram to leave Ur and go to Haran, he and his family find themselves in the middle of a famine. They keep moving and cross the border into Egypt, to graze their herds in the Nile delta, and try to find enough to eat. Pharaoh hears about the beautiful Sarai, and decides to take her for his harem. Abram knows that her husband is likely to be killed off to get him out of the way, so he tries to pawn her off as his sister in order to save his own skin.[1] Those two sojourners in Egypt are aliens in foreign territory; they’ve crossed the border seeking more of life’s possibility, but they have no protection, either from kinfolk or legal systems. They are at the mercy of the local power brokers. Like migrants the world over, they’re exploited. Sarai is abducted – today we’d say she was trafficked – while her husband is forced to stand by and do the best he can to survive.

The story goes on. Pharaoh and his household get sick, and somehow he discovers that he has taken Abram’s wife, rather than his sister, for his own. Pharaoh responds, “you’ve deceived me, now take your wife and get out of here!” Abram and his wife are deported but they do survive.

Abram is not a righteous fellow according to the law, yet he is given this remarkable promise of an heir and rafts of descendants – and the Bible says, “it is reckoned to him as righteousness.” If there is hope for this ambiguously faithful survivor, there is certainly hope for the rest of us. God’s justice is not quite like our own. The point seems to be that God is working his purposes out in ways that are beyond our immediate awareness, that God will bring life out of the worst that life can visit on us, even when we participate in its grievousness and error.

There’s something similar going on in the gospel conversation between Peter and Jesus. Jesus pretty clearly knows that what he’s been teaching and doing is upsetting the powers that be. Like Abram, he knows that the response is likely to be death as the authorities discover who he is and what he’s up to. Then the two stories diverge. Abram is convinced that his survival – and Sarai’s – is what is most important, however he manages to pull it off. Jesus knows that the life of nations has to do with his continued journey, even if it brings his own death. The result in both instances is abundant life and offspring, whether it’s the heirs God has promised to Abraham or the heirs of the kingdom of God, delivered through the labor of Jesus.

Abram has let go of his honor in that culture, by relinquishing his wife and his claims on her. He has been shamed by letting another take his property, even if it was Pharaoh who did it. In his context honor is on a par with life itself – and we can still see that in societies that murder women whose fidelity is in question. Sarai has little or no ability to avoid her abduction, but her beauty will keep her alive as long as she cooperates. Ultimately, the plague on Pharaoh’s house delivers them both, and the fulfilment of the promise of offspring re-emerges as a possibility.

Jesus tells Peter not to lure him away from his path by focusing on his mortal survival. Jesus believes that his journey involves the cross – for the promise of abundant life will emerge from his faithfulness to that road, even through the valley of the shadow of death.

Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who let go of their possessiveness about their lives will find those lives returned to them in abundance.

What promise motivates your journey in life? What cross will you shoulder in the cause of that ultimate goal?

This congregation suffered a considerable loss just a few years ago. It wasn’t just loss of face or identity, but of people who had been known and loved for years. Those who remained picked up their grief and pain and got back on the path, and today you are tasting something of abundant life as a result. You are indeed blessed to be a blessing, and you are living that out through growing the lives of the faithful here and sharing the love you know with the wider world.

Losing life in order to find it comes in many different forms. Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, went to Selma in 1965 to support the march for civil rights. She was not saved by her beauty, and in fact it probably made her a more attractive target as she drove activists from Montgomery back to Selma. She was shot to death for her work, [2] much like Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian who stepped in front of a shotgun blast meant for a young African-American woman, Ruby Sales.[3] In the midst of those events 50 years ago, Andrew Young had this to say about taking up crosses: “We come only with the power of our souls and the strength of our bodies to love the hell out of Alabama.”[4]

Sometimes what is lost is more like Abram’s sacrifice of pride and honor. Whenever a conflict becomes intractable, it’s usually about both sides thinking they’re right in refusing to budge. Marital conflict like that usually leads to divorce – and we’re seeing similar realities in Congress and in the Middle East. You had a taste of it here some years ago. Picking up a cross often looks like vulnerability and empathizing with the other – for once the opponent can be seen as human, the possibility of greater life also emerges. It’s the same thing as loving your neighbor as yourself – seeing the image of God in someone who is actually very much like us, understanding the pain in another life, finding a common hunger for meaning, letting go of our own pride or sense of ultimate righteousness. It might be undocumented immigrants, or people with a different religious or political position, and there are opportunities all around us to pick up a cross of vulnerability.

What cross needs picking up in your life? What needs to be laid down to find your life? Where can we love the hell out of the world around us?

[1] Gen 12:10-20

[2] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/black-history-month-2015-civil-rights-allies-article-1.2129213

[3] http://www.vmi.edu/archives.aspx?id=14481

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_of_the_Brave_(2004_film)