SERMON OF DR. HOLTON SIEGLING Any Shoes But These February 14, 2016 After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, Abraham! And he said, Here I am. He said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burntoffering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you. Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, Father! And he said, Here I am, my son. He said, The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? Abraham said, God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son. So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham! And he said, Here I am. He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place TheLORD will provide ; as it is said to this day, On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided. The angel of the LORD called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said By myself I have sworn, says the LORD: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice. So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba. Genesis 22:1-19 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread. Jesus answered him, It is written, One does not live by bread alone. Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours. Jesus answered him, It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him. Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it 1
is written, He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you, and On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. Jesus answered him, It is said, Do not put the Lord your God to the test. When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time. Luke 4:1-13 You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Have you heard that before? In Harper Lee s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch puts it like this: You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view -- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. I was privy to an encounter between two people in which a younger person who rightly held an older person in high esteem. After they talked briefly, and as the older individual was walking away, the younger person said something to the effect: I want to be like her. She s got it all together. Do you think? I thought to myself? Do you want your spouse to be struggling with Alzheimer s Disease? Do you want your children to never call you? Do you want to feel tired every single morning and wonder how you are going to make it through the day? It is very difficult to know what is going on in the life of someone else and yet we try. Often with the very best of intentions we attempt to understand them more fully. We take into account the lesser known details of peoples life so that we might begin to discern why they act the way they act or feel the way they feel. We consider how we might respond under similar circumstances, we put ourselves in their shoes. But the truth is, you can wear any shoes but these. Mine, that is! And I can wear any shoes that don t already belong to someone else. And that doesn t mean that we can t know one other. It doesn t mean for a moment that there does not exist such wonderful opportunities to relate to someone and to understand their experiences, to love them and serve them with authenticity. But, at the end of the day, we are talking about someone else s experience, and we will never truly know whether someone else s shoes are lined with feathers or laced with pins and needles, because they are not our shoes to wear. Tell me, do you think I could ever walk in the footsteps of a victim of the Holocaust simply because I read the book: Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Can I say that I fully understand the particular life experience that has led to the development of black theology, or liberation theology for that matter simply because I have read some of James Cone s work or sat in on a lecture with Justo Gonzalez? Do I have any real sense of what it is like to walk in the shoes of someone who struggles to make ends meet? I mean, really relate to what it means to be nickeled and dimed nearly to death simply because I didn t have enough money to buy something that I wanted the other day? Why, we even try to put ourselves in the shoes of our favorite Biblical characters. Take this morning s OT Lesson from Genesis 22, for example. Tell me, is there any way that we can put ourselves in Abraham s shoes? Can we possibly fathom what it was like for him to be asked to take the life of his son? Oh, with all of the faithful exegesis we can muster, the chasm that persists between Abraham and us might as well be the Grand Canyon. Oh, we may choose to say something like: I think I know what David felt like when he sent Uriah to the front lines, because I too had to put someone on the front of an assembly line once and it 2
created all sorts of problems. or I know what the disciples James and John went through when they left their father Zebedee mending the nets and followed Jesus because when I went off to school and had to leave my mom and dad at home. or I can certainly relate to how Jesus must have felt when he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, because there was that time in my own life when I had to make that very difficult choice about whether or not I would stand up for my beliefs or be silent. Really? The shoes of Christ? Would any of us presume to know what it was like to walk in those shoes, or should we say those sandals? We are, after all, talking about the same sandals that John the Baptist was not even worthy to untie! Friends, try as we may, those are shoes in which we can never walk. You may be interested to know that this is one of the main reasons why we as pastors, at least in the reformed tradition, why we will not speak about our ability to relate to something of God s majesty in terms of embodying it. What you will hear us say is that we bear witness to, let s say, God s love or that we testify to God s mercy. You see, when it comes right down to it, we are witnessing and testifying to the incarnate Christ, the one who, though he was human like all of us, was God like none of us. And yet while we will never be able to wear the shoes of Jesus, he has proven himself more than willing and able to wear ours. Consider how the very Word of God became flesh and dwelled among us. How it is that according to Hebrews 4:15 we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Tested as we are, perhaps a word or two would be in order about testing and temptation, as it relates to us. Make no mistake about it, when God is behind our testing it is always for the purpose of trying our faith, perhaps of executing justice or revealing where we may fall short of God s glory. But none of those tests, none of those temptations, as it were none of them will ever solicit us to do what is evil in God s sight. In other words, God does not tempt us to sin! No! That s the work of someone else! And so it was that Jesus was tested by none other than Satan while he was in the wilderness. What s more, the Bible tells us it was the Spirit who led him there. Now, before we presume to have caught ourselves in a contradiction, let us remember that while Jesus was wearing our shoes, for sure, he was also wearing God s. In so many ways, Jesus represented all of us. The whole collective group of humanity, in all of its beauty and all of its corruption, and yet that corruption of the human condition, which is the result of sin, it was not at all a part of who Jesus was, because Jesus was without sin. Think of it like this... we may be able to come close to putting ourselves in Jesus shoes inasmuch as we can relate to being tempted, but none of us can relate to being God. In fact, only God in Christ was capable of temptations. To be certain only the power of God in our lives and in our modern day wilderness can give us the strength to endure these trials that would otherwise so quickly and easily overwhelm us. The Apostle Paul gives us some helpful perspective on this when he says to the church in Corinth: No testing has overtaken you that s not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. When we observe this period of testing for our Savior, everything about it had an element of the Godhead, a dimension of the divine, something that we will never fully comprehend. Living as we do on this side of heaven. 3
Oh, put us in the wilderness for five plus weeks without food and we, to put it plainly, we are dead and gone. And yet we presume to know something of what Jesus went through when we refrain from eating food for the better part of a day and then nourish ourselves again after sundown, when we observe year after year something that Jesus did only once in his entire life. And I m not saying that we shouldn t fast. In fact, fasting has its rightful place amidst our spiritual heritage; but let us not be fooled into thinking that as a result of our fasting we can somehow relate to Jesus anguish, or that we can fathom what it means that God relieved Jesus of the necessity of eating, or that God in Christ revealed to us the highest order of humankind; which, in no way, can we hope to achieve that perfection. So what can we hope to achieve? Well, can we not hope to achieve discipleship? We may never be able to walk in Jesus shoes or experience what Jesus experienced, but we can be the children that God came to save. And we can follow in Jesus footsteps; we can draw as near to God as we possibly can! And is that not the nature of discipleship? One of my favorite scenes from the movie Good Will Hunting is when Will Hunting - a certifiable genius, but a loner extraordinaire - is sitting with his Psychiatrist on a park bench. In a previous encounter, Will had seen a painting on the doctor s wall and had proceeded to tear his doctor s life apart, presuming to know everything about him. When they were on the bench the doctor said, You have never been out of Boston, have you? If I asked you about art, you d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo. You know a lot about him. But I bet you can t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine chapel. You ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. If I asked you about love, you d probably quote me a sonnet, but you ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable...known someone who could level you with her eyes...feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you...could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn t know what it is like to be her angel...to have that love for her to be there forever...through anything...through cancer. And you wouldn t know about sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term visiting hours don t apply to you. But you presumed to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my life apart. You re an orphan, right? Do you think I d know the first thing about how hard your life has been and who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Oh, in my view the movie was worth that one extended monologue, only parts of which I shared with you just now. The doctor was letting it be known that we can never know what it is like to be someone else, that there are limits to how we can relate to one another. But the doctor did express his earnest desire to know Will Hunting as a person. I m fascinated, he said, I m in. Is that not what God expects of us? To truly invest ourselves to follow Christ, to learn of God s grace, to know our Savior, to love our neighbor! Perhaps on our best days we won t try to wear someone else s shoes for they are, after all, someone else s shoes. What we may do, what I hope we do is come along side of them, and walk with them. Perhaps on our best days the shoes themselves will not matter at all, because it is a whole lot easier to wash someone s feet without them. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 4
This transcript has not been read or edited by Dr. Siegling. 5