Hear the second call

A sermon preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Quebec City

Readings: Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

Many years ago, in a church far, far away from this one, I heard a story.

A true story. A disturbing story.

In this story, there was a family returning from a church service, where our reading this morning from Genesis had been read.

I was told that the father was a bit quiet on the drive back. But as he got out of his car, he walked over to his son, and he said to him in a calm yet fervent voice:

"Son, I love you. More than just about anything."

"But my love for God needs to be higher than my love for anything."

"If God told me to, I wouldn't want to, but I would sacrifice you."

It's a pretty shocking thing to hear someone tell you that story. It's hard to know how to respond in the moment. This story was told to me by the son, who was pretty scarred by it.

"I know he was just trying to tell me that faithfulness was important," the son told me, "but that is one of the worst things anyone has ever said to me."

It is also, I would add, a gross distortion of the testing of Abraham—a passage that has long been a source of troubled reflection for rabbis and philosophers alike, for over a millennium.

One of the most famous of these scriptural wrestlers was Søren Kierkegaard, whose reflection on this text coined the famous phrase the teleological suspension of the ethical—the idea that this text demonstrates that, in a particular moment, with this person, faith sets aside the claims of universal moral principles (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling). It doesn't just go higher, it goes beyond the claims themselves. This space beyond is the space of faith. And it is unique, particular.

As Kierkegaard notes, Abraham does not try to defend his choice, unlike the father in the story with which I began, for that defense would still be in the realm of the ethical. It would, in other words, make Abraham's moment of testing into a repeatable principle.

It is not. At least, according to Kierkegaard.

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas did not agree with Kierkegaard's reading. For Levinas, the ethical is not beyond faith, it permeates it, arising from the call of the face of the other. For Levinas, the real test of Abraham's faith in this passage is not in his listening to the first voice he hears, but the second.

The voice that cries, stop.

The voice that interrupts the sacrifice Abraham is so sure is God's will. But even in his sureness that God has called him to this action, Abraham remains open enough to hear another call—a call that, in Levinas's words, summons "him back to the ethical order." (Levinas, "Existence and Ethics," p. 33)

Abraham doesn't just follow. He also listens. Listens for a new call. And through that act of listening, God provides a new way.

Had he closed himself off, had he convinced himself that the call he heard at one time was the only call he would ever hear, Isaac—and the promise of God he represents—would not be.

It leads me to wonder: where have we discerned God's call in our lives, in the life of our church, and are we open to hearing a new call, a new way of being?

What if the test of our faith is not our willingness to respond to what we are, at first, so sure, is God's will for our lives? What if the test of our faith is our willingness to let God interrupt even our sense of that call, for the sake of the other: to remain open, and to listen for the leading of the Spirit even when we think we already know its direction, and to be prepared to follow it?

A call which, as Levinas reminds us, we encounter in the face of the other.

Reflecting on the missionary discourse in today's Gospel reading, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes:

"That we do not learn how successful or unsuccessful the disciples may have been indicates that the task is not one determined by success. Rather, to do what we have been told to do by Jesus, and to do what we have been told to do in the manner he has instructed, is what is important. Our responsibility is to be faithful to the task God has given us. The result is God's doing." (Hauerwas, Matthew, p. 112)

Success in our task, in other words, is not about effectiveness. It is about faithfulness. That is not to say our actions are unimportant, or without consequence for us and for others.

As St. Paul reminds us in our reading from Romans, our freedom in Christ is not merely a freedom from—freedom from sin—it is a freedom for: freedom for sanctification, freedom for growing in holiness, freedom for participating ever more closely in the life of the Triune God.

I love the way the biblical scholar Robert Jewett puts it in his commentary on Romans:

"The issue here is one of accountability and personal identity: although believers are not saved by the quality of the fruit they produce, they are defined thereby, and their work will be evaluated at the end of time. Although their work no longer earns honor or status and is now performed out of a sense of gratitude and vocation, its fruit remains a matter of accountability." (Jewett, Romans, p. 424)

But Jewett goes further. This accountability and identity is not principally individual: in the original Greek, Paul uses the second person plural for "sanctification" here, which means that the holiness we are growing into is not merely an individual holiness, it is a social one, a communal one, one we live into together.

Our personal actions, our personal willingness to listen and respond to God's call—even God's call to interrupt and redirect our understanding of God's call—all of this is oriented toward cultivating a network of holiness. The witness of the church, at its best, is that network.

It should not surprise us, then, that Jesus closes the missionary discourse in Matthew with a simple gesture of hospitality, of mercy, of grace:

"Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." (Matthew 10:42)

A cup of cold water. What a simple gesture.

We can enrich this with philosophies, with commentaries, with linguistic studies, but in the end, the gesture Jesus points to is the gesture of meeting a neighbour, meeting a stranger's immediate and fundamental need.

Have you ever seen the yearning and the relief in the face of a thirsty person, when they receive a cold drink? That yearning in the face of the other, and our response to it, is the test of our call. That relief in the face of the other, and our contribution to it, is our participation in sanctification.

What small gestures, what simple mercies might we offer this week? Whose faces are yearning? How can we ready ourselves to be interrupted, and to listen to that yearning?

May we, like Abraham, hear the second call, and through smaller mercies, unbind those our world is prepared to sacrifice.