Doing the impossible

Genesis 22:1-14 Psalm 13 (Jeremiah 28:5-9; Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18) Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:40-42 Propers for the Thirteenth Sunday of the Year which is celebrated on 26th June 2011

Can God do the impossible?
Even more, does God delight in making things more difficult than they already are?
The story of Genesis 22 is a key narrative

in the story of God's relationship with humanity.
Will we trust God

even when it seems

that there is nothing to suggest

that God can be trusted?

Abraham has only one son,

and has been promised

that he will be the father of a great nation
He then comes to the belief

that God wants him to sacrifice his only son
What is going on here?
This story is so dramatic

that we can be easily distracted by its force.
It is about the requirement for God's people

to have faith in God

and God alone.
Abraham has already done that,

he set out from his father's house

in Ur

to follow where ever the Lord would lead him.

It is a paradigm story

of each human being.

Will we go where the Lord chooses to lead us?

or puddle along on the merely meaningless meanders

we mindlessly pursue.

For Abraham the story reveals

he is not now at liberty even to have faith in himself,

or in this great blessing of his son Isaac.
Having put faith in God,

we are not then at liberty to put our faith instead

in the means that God has given us
to fulfill the promise.
This may seem a subtlety,
but it is also a truth.

For example,

God uses our family
our marriage, our children,
our church.
Education, work and country
to provide for us.
But we are not allowed then to put our faith in them.

These are the means

not the ends


....more coming