May I speak in the name of the God who is Speaker, Word & Breath. Amen.
based upon Genesis 22.1-14, Romans 6.12-end, Matthew 10.40-end
I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t thrilled to get The Sacrifice of Isaac in today’s readings – although it means that I get to tell you that in my first year of high school, in an RE lesson we had to re-enact stories from the Old Testament – my group was given The Sacrifice of Isaac, and I got to be the sheep.
What I’m deflecting from here with the tale of my ovine acting debut is that this is one of those bible passages that leaves me with a deep sense of unease.
Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his precious and long-awaited son. It’s a story that’s troubled people for generations, and it should trouble us – who of us would go out to the wilderness, no questions asked to kill something so precious to us? It seems so unnecessary and cruel for God to test Abraham’s faith in this way.
So what at its heart, does this story teach us about God. Is the God we follow the one who demands the sacrifice? Or should the emphasis be on the God who interrupts it? The story doesn’t end with death – well, unless we consider the poor sheep.
The story ends with God crying out: “Do not lay your hand on the boy.” It ends with God saying no to violence and providing Abraham with everything he needs, and Abraham naming the place: “The Lord will provide.”
As we come to the end of Pride Month, where the lives of LGBTQ+ people are highlighted and celebrated, this story struck at something for me. On Friday the Christie Hospital Rainbow Staff Network, which I’m part of, threw our annual Pride Garden Party – offering lunch, games and community to staff and patients alike. It’s a celebration of our diverse staff and encouragement for them to feel safe to be their authentic selves.
Because for many LGBTQ+ people, the message they’ve heard - sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly - is that God requires a sacrifice of them: a sacrifice of their identity; a sacrifice of relationships; and this means a sacrifice of their truth.
What’s heard is “be someone else, hide who you really are, give up what’s natural and beautiful to you, and then you’ll be acceptable. God made you this way but God doesn’t want you this way”
Yet the God we meet on the mountain in the land of Moriah is not a God who ultimately demands the sacrifice of what we love. This is a God who interrupts harm. A God who says: I’ll provide another way. A God who doesn’t ask us to stop being who we are - but who does call us to deepen our faith and our trust in God.
And that brings us to the reading from Romans. Again, at first glance, this is also a passage which makes me feel uneasy - Paul talks about belonging and about giving ourselves over entirely to God, but it’s wrapped in this language of slavery.
For us, where autonomy and identity matter so deeply, this language can feel really uncomfortable, and even dangerous. But I wonder if Paul is trying to describe something that our modern understanding of the language or translation struggles to find the nuance in.
Because we all at some time or other can find ourselves under the power of things which stop us fully connecting with our faith. This might be fear, expectation, shame or the need to fit in.
For many of us, in different ways, the thing that we’re, for want of a better word, slaves to, is the pressure to be acceptable. To our families, our friends, our colleagues, our congregation and to God. For LGBTQ+ people there’s an extra layer to that if you’re being told that unless you change something fundamental to who you are, you’ll never be acceptable.
I some way, we each perform a version of ourselves we hope won’t be rejected. Paul says: that kind of life doesn’t make us free. It leads to death - not physically, but spiritually. The death of joy. The death of truth. The death of the self that God created us to be. But then comes the good bit: “You have been brought from death to life.” Not by following what we think the rules are, or by shrinking ourselves, but by grace.
Grace isn’t what we get for sacrificing or denying our true self, grace is God’s gift and the declaration that we’re already loved. And it’s from that place of love, that we’re invited into transformation.
Not transformation into someone more acceptable to God and society, but transformation into someone more fully alive, more fully human and more fully ourselves.
It’s frequently asked why there’s been an explosion of people trying to autism or ADHD diagnosed post the pandemic. The truth for my family, as for many others, is that when my children felt safe and loved in our home they also felt they could be their authentic selves – they weren’t out in a society everyday that told them they way they thought, or acted or encountered the world was wrong.
This is called unmasking, and it’s where you stop wearing the mask of “what does the world find acceptable” and can only be done when you feel safe to be your true self without fear of rejection.
Today’s Gospel reading is just three short verses, and the one word which echoes through those verses is “welcome.”
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me.”
It’s so simple, and yet so radical, because Jesus is saying that how we treat one another is how we treat God, in the ordinary, everyday, encounters of our lives. How we treat everyone matters.
We’ve been on a journey of Inclusion before and since joining the Inclusive Church Network. Joining the network wasn’t a declaration of a journey that was completed but a waymark on an ever-evolving pathway of what it means to sign up to The Inclusive Church Statement:
“We believe in inclusive church – a church which celebrates and affirms every person and does not discriminate.
We will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.
We believe in a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”
So here’s the challenge for us, as the Church: Who are we failing to welcome? Has anyone been made to feel that they’re too much, or not enough? Who’s walked through our doors and left feeling unseen, or unsafe, or silently judged?
Because if Christ comes to us in one another, as Jesus makes clear in the Gospel reading, then exclusion is not just unkind, it’s a failure to recognise God in our midst.
Pride Month matters because it reminds us of this truth. That people who were once told “you don’t belong” are claiming their place and saying: We are here. We are who God made us to be. And we will not disappear.
And Christians have a choice. We can stand like Abraham at the altar - knife in hand -believing that faith requires sacrifice of the self, and the things most dear to us. Or we can remember the voice that says: “Stop. Do no harm.” We need to trust that God will provide another way.
And what might that way look like?
It might look like a cup of cold water, a small act of kindness, a word of affirmation, a refusal to laugh at a joke that we know isn’t really OK. It might look like truly listening to someone whose story is different from our own or creating spaces where people don’t have to hide. Where no one has to choose between their faith and their identity. Where being fully known isn’t a risk but a beautiful gift.
The Gospel reading isn’t complicated.
God offers us life.
God doesn’t require us to erase who we are.
God calls us - by name - into freedom.
God says: Welcome.
So perhaps today our prayer is this:
That we might have the courage to reject all the voices that call us to sacrifice what God has called good.
That we might trust in the God who provides.
And that we continue evolving as a community where everyone can hear, and know, and believe:
You are welcome.
You are loved.
You belong.
Amen.
