Lent 2B, March 4, 2012

O God of life, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

When Abram was 99 years old – in other words, when Abram was as good as dead, he had a vision of the Divine. The One-Whose-Name-is-too-holy-to-be-spoken appeared with a message for him. And Abram fell on his face. He fell on his face.

I’ve spent some time this week wondering about that. Was it intentional or unintentional? Was his belly-flop in the dirt an act of reverence or did he completely lose his balance when the Holy One appeared and spoke? The scene is a little funny to me – the voice of Almighty God commands “walk before me” and then offers, yet again, the promise of exceedingly numerous offspring, and Abram doesn’t walk anywhere. Abram immediately falls down. My curiosity about this face plant prompted me to look to see if Abram falls down every time he encounters the vision or the voice of the Holy. In fact, no. Abram has heard the voice of the Holy One numerous times before this point in the narrative of the Book of Genesis, with no mention of falling down.

Back when Abram was much younger, only 75, the Holy One had urged Abram to take his barren wife, Sarai, his nephew, Lot, and all of his slaves and other possessions, saying, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed – all of them!” Once Abram and his entourage had settled in Canaan, the Holy One appeared again and said, “To your offspring I will give this land,” which was great, except that, at the time, the land was suffering a terrible famine, so there was actually no way to survive on this promised land.

So Abram made his way to Egypt, where he sold his beautiful wife to the Pharaoh, telling Pharaoh that Sarai was his sister, and Abram got very rich in the process. But when Pharaoh and his household started suffering from plagues, Pharaoh began to suspect that the plagues were “because of Sarai.” (nice.) Pharaoh somehow figured out that Sarai was really Abram’s wife (not his sister) and gave her back to Abram with strict orders to hit the road. Across the desert, back in Canaan, Abram again hears the promise of God, that his offspring will be so numerous that they will be like the dust of the earth – and this is particularly meaningful to him because he has just travelled a long way through a lot of dust.

Some military battles ensued. Turns out there were many others already living in the land. And Abram and his small but mighty gang prevailed. The Holy One appeared again and said, “Do not be afraid Abram, I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great.” And again, God promised numerous descendants – this time, as many as the stars in the sky – in response to Abram’s complaint that he was still waiting for his first child. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar, Sarai’s slave, bore his first child, his son Ishmael. Five chapters of encounters with Almighty God over two dozen years and Abram has not once fallen on his face – not even a stumble is recorded. This is a first, and I think it’s significant, whether or not falling on his face was intentional.

The commentaries have little to say about Abram falling on his face. Christian commentators are eager to get on to talking about the God-given name changes: Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah – not so different from Saul to Paul. Jewish commentators are eager to get to talking about the verses on Abraham’s circumcision (at age 99) which are omitted in our lectionary portion presumably because of the work of that same Saul turned Paul. I wonder if either the new name or the circumcision would have even been possible until Abram fell on his face. Falling on one’s face involves a certain surrender, doesn’t it? It can’t have been easy for Abram at age 99, even if it was voluntary. And in my experience, when a fall happens because of a loss of balance, it comes with broken teeth and bones, cuts and bruises. Both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim) traditions revere Father Abraham so much, no wonder there is so little talk of his face plant on the ground, and no talk that it might have been involuntary, but I am not so sure.

He did pick himself up, accepted the name change and the circumcision as signs of God’s promise, and when God told him that Sarai, turned Sarah, would bear a son for him, he fell on his face again, and this time the text says he laughed. He fell on his face and laughed.  “That’s a good one God. You got me this time.”

My reflection on Abram’s falling on his face took me back to Philip Simmons beautiful memoir about his learning about the art of dying, through which he learned about the art of living with ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Perhaps you know his book, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.  He lived for ten years after the ALS diagnosis. He wrote about how falling is the perfect antidote for complacency and pride. It’s true, in my experience anyway. I have fallen on my face literally and metaphorically. It’s not pretty.

Simmons wrote: “Think …of falling as a figure of speech. We fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. In each of these falls, what do we fall away from? We fall from ego, we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall, at least temporarily, from reason. And what do we fall into? We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others whom we realize are likewise falling. We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.” [and] “In falling we somehow gain what means most. In falling we are given back our lives even as we lose them.”[1]

Ahhhh and that sounds like our Gospel lesson for today.

Jesus has turned from a private exchange with Peter, to the group of disciples, and then Jesus has called the crowd to join his disciples for this teaching (so he’s shouting now): “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” In other words, remember what your life is for. What is your life for?

But let’s back up a minute. What does taking up a cross mean? In Jesus’ time, the cross was the most unambiguous instrument of capital punishment, used on the lower classes, slaves, criminals, violence inciters, insurgents, and traitors, to maintain the rule of Roman law. It was employed in theaters, on hilltops, and along busy roads, as a kind of grotesque billboard warning anyone who might be tempted to subvert the dominant political and military and economic order. What does “for the sake of the gospel” mean? In Jesus’ time, it meant “everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.”[2] It meant to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”[3] It still does mean those things. Taking up a cross for the sake of the gospel means voluntarily picking up a burden on behalf of another which will probably cause you to fall on your face, and might cost your whole life, for the love of God. The thing is, none of us is getting out of here alive. So how are you going to spend your life? Spend it because you actually can’t save it.

So a last word from Philip Simmons: “We are all—all of us—falling. We are all, now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life.”

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