Water is chaos.

I feel like that is one of the first things I learned in my college Intro to Biblical Literature class. When Genesis 1 describes the Spirit of God hovering over the waters, it sets the stage for God to bring order out of chaos. When the Great Flood swallows the earth, it is the chaos of pre-creation consuming life. When the Children of Israel cross the Sea of Reeds on dry land, they find God’s peace in the midst of chaos. When Jonah tries to run away from God rather than go to Nineveh, he finds himself sinking into the sea until a great fish provides an unexpected respite from chaos and death. The stories we see in the Bible have God bringing life out of the madness.

Until I started writing this, I had never considered the juxtaposition between the Spirit of God hovering over the waters in the Genesis 1 creation account and Jesus walking on the water in the gospels. Jesus touches the water. He is not removed from it. The chaos splashes around his feet, the waves soak his robe. It is true that he walks on the water, but Jesus is in the thick of it.

And really? Thank God for that because we find ourselves at sea often in our lives: the illness of a loved one, a child going through a difficult time, a broken relationship, a lost job, living with depression or anxiety, tragedies that seem to happen repeatedly in a sick cycle, hurt, loss, death, uncreation, the dark and stormy nights of the soul when you wonder if God is even real. In the midst of that, I want a God who does more than hovers over the waters, but one who is in the midst of the stinging spray of the sea.

Like many homes containing individuals both my age and my sons’ ages, we have been deep (literally and metaphorically) in Hyrule. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out in early May and since its release the Cox men have been scouring the land, the sky, and the Depths for everything that we can in order to defeat the evil Ganondorf (or create an automated flame-throwing robot that will attack a camp of Bokoblins). It’s a delight.

Thus when I read in today’s gospel passage about a great treasure hidden in a field, I immediately heard the sound effect that has accompanied the opening of treasure chests in Zelda games for decades. In the parable, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven (the reign of God, the beloved community of God) to a great treasure that one stumbles upon. The treasure is so valuable that the one who finds it goes off and sales everything that they have just to buy that field.

In Tears of the Kingdom, there are treasure chests all over Hyrule. Sometimes the contents of a chest are not exciting: stakes, a piece of amber, a shield. But then sometimes you will come across a treasure chest that has an incredibly powerful and valuable weapon. This discovery often forces a difficult decision. Your character Link can carry only so many weapons. So if you come across a valuable item when your cache is full, you have to literally drop something in order to make room for it. Sometimes the decision to drop something is easy yet sometimes you have to make the hard decision to part with something valuable to make room for something better.

The parallel is not perfect. Even writing it now, I don’t feel great about comparing the Kingdom of God to a weapon.

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven”….He called that place Bethel.
-Genesis 28:16-17, 19a

Whenever I visit my home in South Carolina, I love to go outside at night and take a deep breath. On a clear night the stars are far brighter than they are in Nashville. My parents live on the edge of the woods and though you can hear the distant hum of Interstate 26, the primary sounds are of the life that fills the place. Crickets. Cicadas. Birds bidding good night to one another. And a chorus of frogs that transform from a boy choir chirp to a deep bellow as spring turns to summer.

If I stop for just a moment, I feel peace. The world is still and I feel like God is just a little bit closer. I don’t see angels ascending and descending, but it definitely feels like the holy is in that place. That driveway in Spartanburg County is a Beth-el, a house of God. I am grateful for the times I remember that.

Sundays are hard. That is just the reality of my life right now. It used to be my favorite day; a time when I got to to do what I love. Now the day is salt in the wound. This difficult season has put a great strain on my faith. Strong in the initial weeks after stepping down, I find myself spiritually struggling. I feel alone; uncertain of whether there is a place for me. There is a spark of hope and sacred mischief that, for the time being, has been extinguished.

So when Parable of the Sower began to be read this morning at church, I braced myself for the wave of guilt. In this wilderness season, I am the rocky soil, the soil among thorns, the soil patrolled by a Hitchcockian number of birds. How on earth can something good take root when I feel like crap?

While I prepared for a guilt trip, I heard our assistant rector Rev. Sides say this, “Jesus doesn’t use parables to shame.” She said that the point is not for us to hear these words and feel like failures. We contain all four types of soil. We need to be aware of the areas of our life that our rocky or thorny and clear the land the best that we can. Yet Jesus is still going to graciously sow seeds.

Did the title tip my hand too much? The near sacrifice of Isaac has always been a troubling passage for me. Now I can put on my religious studies hat and tell you that compared to some other religious stories of the day that this tale is actually kind of progressive. The religion following the God of Abraham is different from other faiths; even though it feints in that direction, this God does not require child sacrifice. This story conveys the important message (one that I wrote about just last week) about the necessity and difficulty of obedience to God above all else. It asserts that such faithfulness will be rewarded. I also know that this story was told in a context that is dramatically different from our own. It is not written for modern audiences.

But, whew, I really hate this story. I didn’t feel great about as a kid and I truly do not like it today as a father. Despite all the caveats mentioned above, I cannot read this story and not imagine how everyone involved would walk away with irreparably scarred relationships.

How could Abraham have lived with himself knowing that he was moments from killing his own son? How could Isaac—who was tied up, laid upon an altar, and watched his father grab a knife to sacrifice him—not be a complete shell of a person? How could the relationship with father and son ever be the same? And how could either of them not feel conflicted about a God who played such a seemingly cruel game with both of them?