Sitting up in bed yesterday morning, working at this sermon, and Hugh came in. I asked him if he knew the story of Abraham and Isaac—he looked vague so I read it to him. ‘That’s horrible!’ he said.And indeed it is. However you hear it, however often you hear it, it’s shocking. That God should demand such a thing. That Abraham should be prepared to carry out the killing. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. Imagine the father doing these things. Imagine the son’s dawning realisation. See how the dialogue ceases between the two as the answer to the boy’s question becomes clear: ‘but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ This is Isaac, the child born late in life to Abraham and Sarah, the only son, whom they loved.
I read the story and it never fails to chill me.
Why? What’s going on? The usual interpretation is that this is God’s test, and Abraham responds with faith—faith that is prepared to sacrifice his own son out of a greater obedience to God the Father. It is a story of primordial significance—the beginning of faith. But if that’s all this story means, it’s a harsh and cruel God that we see, a God who bargains with loyalty. I think there’s more.
It is the voice of God who demands the ultimate sacrifice. It is an angel of the Lord who comes with the message of reprieve. And then the angel brings a second message, the significance of which too often is left out. It’s integral to the story, I think, that the angel prophesies that Abraham’s offspring shall be as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. The promise that the nations of the earth will be blessed—because of Abraham’s obedience.

I think what we see here a prime transition from the individual into corporate life.Since Abraham, those who follow God—the people of God—must be understood as a first person plural, rather a first person singular. That ever since Abraham, we have been a ‘we’ rather than an ‘I’.
Abraham didn’t merely merely! offer his child as a burnt offering; he offered himself. He offered his own future as he offered his son. He offered his I. He couldn’t have taken his own life, could he, to prove his faith in God? Suicide would have been meaningless in this context. But that’s what it amounts to: Abraham, in offering his only son, is offering himself, much more powerfully, intensely.
Imagine that Isaac had indeed been slaughtered, a burnt offering. Abraham could not have continued. Isaac’s death would have been his too.
It is only after Abraham had proved himself willing to sacrifice himself that the people of God can be born. He becomes a father of nations in that moment of reprieve. And at that moment the corporate, rather than the individual is born. First person plural rather than first person singular.

Corporate identity has been the prime identity ever since, I’d argue—it’s one of the greatest gifts that God bestows on humanity: that we are born to be community; that our lives only make sense when we know ourselves to be in relation. That we are only fully human when we refuse to indulge the ‘me, myself, I’ that wants its own way; that cries out for attention, that lives out a damaged existence of self-referentiality, self-absorption. 
The corporate identity is one that the world is hell bent on forgetting. Instead the individual is vaunted and displayed: a peacock persona, demanding its human rights, yelling equality at every turn, refusing a sense of responsibility to those around.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, based in York, produced a report in 2008 on contemporary social evils. Head of the list was excessive individualism. Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker philanthropist. In 1904 he set up trusts that bear his name, and urged them to search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil in the community. A hundred or so years later a consultative process flagged up what Zygmunt Bauman called ‘the withdrawal of society’ as profoundly damaging in contemporary society. Most of the public and the intellectuals consulted spoke with one voice: the greatest evil is the retreat of society in the face of rampant individualism.

 You see it in youth clubs that don’t work anymore because kids don’t know how to care for others, or for their environment. In young people so schooled in child-centred approaches that they understand education as a consumer, rather than as a culture to be acquired and to which they might aspire to make a contribution.How profoundly reductionist. You see it in adults unable to sustainmarried life because their individual needs are no longer metthe person they wed. We all know what it looks like: we hopefully all recognise in ourselves the corrosive power of what Luther called ‘me, myself, I’, and repent.

Thursday is almost upon us – do make sure that you use your cross. And as you do, bear in mind the need for us to recover a sense of community again in the face of individualism. That Abraham became the father of a first person plural – the people of faith. Christian churches need to recover confidence in commending corporate life to society again.
We are the body of Christ. We know that corporate life flourishes best when it feeds on the Body of Christ. We need to talk about what corporate life is about; we need to live it, as honestly and courageously as we can. We need to commend the church as the prime example of corporate living – enriching society at large, upholding our civil institutions, our voluntary organisations, and yes, our political systems and structures of governance. We simply need to recover this, as a matter of urgency, in a nation that increasingly forgets God. It starts with you and me, and our refusal to speak and be individual.

Or rather, to be individual in the true sense of the word—as indivisible, that which cannot be divided. Truly individual, knowing Donne’s wisdom that no man is an island, entire of itself.

Think for a moment about the choir. The children come from schools all around, and from all sorts of backgrounds. They are individuals when they first come along, but they receive an education that is choir centred, not child-centred. They very quickly learn that they are there to contribute to the choir, to the singing, and they learn that they belong to something vastly larger than them – a choral tradition that stretches into the past and through them, into the future. They become incorporated into the choir; they become a first person plural identity – a we instead of an I.

Rampart individualism is an aberration. All our natural inclinations are towards community. So it’s not difficult to redeem, and change and transform. What does it take? The realisation that we are members together of the body. Or, as Jesus taught in John’s gospel, By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. When we learn to love, to give and forgive, then we learn to be the corporate, we become the Body of Christ.
As you vote, don’t just vote for your own self interest. Vote for the good of society as a whole – for community, for us as a nation; for the party you think best expresses the teaching of Jesus who gave his body and blood that we might be one.
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.