Abraham & Isaac
This week’s bible text that goes with this sermon can be viewed at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=499148797
"Abraham and Isaac," John August Swanson. Image © by John August Swanson. Artwork held in the Luther Seminary Fine Arts Collection, St. Paul, Minn.
I wonder how this sacred story makes you feel. I wonder what it stirs up in you.This is the kind of story that can’t help but illicit strong gut reactions and I want to start by taking time to notice what’s going on with us when we hear it. Cuz honestly nothing I’m going to say externally is going to trump what’s happening internally with you. So I invite you to just take a moment to breathe and notice what your body and soul are up to right now. Just one more note before we take a second to do this. As you take stock of yourself, I invite you to withhold any judgement you may be tempted to place on your reaction. At least for this moment, let go of what you think you should or shouldn’t be thinking or feeling, the idea that a particular reaction is bad or unfaithful...just practice noticing without assigning value.
…..
I wonder if your muscles instinctively tighten under your skin, perhaps in defence, perhaps in anger, perhaps a bit of both. I wonder if your senses and your brain seem to have suddenly shut down so that you’re not thinking or feeling anything. I wonder if you feel a tinge of jealousy toward Abraham who, however misguided, seems to have an intense intimacy and an ability to trust God in ways that feel impossible for you. I wonder if you are repulsed by the mention of faith anywhere near a story like this.
Oh I definitely have thoughts and feelings about it. Part of the reason I feel the way I do isn’t just an innate sense of ethics, but because I’ve borne witness to far too many stories where violence and cruelty are justified by a sense of divine mandate and even blessing. It gets to me because it opens up the can of worms of other sacred stories where God seems to ordain destruction. This story feels deeply troubling, especially when laid onto a local backdrop where children are being put at risk for severe illness and death with a “faith over fear” justification. And then I start to feel annoyed that God has called me to work where I’m expected to answer for or explain such problematic situations. Plenty of folks want pastors to spin gold from this straw, but in my experience rose-colored theology doesn’t hold up.
What is God up to here? What kind of person is Abraham? Or Sarah, Issac’s mother? Why is this happening? Is there something we’re missing? What is being lifted up in this story? How can a God, who is Love, be involved here? And who would want to follow such a God? Make it make sense.
As I study this text and seek to understand, and read the wisdom of scholars before me...there are perhaps as many different understandings and explanations as there are stars in the sky. Seemingly inexhaustible amounts of ink have been spilled trying to navigate the complexities before us and their possible significance . Generation upon generation upon generation has wondered at this particular chapter of God’s story. I’m still not sure if I’m comforted or disturbed by the fact that we are not the first ones to wrestle with this story’s meaning, to ask questions of it. But perhaps the questions….may be part of the point.
Abraham has certainly asked questions of God before, even argued with God’s commands. When God promises Abram and Sarai endless descendants, they ask how can this be since they are old and still childless? They even laugh at the ridiculousness of God’s word. When God announces the downfall of the exploitative and unjust cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argues with God to be who God has promised and been shown to be...merciful and redemptive. One interpreter suggests a sort of Jewish lens of reading scripture in which we examine the space between the lines of Genesis 22.It may be that the narrator intends that the reader, having learned from Abraham in Genesis 18 how to question God, is now the one to ask the questions on this occasion.
In response to question of “who would want to join a faith that seems so callous?”, Old Testament scholar, Ellen F. Davis poses this possibility:
“The point of this story is not to make people want to believe in Abraham’s God, who is of course also Jesus’ God and Father. Rather, this harrowing story exists to help people who already believe make sense of their most difficult experience, when God seems to take back everything they have ever received at God’s hand. In other words, the Holy Spirit and the heavenly Council would tell me the point is not to draw people in but rather to help people who are already in stay in -- stay in relationship with the one true God, even when their world turns upside down.
This story appears front and center in Genesis, where no reader of the Bible can miss it, because the hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful more often than we like to admit.”
She continues:
“I remember the words of my young friend, a devout Roman Catholic, just a few hours after his first child had died in birth, strangled by her umbilical cord: “I could say, ‘Why me?’ But why not me? I knew this happens to people, and it never made me doubt God before. So why should I doubt God now? But still, I do not understand.”
The 22nd chapter of Genesis is the place you go when you do not understand at all what God allows us to suffer and, it seems, asks us to bear -- and the last thing you want is a reasonable explanation, because any reasonable explanation would be a mockery of your anguish.
This story of Abraham and God and Isaac is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or to deny that God cares at all, or to deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind.
To deny God any meaningful place in your life would be to deny your own existence. And so you are stuck with your pain and your incomprehension, and the only way to move at all is to move toward God, to move more deeply into this relationship that we call faith. That is what Abraham does. Without comprehension, nearly blinded by the horror of what he was told to do, Abraham follows God’s lead, for the simple and sufficient reason that it is God who is leading. To what end, Abraham has no idea.
It is quite common for theologians to hold up Abraham as a model of unquestioning obedience to God, but I think this is misleading, and possibly even damaging to Abraham’s character. After all, obedience is a virtue only if it serves a just cause. Obedience in service of an unjust cause is servile, cowardly, even criminal. … If it is purely out of obedience that Abraham submits to God’s command, then his willingness to submit is monstrous.
But there is another option.
What if Abraham follows God’s command, not out of obedience, but out of faith -- which is to say, what if Abraham trusts God, even now, when what God asks of him seems to run counter to everything God has promised? (For the child Abraham is called to sacrifice is the child through whom God’s promise of blessing is meant to unfold.)
It is trust, not obedience, that binds Abraham to God.”
The context of trust, of that kind of relationship formed over time, after all God and Abraham have walked through together, casts a different light on the idea of this episode as a “test.”
We read in verse 1, “After these things God tested Abraham.” Neither God nor Abraham say that this episode is a test, only the narrator. But “test”…. Is an interesting word. One I hear often in time of unknowable challenge, that “God is testing you.” A test conjures up images of grade school in which you can either pass or fail. It can evoke the feeling of being tricked – where your innate responses and assumption are used against you in pursuit of a nearly impossible solution. But “to test” can also mean to probe, to delve deeply into discovery, to know, to uncover truth.
When you test a ship’s seaworthiness the goal is not to sink the ship, or even cause it undue distress, but to know its boundaries, and capabilities, to identify small leaks, areas that might be tweaked before going farther into the ocean. To know a thing is to build trust in it, to strengthen the relationship between two things. Perhaps this is an experience that serves to strengthen Abraham’s trust in God’s promises, even amidst all that seems to run counter to those promises.
Abraham knows God to be life-giver, as one who provides possibilities out of impossibility, as one who doesn’t not abandon or overlook. In the cross of Christ, God becomes the One and only beloved to carry the wood for the fire, the weight of suffering, but also the lamb of impossible possibilities.
When we are in a spot that doesn’t make any sense, when the world’s cruelty and heartache seem to ask more of us than we want to be a part of….what we thought we knew may be shaken, tested, even ultimately unraveled. And yet what emerges from the brambles...draws on what was already deeply true while also creating a new saving ways of being in the world and with the divine. I wonder when we approach the crucibles of our own lives….what emerges as a core knowing we can lean on?