May 18, 2008

Scripture:         Genesis 22:1-14

Sermon:           “This Is a Test”

            Let’s now turn God’s Word.  Our scripture lesson today comes from the book of Genesis.  I want to look at a difficult story with you today.  In chapter 22, let’s read together verses 1 through 14.  If you’d like you can find that easily on page 22 of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible in the bible provided for you in the pew.

            We are about to read what is, perhaps, the most disturbing story.  You are familiar with it, I am sure.  But, like me, you may not bring it to your mind very often.  For it tells a tale and presents a portrait of a God that does not fit neatly into our desires.  It is the story of the great patriarch, Abraham, and his willingness to kill his very own son in order to comply with a command from God.  And it is God who asks of Abraham to do such a thing.

            There is no easy way to explain all of this, though many have given it a good try.  And in the end, I don’t know that I can do it either.  But, I have some thoughts.

            Let’s go ahead and read the story as we find it in the scriptures.  We’ll let it fall on our ears, sink into our consciences, and wrestle with it together.  With hesitation I proclaim to you that this is the word of the Lord…

            After these things God tested Abraham.  He said to him, “Abraham!”  And he said, “Here I am.”  He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you.”  So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.  On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.  Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.”  Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.  So the two of them walked on together.  Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!”  And he said, “Here I am, my son.”  He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”  Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”  So the two of them walked on together.

            When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order.  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.  But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham!  Abraham!”  And he said, “Here I am.”  He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”  And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns.  Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

            I’m not entirely sure where to begin, I’ll be honest.  I remember vividly the moment when my daughter, my only child, was born into this world.  She was crying out her first sounds, taking her first breaths.  Her skin was still that color of grey before it turned red as oxygen flowed into her bloodstream.  Now that I am a father, this story hits me right in the heart for there is nothing more precious to me in all the world than my little Booger Bear.

            I said to her on that day, “as long as I live I will never, ever, let anything happen to you.”  And I meant it.  I don’t know how that’s going to play out in the coming years when I have to let her learn from her own mistakes at times.  But, I cannot endure her helplessness and her cries for me when she is scared.

            That’s what fatherhood will do to you.  It is probably even deeper for mothers.

            So, you’ve got this story in the Bible.  And God says to Abraham, “I want you to take your only son and sacrifice him on an altar.  You know how folks offer up animals as sacrifices to the gods they believe in?  That’s what I want you to do with that son you love so much.”

            I can’t help but read this story as a father and think:  there’s no way.  And if it were me in Abraham’s shoes, I’d say, “thank you very much, God, but you’re out of your mind.  Find yourself a new spokesman.”  And then I’d go and find my little Maddy as quickly as I could and hold her in my arms so tightly.

            It’s disturbing enough at the beginning, isn’t it?  God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son.  But, then Abraham doesn’t even seem to bat an eye.  When the sun came up the next morning, he was on his way to the place where God would show him.  No questions asked.

            And did you notice this little part?  Isaac starts to get a little curious about what’s going on.  Remember?  “Hey, Dad.  This is pretty cool.  I see you’ve got all the stuff to kill a lamb, build an altar out of wood, and set it on fire.  But, aren’t you forgetting something?  Where’s the lamb?”  And in order to get Isaac to go along with the whole thing, the boy’s father tells him what seems like a lie!   “Don’t you worry about that, my boy.  God will provide the lamb.”

            At this point, you might try to explain the story in another way.  God, of course, did provide another offering instead of innocent Isaac.  And you could turn the whole thing upside down and say that it was Abraham testing just how far God would go.  He seemed to know how it would all turn out.  So, it must have been Abraham testing God.

            But, that’s not what the story says.  In fact it says quite clearly that it was God testing just how far Abraham would go.  It says, “God tested Abraham”.  Right there in verse 1.

            And, we learn that Abraham passed the test.

            There’s a famous painting from the 1600s that depicts the angel of the Lord disrupting Abraham while he’s in the process of taking the knife to Isaac to kill him.  Abraham’s about to go through with this horrible thing and you get the impression that the angel has to grab the man’s hand to keep the knife from cutting into the boy’s neck.

            It’s the moment of truth.  The man was willing to do what God had asked, even if it meant killing his only son.  And we all breathe this sigh of relief as the whole episode ends with Isaac’s life being spared.

            I’m terrified of this story as a father.  And as a pastor, it scares me, too.  What did Abraham think that this God was all about?  How could you love this God and devote yourself to this God?

            I hear folks say things that remind me of Abraham at times.  And I understand that life’s most difficult experiences cause us to look for answers.  Those answers sometimes sound like something Abraham might have said:  It was just God’s will.  That’s what we say at times.

            Even more common is this notion that God’s sending all kinds of suffering our way in order to test us like Abraham.  Our world may be utterly falling apart at the seams with just one thing after another.  Losing jobs.  Family members in crisis.  Family members in the hospital.  Our own health in question.  It all seems to happen at the same time.  And we rationalize the whole disaster with this platitude:  God will never give you more than you can handle.  God will never give you more than you can handle.  Have you heard that?

            We say that like it’s in the Bible.  In fact those words do not come from scripture at all.  The Bible doesn’t say “God will never give you more than you can handle.”  Sounds biblical.  But, it isn’t.

            Paul said something like it once in his first letter to the Corinthians.  He said, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength.”  He wrote this as he was trying to get those wayward Corinthians to be aware of their temptations to sins.  It has nothing to do with God causing hardship in our lives.

            But, it doesn’t quite let God off the hook in Abraham’s case.  The Bible does say “God tested Abraham”.  And that test was unimaginable to me.

            Part of Abraham’s apparent willingness to go along with this plan might be in the fact that this was not so unusual in the world he lived in.  We are all justly outraged when we hear of innocent children suffering the abuse of parents or other adults.  And we’ll go to great lengths to try to bring it to an end when we can.  It’s hard for us to get our heads around the idea that some people used to sacrifice children as a religious practice.

            Abraham’s world was one where this actually happened.  The peoples all around him either did these things, or were rumored to do so.  Can you even imagine such a thing?  We are right to ask what kind of a god requires the killing of children.  But, that was, perhaps, not such a stretch of the imagination for Abraham.

            And, remember, Abraham was the first person God chose to start a new covenant people with.  Abraham didn’t really know this God.  He didn’t go to Sunday School or vacation bible school or sit through years of sermons and bible studies.  He just learned what God revealed to him over time.

            So, offering his only son Isaac as a sacrifice may not have been such a stretch.  The folks over in Phoenicia were said to do such things.  People who worshiped the local gods where Abraham lived were rumored to do such things.  If this God was real, that’s probably what Abraham thought would be involved at some point.

            The Bible talks about some of this stuff.  You know how the ancient Israelites who were Abraham’s descendents were often straying away from their own God.  They built a golden calf in the desert.  They built altars in their own land to worship the gods of their neighbors.  And one of those gods was called Molech.

            Things got so bad at one point that folks had built an altar to Molech right at the bottom of the hill under the Temple in Jerusalem.  1 Kings 23:10 says that King Josiah tore the place down “so that no one would make a son or a daughter pass through fire as an offering to Molech.”

            And the prophet Jeremiah railed against it, too.  Speaking on behalf of God he preached these words:  They go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire—which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.  (Jeremiah 7:31)

            For Abraham to hear God suggesting a child sacrifice might have just fit right into his expectations.  That’s what gods do, he might have thought.

            If all of that is the case, it seems to me that we have quite a different story on our hands.  It’s awful.  And it’s disturbing to no end.  But, it also says to us that God was so willing to connect with Abraham that God would go to this terrible extreme to meet him exactly where he was.  If Abraham’s notions of what a god was all about included these sick and ugly distortions, that’s just what God would appear to be in order to reach him.  Only then would God be revealed as something so completely different than Abraham ever could have imagined.

            Now, in that sense there is finally a bright ray of grace beaming through the clouds of this dreadful account.  God’s so willing to make a connection with somebody that even the darkest parts of his imagination are not off-limits.  Even in a man’s willingness to kill a child, God is speaking and claiming and searching out the man’s soul in order to capture him.

            Do you hear that?

            There’s no place too dark for God to find a way into in order to speak to us.  No place.

            We’re usually so afraid of what’s hidden down deep, what’s out of sight from most other people.  We’re so afraid of the truth of who we are sometimes that we’re just certain God isn’t going to want anything to do with that.  We do terrible things.  Sometimes publicly.  Sometimes privately.  We do terrible things.  And we have horrible thoughts sometimes.  We harbor some dark feelings, even if we don’t let them be known.

            And then we are just positive that a good and holy God couldn’t possible tolerate us.  We might not even be caught dead in a place like a church.  You know what I mean?

            I hear something in this story.  Do you hear it?  God’s going down a very long path in order to meet a man in the depths of his soul.  It’s a place where it is possible to imagine killing his own child.

            Now what do you possibly think is just too much for God to ever endure in order to find you and rescue you?  This is a God that you can trust.  And this is a God that you can love.  What do you know?  There’s a great deal of good news in this story after all!

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)