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Associated
Press: Birmingham, Michigan, August 5, 2007
A man was arrested today after police received an
anonymous tip about a bizarre religious practice that was to
take place. The man’s son was freed by police as the father
was in the act of taking the boy’s life with a butcher
knife. Police said the man told them he had heard the voice
of God command him to sacrifice the boy.
Names have been withheld to protect the juvenile boy’s
identity. The father is in custody pending examination by
state psychiatrists.
* * * * *
That is how
the story would read in today’s paper. We would be shocked
and sickened to read this in the Free Press.
It would be the kind of story we shake our heads about,
mumbling under our breath something like: “That guy is
nuttier than a fruitcake.”
Genesis 22 is
one of the most difficult passages in all of scripture. No
matter how you look at it, twist it, or try to nuance it, it
is a story that, at its heart, is a terrifying scene. We are
not sure what to do with this story.
This text is
terrifying on many levels. First, the fact that this act of
“sacrifice” was a test is terrifying. We ask ourselves: “If
that is how God tested Abraham, how might God test me?” On
its face, this seems like an impossible test. There is no
way to pass. Prove your love to God and kill your son, or
save your son and lose your relationship with God. Surely
there has to be a different test. Besides, this test seems
to go against everything we thought we knew of God. God
would never tempt us into sin, would he?
Many Jewish
commentators think Abraham failed the test. They think
Abraham was supposed to say no! He was supposed to say,
“God, I know you don’t believe in this stuff. It is the gods
of the surrounding culture who demand the sacrifice of our
children, but not you. It is not who you are.” One way the
text can be read is as a story of God teaching Abraham the
difference between the voice of the one true God and the
voices of all the other gods of the culture.
At first
glance, I really like this way of reading this
otherwise-terrifying text. It becomes a text about
discerning the voice of the one true God, a lesson still so
important because of the voices of greed, security and
career—voices that constantly tempt us to sacrifice our
children on the altar of selfish ambition and a seventy-hour
work week. More than ever, we need to learn to hear the
voice of the God who affirms life in the face of a culture
whose gods—the gods of poverty, hunger, abortion and
war—continually deal out premature and unnecessary death to
millions of children. Maybe God didn’t ask Abraham to kill
his son after all. I like that. It sounds a lot more like
the God I believe in.
But there is a
portion of the New Testament book of Hebrews that won’t let
us off the hook that easily. In fact, this scripture
suggests that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, to
kill his son, was both right and good. Hebrews, chapter 11
reads:
By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a
sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to
sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to
him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring
will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could raise
the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac
back from death.
The book of
Hebrews suggests that Abraham was going to go through with
this because he knew God was going to resurrect
Isaac—another terrifying prospect. I heard a story from a
preacher who served a church in small-town New Jersey. The
daughter of one of the men of her congregation had died at
home. This man was so convinced God would raise his daughter
up, bring her back to life, he would not surrender her body
to the medical examiners. There was a standoff with the
police before the body could be properly cared for. She
described it as a horrible event. “I can kill my kid because
I am sure God will raise my kid up again.” That kind of
reasoning gets you acquitted by reason of insanity in a
court of law. If Abraham is justified in his actions because
he heard God tell him to kill his son, then is anything
anyone does because “God told them to” justified? Isn’t it
just a bit terrifying that faith and insanity can look so
much alike?
In preparation
for this week’s sermon, I had to turn the clock back a bit
to my seminary days and revisit the works of the great
Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. These nineteen little
verses troubled Kierkegaard so much that he wrote an entire
book trying to understand them. He called his book Fear
and Trembling, and in it he asks this big question: “Is
there such a thing as the teleological suspension of the
ethical?” (I paid big bucks in seminary to be able to say
that phrase. Tomorrow at work, walk up to someone and ask:
“I was wondering what you felt about the teleological
suspension of the ethical” and see what happens.) The
essence of this philosophical question that Kierkegaard, and
I would argue many of us, asks after confronting the near
sacrifice of Isaac is: “Does the end justify the means?” If
God has called me to do something, does obedience to God
justify doing anything, even if it is
something that I otherwise think is evil?
And this story
forces us to ask some terrifying questions about the very
nature of God. Does God just randomly select what is good
and what is evil? Could God have determined that child
sacrifice was a good thing after all? Or is there some
absolute standard of good and evil that is not arbitrary at
all, a standard that even God is accountable to? If God
randomly chooses what is good or evil, or if it is different
for different circumstances, we are left with a morally
chaotic world of relativism—what is good for me is good for
me, and what is good for you is good for you—a slippery
moral slope indeed. But on the other hand, if there are
moral absolutes—cosmic standards set in stone, standards
that even God is bound to—then we are left with a God that
is not free to be God. And if God is God, then God must be
free.
Christian
theologians have sought to answer this dilemma. They have
argued that goodness comes from God because God is
good. Goodness is who God is. That is why we can trust God’s
word. If God said it, it must be good—it is who God is. But
then we read this story. If God’s nature is good, then how
could God tell Abraham to take his boy and bind him to an
altar and terrorize him with a knife? How could a God whose
very character is supposed to be goodness command such a
thing? Maybe God isn’t as good as we thought. This text gets
more terrifying all the time.
This brings me
to the moment in the sermon when I am supposed to tie it all
up in three quick points and finish it off with one of those
Chicken Soup for the Soul stories. But that requires
us to recognize that our ideas about God are so small, so
safe, so domesticated and so tame. This story presses us to
recognize that the God we claim to worship is an
all-consuming God. Our God can never be defined into our
nice little categories. The God we encounter in this story
is the God who has an absolute claim on our lives, and who
has the right to claim anything and everything about us,
even those things that are most precious to us.
Many of the
commentators I read this week tried to make this story more
comfortable, trying to explain away the absolute terror of
confronting a God who has an absolute claim upon us. So I am
afraid that trying to tie this up nice and neat would be a
mistake.
But this story
does offer a foothold or two on the ineffable mystery of the
wildly free and unpredictable God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob. The first has to do with the whole notion of
sacrifice. This is perhaps the first text in the scriptures
to suggest that our limited notions of sacrifice are always
going to be inadequate, if not downright deceptive, in our
approach to God. We are still early in the Old Testament.
This is before there is any formal sacrificial system in
place. So even before there is an established system of
sacrifice, the human impulse to believe that we must make
some sort of payment to God is very strong—in this case, so
strong that one might even sacrifice their only child. The
tricky part is that our impulse has the intention, but our
response is often off the mark. While it is true that many
of the writers of the Old Testament detail the formalities
of a system of sacrifices, this sacrificial system is always
qualified. There are many instances where a writer pens:
I am making this sacrifice, but I know this isn’t what you
really want. You don’t really want bulls. You don’t really
want calves. You don’t really want doves. You want my broken
heart. I am making this sacrifice, but I know I cannot
purchase your grace.
What is the
sacrifice God truly desires? The answer is all over the
scriptures. God wants our acknowledgement, our dependence,
our need, our humility, our contrition. Every religious
ritual of sacrifice is simply an external sign of what God
really wants from us.
Nowhere does
God ever say that we are earning or buying our salvation by
what we sacrifice. We are always reminded that our
salvation, our forgiveness, our relationship with God comes
from God—from God’s grace, from God’s love. Therefore, every
sacrifice, every offering, every gift we give is simply our
best attempt at saying that all of this came from God in the
first place.
In the ancient
Near East where Abraham lives, the gods of the culture asked
for child sacrifice all the time. So for the first listeners
of this story, what is most surprising is not the call to
sacrifice Isaac. What is absolutely shocking instead is the
call to stop. “Stop. No matter what you give up, you cannot
purchase my favor.” This story is trying to show us that the
way God understands sacrifice is radically different than
that of the gods of the culture. For the gods of the
culture, it is all about buying favor. Every ad on
television or in the magazines tries to sell us this lie:
“Just sacrifice your money on this, or on that, and it will
give you all the beauty, power and prestige you desire.”
And lest we
think that our religious lives are somehow immune to this
temptation, too often we are tempted to think: “If I just
say this prayer, I won’t get sick.” “If I just attend church
every Sunday, I will not lose my job.” Or, “If I put this
much in the plate every week, I will assure my place in
heaven.” The gods of the culture trick us into thinking that
it is all about exchange, a trick designed to make us think
that we can control divine power, making us think we can put
ourselves on God’s level, saying: “Let’s negotiate. I am
willing to give you this…but not that… in exchange for your
blessing.”
But that is
not how the God of Abraham is at work in the world. From the
beginning, what God keeps saying to Abraham is this: “I am
the one who is providing the sacrifice. I am the one who is
taking the risks. I am the one who is entering into this
covenant. I am the one who has initiated this relationship.
Your only jobs are to receive the blessing and to give the
blessing away.”
This story
reminds us that every lamb, every sacrifice, is provided by
God. We don’t have to keep trying to make the inadequate
sacrifice of ourselves. God says, “Stop. I will provide the
lamb—the lamb who is perfect, the lamb who is without
blemish, the lamb who can do the work of reconciliation that
needs to be done.” In reading this story, Christians should
be quick to see Jesus as the lamb—the Lamb of God that not
only took the place of Isaac as the sacrifice, but takes our
place on the altar of sacrifice, as well.
This doesn’t
mean we can dismiss the faith of Abraham—a faith that knows
God’s complete claim upon one’s self, a faith that is
expressed in the willingness to give up that which would
kill you to lose—for an easy Jesus-did-it-for-me
substitute. The book of Hebrews reminds us that Abraham’s
readiness to give to God whatever God asks from him is the
model of true faith, one that still needs our honor and
respect.
In a few
minutes we are going to come around this table, and when we
do, we will have the opportunity to see the connection
between the faith of Abraham and the death and resurrection
of Jesus. After all, this is not just some little religious
ritual of memory we participate in here. No, around this
table the Holy Spirit has promised to come and to use these
everyday gifts of bread and wine in such a way that we will
actually share in Christ’s sacrifice and in Christ’s new
life. We participate in a real way in his death and in his
resurrection when we share the broken bread and the common
cup. What we do around this table is glimpse what it means
to live into Christ’s sacrifice. Around this table we say,
as Christ said, that everything we are, everything we have,
everything we might ever become is at your disposal, God.
Like Christ, we recognize that we belong to God, and that we
will pour ourselves out for God and go wherever God calls us
to go. When we do this—when we break ourselves open
and pour ourselves out so that God can use us—we participate
in the sacrifice of Jesus.
So tonight,
let us come to this table in the terrifying knowledge that
all we are and all we ever will be belongs to God. And if we
can do this, God might just be able to scare the death
right out of us.
Note: Podcasts
have become one of the newest tools in doing sermon
research. I listen to several different sermon podcasts in
order to get some fresh insight, new illustrations, and
different interpretations on scripture. This past week I was
especially helped by a sermon entitled “Fear and Trembling”
by Laura Smit. Smit is Dean of the Chapel at Calvin College
in Grand Rapids, and this sermon was found on their Center
for Excellence in Preaching podcast. Her thoughts, along
with the continued reflections of Walter Bruggemann in his
seminal commentary on Genesis, helped inform the piecing
together of this sermon. |
