Genesis 22:1-14

Psalm 16:5-11

Romans 8:31-39

MARK 8:31-38

Sermon – March 12, 2006

Abraham does WHAT?

No – Abraham ALMOST does WHAT?

God asks Abraham to –

What is this story, this heart-rending, deeply perplexing story from the deep past all about? And what does it have to do with us, 21^st Century Christians? Do we really worship the same God as the one who spoke to Abraham?

Yes, we do. And it is that same God who chooses Abraham out of all the people of the world by whom to begin the rebuilding of God’s relationship with humanity when, in Genesis 12:1, God says to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

God’s opening speech to Abraham essentially says, “This is how you will be viewed hundreds or thousands of years from now if you obey.” This speech does not describe any of the “little,” “tiny” tests of faith God throws at Abraham along the way. But Abraham passes the first test: in response to this speech, the Bible says simply, “So Abram went.”

Understand, Abraham is at this time the only person in the world who has ever heard the voice of or knows anything about the one True God. Abraham has no Bible, no community of faith, not even any oral tradition about God: all he has is God. And he, and everyone he has ever known, has lots of traditions about the gods of Babylonia, who were described in their own sacred texts as capricious, petulant, selfish, blood-thirsty bullies.

And so now he hears this VOICE making these outlandish promises. Outlandish because – well, Abraham at this time has exactly zero children. So how exactly is this VOICE going to make of Abraham a great nation? Especially as Abraham is already an old man, and his wife, Sarah, is getting along in age, too.

But Abraham has faith, even in this VOICE he hears for the first time whose only immediate promise is to guide him “to a land that I will show you,” not exactly a detailed MapQuest print out. Abraham has faith – even though most ancient peoples believed that not only were there many gods but that gods were territorial – and, that once he gets to this new, vaguely described territory, the VOICE might, in fact, have no power there. Abraham goes, even though his traveling is like moving a small village, since he has other relatives, servants, slaves and flocks and herds that all need water, and this VOICE is promising to take him away from a great river, which he has probably never lived out of sight of his whole life, to a country utterly unknown to him.

And then the VOICE makes Abraham wait 25 years until his only son by Sarah is born: Isaac, ancestor of the Jewish people, after Abraham previously fathered Ishmael (ancestor of the Arabs) by his Egyptian maid, Hagar.

And now that the child of the promise, Isaac, is old enough to go on a three-day’s journey with his father, old enough to carry wood, old enough to ask questions like, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”, perhaps old enough to be nearly ready to look for a wife for himself and provide grandchildren for Abraham (and confirmation of those initial grandiose promises of the VOICE years before), now this same VOICE tells Abraham to “offer his son as a burnt offering.”

So Abraham rises and goes.

What is he thinking during this? How can God ask him to destroy the fulfillment of the very promise that God has previously made to him?

If you have ever wanted to stand out under the night sky and scream up to Heaven, “I don’t get it!”, perhaps Abraham is your man. He certainly is entitled to do just that. But the Bible doesn’t say he did.

There are a lot of things about this story I don’t get, and maybe you, too. In addition to “Why would God endanger God’s own promise?”, there is “Why, even as a test, would God ask someone to do such a gruesome thing?” Hasn’t Abraham already been tested enough?

Why does Abraham go? Does he think it is a test? He does say to Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” – which proves to be true, but only after Abraham has already come within seconds of killing Isaac. His words say “this is only a test,” but his actions are different: “this is not a drill; repeat, this is not a drill.”

And what about Isaac? Someone who’s old enough to carry an armload of firewood up a mountain is also old enough to run away when he starts putting two and two together – or old enough to fight back against a very old man. He doesn’t. How much faith does Isaac have? Does he have faith that God will deliver him at the last second – or faith that his own death is, somehow, the right thing because God commands it? What would his own death mean to him? Abraham ties up Isaac and lays him on the wood. Isaac does not resist.

And where the heck is Sarah all this time? Sarah is portrayed in Genesis as a strong woman who is jealous for her son’s prerogatives; after all, while Abraham has another son, she does not. So she lets Abraham, with that ultra-focused look in his eyes, go off with their son – her son – on a mysterious journey for worship and sacrifice and take not one of the dozens or hundreds of animals they own with them as a sacrifice. Doesn’t she get a tiny bit suspicious, especially given that this sort of thing happens all the time in 2000 B.C. in the land of Canaan? Sarah is completely absent in this story.

But most of all, what is God all about in this story?

The traditional interpretation is that God tests Abraham in a way God would never, ever again test anyone, by ordering him to do something that God would subsequently, in the strongest possible terms, prohibit the people of Israel from ever doing. That prohibition of human sacrifice is one of the crucial things which makes the people of Israel different from – and better than – their ancient neighbors.

O.K.

But isn’t there another way God could make the point?

So this story is one to wrestle with over and over again. Christians do. Jews do. Muslims do – many of whom believe it was Ishmael who had the honor of almost being sacrificed, though the Koran does not name the son in the story. It is easy to see Abraham in this story as a fanatic – a strain that survives, alas, in some (not all) of his children – Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. When does faith veer into fanaticism?

Or does Abraham walk up that mountain weeping profusely, at least inwardly, submitting to what he hears as God’s will but praying that there must be some other way?

If so, Abraham’s prayer is answered. There is some other way. God does, indeed, provide a lamb for the burnt offering. Is the lamb miraculously provided out of thin air by God after Abraham passes this test of obedience – or is it there all the time as Abraham ties up his son and, if so, is he not willing to use the lamb until he is explicitly allowed to do so? We don’t know. All we know is, there is some other way.

Two thousand years after Isaac contemplated his own death, earnest prayers were offered in a garden at the base of what tradition says was that very same mountain: the mountain in Jerusalem on which ancient Israel’s temple was build, and on which the magnificent mosque known as The Dome of the Rock still stands. The rock on which Abraham stood with knife raised.

That prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane was, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” But that time, there would no other way. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Sacrifice for millennia has been the way many humans sought to appease, so they believed, angry gods. It was not just the Canaanites; the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas in the Western Hemisphere were gruesome masters of human sacrifice, and so were the ancient Irish – before St. Patrick converted them to Christianity.

Christ, Patrick convinced them, sacrificed himself for all sins of all people for all time. There would no longer be a need for sacrifices, whether human or animal. Christ himself had paid the price for our sins. We were not to make ourselves or other humans or other creatures of God suffer or die because of our sins; God himself had willingly made himself suffer so that our sins might be wiped away and we be reconciled to God.

From the moment that Christ died on Calvary it became crystal clear that any “voice” which demanded blood sacrifice was a delusion or a demon. God had done, himself, what he had not wanted Abraham, or anyone else, to carry out.

The time for sacrifice for atonement, for forgiveness, is over. We are set free from the burden of our sins. We are assured that the ultimate power of the universe is one of love – and of overwhelming, awesome, poignant generosity. “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven …for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”

Let the final words be those of St. Paul: “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?...for I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church