“Abraham and Isaac”
A Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Jean Niven Lenk
Sunday, October 14,
2012
First Congregational
Church of Stoughton, United Church of Christ
Texts: Genesis 22:1-19
Last spring, when we first started promoting our plans for
“Bible Top 40,” I said that this program year we would be covering the “40 most
beloved stories” in scripture. But I
quickly changed the word “beloved” to “most well-known,” because of the difficult
text we encounter today.
It is hard to call the binding of Isaac a “beloved” story,
but it is well-known. And the fact that
it appears in the Holy Scriptures compels us to pay attention to this haunting account.
Last week, Mary
Perry told of Abraham, who was called by God to “Go from your
country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show
you. And I will make you into a great
nation, and I will bless you” [Genesis 12:1-2a] and “make you the father of
many nations” [Genesis 17:4] “and make your descendants as numerous as the
stars in the sky” [Genesis 22:17].
Abraham obeyed God’s commands, and in the fullness of time he and his
wife Sarah, both well beyond childbearing years, are blessed with a son they
name Isaac.
In this morning’s lesson, God again speaks to Abraham, but
this time God gives Abraham a most troubling command: to sacrifice his young son,
Isaac. Isaac – the child of Abraham’s
and Sarah’s old age; the child of promise, the first star in a sky full of
descendants. And Abraham's obedient
response to God’s order confounds us. Abraham
does not haggle with God. He does not
remind God that this command is in conflict with the promise that God has made
to him – that Abraham will be the ancestor of a multitude of nations, and that
multitude is to begin with this miracle child, Isaac. Instead, without questioning or debating God,
Abraham goes out silently to obey God’s drastic command, taking Isaac to the
mountaintop.
Once there, the boy asks the obvious, yet heartbreaking,
question: "Father, the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb
for a burnt offering?" And Abraham
responds with what seems to be an awful lie: "God himself will provide the
lamb for a burnt offering, my son."
And just as Abraham draws out the knife to kill Isaac, God’s
angel calls to him and – to everyone’s great relief, including ours – tells him
to spare his child, saying, “I now know that you fear God, since you have not
withheld your son…from me.” God speaks
in the nick of time, staying Abraham's hand, and God does indeed provide; a ram
caught in a thicket serves as the sacrifice in Isaac’s place.
This story has been called "the test of Abraham,”
because it is not enough that Abraham believes in God. God wants to know: is Abraham willing to put
his total trust in God? Can Abraham go
up that mountain and truly believe that God will provide?
This is a test no one would want to undergo. We can barely conceive the thought of a
parent sacrificing a child. It is
abhorrent to us; abhorrent and threatening, for we know that, put in Abraham’s
place, we would not, could not, do it.
And contemplating a God who would test us in such a way and demand such
an act unnerves us in that place deep in our hearts where faith takes
root.
Like theologians through the centuries, we are haunted with
questions. What kind of God is
this? Why must God test us? Where is the God of justice and
compassion? We live in a world in which
we open the morning papers and see the story of yet another child abducted,
molested, killed, murdered. Just this
week, it was 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway in Colorado. And we want to cry out – why doesn’t God
protect our precious children?
Some theologians suggest that in this story, God wanted to
send a message to the pagan religions of the day, which practiced child
sacrifice. Through this story, was God
telling the Canaanites and Moabites that although such heinous acts may be
required by their pagan gods, Abraham’s loving, gracious God would never
require such barbarity?
Then there are scholars who believe the voice that told
Abraham to slay his son was that of a false god – the same kind of voice that
spoke to David Koresh in Waco and Jim Jones in Guyana.
And it is too easy to dismiss this story as another example
of the Old Testament God who is angry, demanding, and judging in comparison to
the loving and forgiving God of the New Testament, embodied in Jesus. This explanation is not only simplistic; it
doesn’t stand up. David refers to that
Old Testament God as “my shepherd”; Deuteronomy images that God as a mother
eagle who lovingly hovers over her young; the prophets describe that God as a
mother who teaches her toddler to walk and comforts a frightened or hurt child
in her arms [Hosea 11:1-3, Isaiah 66:13]; that God delivers the oppressed
people of Israel into the Promised Land and is called “Father” by Jesus.
No matter how theologians through the centuries, and we who
sit here this morning, may try to explain away the horrific story of the
binding of Isaac, it nevertheless reminds us that as people of faith, there
will be times in life when nothing makes sense, and all we have left is our
trust in God. Times when the very best
medicine has to offer is no guarantee for our or a loved-one's future. Times when a relationship upon which we have
so depended is suddenly dissolved. Times
when the career we have worked hard to build is pulled out from under us. Times when all that we have dreamed about and
prepared ourselves to do in life falls away, and we are left, despairing of the
present and bereft of a future. Times –
as our Stoughton community know all too well – when our precious children are
suddenly and inexplicably taken from us.
In those moments, when nothing makes sense and everything seems lost,
will we put our trust in God?
We do not know the anguish that wrenches Abraham's heart; we
only know that in spite of it, he goes forth toward the mountain, trusting God
even when it seems absurd, heartbreaking, senseless to do so. God tests Abraham and finds out that Abraham
is willing to put his total trust in God.
There will be times when we, too, will have to walk our own
road from Beer-sheba to Mt. Moriah, as
Abraham walked; and in those moments, how will we respond? When we are in the hard places and facing the
hard choices in life, will we put our total trust in God? When we are in the midst of struggle and
heartbreak and circumstances that test us to our very core, will we have faith
that God will provide?
In the story of Abraham and Isaac, at the moment of truth,
God is faithful... death is not the end, tragedy does not triumph; our God
gives life, not death. That is why the
first Christians saw in this story of Abraham and Isaac a prefiguring of Jesus’
story: a son called to sacrifice his life, carrying the wood of his own
destruction up the mount and spending three days on the deathly journey, only
to be raised from death when all seemed lost.
We are the inheritors of that story, descendants of Isaac who learns of
the God that transforms darkness into light, and death into life.
And what about the children in our world, and right here in
this community? What of them and their
families who wait for a reprieve that may not come? The questions remain unanswered and the story
is open-ended ... There is no neat ending for this sermon, just the promise
found in the name that Abraham chooses for the spot on top of the mountain,
where Isaac was spared and the ram was caught in the thicket. Abraham calls the spot Jehovah Jireh, meaning "The Lord will provide." Tradition says that Abraham saved one of the
horns of that ram provided by God and with it made a ‘shofar’ ... a shofar
that, like a church bell, calls people to worship, its sound a constant
reminder to keep faith in the One who promises to provide. And does.
Amen.
