God said to Abraham, “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.”
Hearing again the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac
is not what most of us would want.
Yet here it is,
showing up on a fine summer Sunday morning
so that we have to look at it and not avoid it.
The horror of it all!
Do we really want to go there?
The horror of what is being asked by God for the testing of faith!
Would you read this to your children or grandchildren
as a bedtime story?
It is beyond all reasonableness.
Way beyond.
Reasonableness gets left out completely.
Is this what we’re in for – this sort of testing of faith?
If your mind works anything like mine does,
one might picture some horrific real life news stories
of aberrant parental behavior –
abuse and victimization and murder.
I’ve had to deal with that pastorally
and it’s the hardest work I have ever done.
And it leaves its mark.
Or all we need to think of is war –
the bizarre way in which we send our sons and daughters off
to be slaughtered
or to return home damaged in body and mind and spirit,
a huge cost, humanly speaking,
with dubious rewards.
Take, for instance, the poem by Wilfred Owen
used in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem
which was an anti-war statement in exquisite music
about World War I:
"So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son, -
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."
But that is not what this story of the Sacrifice of Isaac is about.
We have to back up and see how Abraham and Isaac come to this place;
we have to remember, or learn, the context for this story.
Otherwise it will make no sense,
and it will be abhorrent parental behavior of the worse kind.
Abraham, the one who would be know as the father of faith,
was called by God to engage in a comprehensive spiritual process
of personal transformation.
Actually we all are –
we all are called by God to engage in a comprehensive spiritual process
of personal transformation.
The thing with Abraham,
and why we have chapter after chapter of stories about him
in the book of Genesis,
is that Abraham listened and cooperated.
So God took him deeper and deeper into spiritual transformation
that would bring him to his full potential as a human being.
Get up and move to a whole new land and culture and people, God told him.
No matter that you are 75 years old.
And Abraham did so.
Look at the stars of the sky, God told him.
Countless, right?
So will your descendants be.
Despite the fact that you and Sarah have no children.
Well, Sarah thought and thought about that one.
If she was barren, how could they have even one child,
let alone a vast dynasty?
There’s the old custom of the surrogate.
Give Abraham Hagar, her slave girl, and claim the child as the heir.
Bad move.
Scripture records so clearly some really rocky family dynamics that happen because of that.
Ishmael was not the child of promise.
The next step in this spiritual process –
the travelers at the oak of Mamre,
angels of God
bringing the message that a year from now they would have a son.
Sarah laughed, and Abraham too. She was 90 years old, for goodness sake.
Nevertheless God was true to the promise.
And they named this impossible son Isaac,
a name that means laughter.
This is an important point,
that we have expectations about how things should work,
but God’s action is unique – the impossible happens.
God’s joke on us – and it’s a good joke, one we can laugh at too.
God was working with Abraham,
showing him a solid basis on which he could set his faith and trust.
With God the impossible happens, always surprising and unique.
See how the sacrifice was interwoven with all this prior history?
God was now taking Abraham to a place of final surrender.
Final surrender – for that is what faith ultimately is.
If Abraham was to become the prime example of faith,
it had to come to this:
to the place where the promise remained
but his expectations about this were surrendered,
and there only remained the unique actions of God.
Isaac, God was telling Abraham, is not for you.
Our children are not our own.
You may be familiar with these words of the poet Khalil Gilbran:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
… You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.…"
Isaac was not Abraham’s to own.
Isaac in fact would get up off the altar
as though resurrected from the dead,
and would be the replacement for Abel,
who was slain by his brother over rivalry and envy because of a sacrifice
Abel who sacrificed to God from his flock of sheep
and a ram from someone’s flock of sheep having wandered off
God provided tangled hopelessly in a thicket,
waiting certain death from some predator,
now the unexpected action of God.
Isaac would rise from the altar,
and walk back with Abraham.
He would have flocks and herds, and dig deep wells for water.
Abraham would never see with the eyes of his body
the descendants countless as the stars
or the grains of sand on the seashore.
But he completed the spiritual process of going beyond his own thoughts,
his own awareness of what could happen.
He surrendered in trust to God’s promise.
And we have this heritage from him.
This is a huge archetypal story of our own spiritual process of faith.
Are we his children of faith?
Are we willing to be taken beyond our own thoughts?
Where is God taking us?
Beyond all reasonableness
Beyond all reasonableness, obviously, in our own lives,
but where God is taking us is into a process of becoming
our full potential as human beings.
God was working with Abraham,
showing him a solid basis on which he could truly set his faith and trust.
God shows us a solid basis in Jesus, whom Isaac foreshadows,
the One on whom we can truly set our faith and trust,
Son of Man and Lamb of God.
Faith is a crucial and essential element of life.
Will you let God take you beyond
your own littleness of reasonability?
The promise is made solid in Jesus
and fullness of life beyond expectation
is waiting for you.
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