Faith and a Horror Story

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.

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 known 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.

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?

Our current situation caught in the middle of a pandemic 

                                                gives us good cause to ask this question.

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.

Compassion and Harvest

In the Gospel for today we hear that

“… Jesus went about all the cities and villages, 

            teaching in their synagogues, 

            and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, 

            and curing every disease and every sickness. 

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, 

            because they were harassed and helpless,

                        like sheep without a shepherd.

Jesus looks at all with love and compassion,

                        every single person wherever he went.

He saw and sees the condition of suffering for each one;

            he sees the helplessness they experience in the face of their suffering.

He knows it all.

Nothing escapes from his loving gaze – 

            your pain and mine, hidden and known, 

            the suffering we admit to 

            and the suffering we hide 

                        out of the shame of not being self-sufficient, 

                        not having it all together.

And then there is the suffering we are not even aware of,

            the ways in which we are bound by the limitations of our perceptions

                        and the timidity of our faith.

Jesus saw the crowds and he had compassion for them

            because they there harassed and helpless and leaderless.

In his compassion he sends out his disciples to minister to them

                        just as he would minister to them.

“The harvest is plentiful,

            but the laborers are few.”

In this Gospel reading for today,

            I think we can get it about who the laborers are, the 12,

                        but what exactly is the harvest?

Is it a harvest of saved souls?

Is it a harvest of testimonies and stories of healings and liberations

                        that have come to people?

Or perhaps one could think of the harvest in terms of

            what the disciples harvest from Jesus:

                        of the authority he has to give them to carry out their mission

                        of healing and setting free 

                        and proclaiming the Kingdom come near.

They harvested from Jesus the authority

            to cast out unclean spirits and to cure every disease and sickness.

This was not their own capability, or even what they learned in seminary,

            but pure gift through the Holy Spirit.

And these disciples don’t have to go far – 

            those needing to hear the good news

                        are those even of their own household of faith.

            Can’t make an assumption about them

                        that there is no need for release from unclean spirits or disease.

This proclaiming of the Good News of the Kingdom of God drawn near

            is not for the purpose of making the Samaritans, 

                        or other neighboring peoples, 

            into good Jews.

Rather right within the “right believing” Jews 

            were many who were lost,

            who were silently suffering in their own private situations

                        of pain, grief, bondage, alienation, loneliness, anger,

                        and all other forms of human wretchedness.

So Jesus begins with his closest disciples and sends them out.

Is this message just for the original 12? 

We say no, but for all disciples, including ourselves.

First Jesus sends the 12.

They are only to go to Judean and Galilean towns.

Later he will send 72, 

            and the text says he sent them to all the places he was going to go.

Then he sent 120, 

            who had gathered in the upper room the day of Pentecost, 

            and they went out into all the known world at that time.

Starting close to home, the circle then ever widens.

Next he sends us.

And if we look at this passage and his instructions,

            then this is quite a lot to ask of the average pewsitter.

We are not just to proclaim in word some spiritual good news,

            but also to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, 

                        cast out unclean spirits

            and make no provisions for ourselves

                        but rely on those who receive this ministry to take care of our needs.

Say!  We don’t even ask this of the clergy!

            And this is not what you would find in the call process for a new rector!

But what Jesus is telling the 12 here

            is that they are to go out and do exactly what he had been doing, right?

And to do it in the same way Jesus did,

            that is, with utter trust that your basic needs will be met.

Jesus had no home, no paycheck, no pension plan, no credit cards, 

                                                not even carry on luggage.

So Jesus knew this was way beyond the capabilities of the disciples,

                                                                                                and all the rest of us too.

In actuality the disciples would be doing these things 

            not out of their own capabilities

            but Jesus was going to be working through them.

It is Jesus who does the work, not us.

When acting as evangelists for the Gospel, remember:

            we are not the ones who are doing the saving.

It is Jesus.

The healing and casting out or liberation, 

                        which are signs of the Kingdom of Heaven drawing near, 

            are done by Jesus.

And they are done by him through the open and willing bodies 

                                    of his disciples.

We would like to think that these disciples were ordinary folks;

            there were fishermen and a tax collector among the 12,

                                                            we know for sure.

But they were extraordinary

            in that they were responsive to Christ’s call for them to follow him.

They got it about the huge compassion Jesus expressed 

            through his words, his actions and his very being.

They were magnetized by that,

            and so when Jesus drew them, they responded.

And they came with openness –

            openness of mind, openness of heart and openness of hand.

So the implications for ourselves                         here                         today               …

“The harvest is plentiful,

            but the laborers are few.”

From Romans 5:  Paul writes that we can “boast in our sufferings, 

knowing that suffering produces endurance, 

and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 

and hope does not disappoint us, 

because God's love has been poured into our hearts 

through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”