The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year A, Proper 8)
June 29, 2008
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
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God said to Abraham, “Take your son, Isaac, whom you love…and offer him to me as a burnt offering.”[1]
For a bit of the back story, God calls Abraham to leave his homeland and to go to a land that God will show him where he will become a progenitor
of nations. But Abraham, almost one hundred years of age, and Sarah, his wife, nearly ninety, are childless. Hard, no, impossible to bring forth
multitudes when there is not even one child.
Sarah, impatient with God’s timetable, offers her servant Hagar to Abraham. Ishmael is born. But Ishmael, according to God’s plan, is not the
child of the promise that Abraham and Sarah would become the parents of countless peoples. So unchosen by God is Ishmael that finally when Isaac,
the fulfillment of the divine promise, is born, God could say to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac.” (This discounting of Ishmael’s
existence by God is perhaps the most glaring sign that none of the “adults” in this installment in the biblical saga will come off very well.)
Abraham, having left his homeland, having sacrificed his past, is now told by God to kill his son, thereby sacrificing his present and his
future. And the scripture tells us that “Abraham arose early in the morning…and set out” to do as God had commanded.
What?
Presumably God’s command was meant as a test of Abraham’s love for God and loyalty to God. A test, we are assured that God had no intention of
seeing through to its terrible end. A test that Abraham, in his willing obedience, would pass.
Nevertheless it was a test monstrously cruel.
It does not assuage the sensitive human conscience to claim that this story is a biblical protest against the ancient practice of human sacrifice,
particularly child sacrifice. Nor does it comfort us to impose some theological justification on the violence of the story so to turn God’s
aggression into some positive good. That God’s command to Abraham to kill his only son is but a portent of the Christ event – God’s sacrifice
of God’s only son to redeem the world. That this act of divine sacrifice is foreshadowed in Abraham’s response to Isaac’s wonderment about the
whereabouts of the sacrificial animal, “God will provide the lamb.” All this explaining why we, Christians, thankful for the sacrifice of Jesus,
pray, “O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
But none of these explanations, these rationalizations really work. Sacrifice is sacrifice. Violence is violence. And in a world – whether ancient,
modern, or post-modern – filled with gratuitous brutality, which raises the question of whether there can be any such thing as redemptive suffering,
how can this story appeal to wounded human conscience? How can this story assuage souls ravaged by the ills of history and humankind. It can’t!
Therefore, at the end of this story we are left where we began – with a violent God who utters vile commands: “Kill your child.” So, either we
reject as not of God this and any biblical story that exalts human sacrifice or justifies child abuse, whether in the Old or New Testament,
whether on an altar on a mountain in the land of Moriah or on a cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem, whether involving Abraham and Isaac or
God and Jesus or we reject any god who mandates that sacrifice be made.
Choose.
And let us choose well and wisely. For if we do not reject this story as ungodly or, if we believe it to be of God, but do not reject the God
it portrays, then we run the risk of following Abraham in his willing, blind obedience. Following Abraham in the rightness of his oughtness –
I ought to obey my God – into hell. For it is this kind of love, this kind of loyalty that quickly degenerates into the fanaticism that knows
no limits either of history or tradition. The fanaticism that believes purification and redemption come only with the spilling of blood. The
fanaticism that readily sacrifices the living for the sake of some all embracing truth. The fanaticism that sparked the Crusades, that energized
the Inquisition, that fed the infernos of the Holocaust, that made northern Ireland a killing field, that sent planes into New York city
skyscrapers, that sets off bombs in the streets of Baghdad and Jerusalem.
So, let us choose wisely and well.
On Sunday, February 4, 2007, when I returned from my sabbatical, at the end of the service, I uttered this prayer: May we find a cause for which
we are willing to die and a self with whom we can truly live. Some of you questioned me, reminding me that suicide bombers have a cause for which
they are willing to die. True, I thought. Hence, I changed the wording: May we find a cause for which and a self with whom we can live. That
seemed right.
But once again I’ve changed my mind, for I’ve discerned that for me, as one who follows Jesus, one who died for his cause, life – real living –
is a matter of knowing that for which I am willing to lay down that life. So, this is my prayer: May we find a cause for which we are willing to
die that does not involve the sacrifice, any sacrifice of another life and, in that discovery, may we find a self with whom we can live.
This is my cause in which I have found my self. To embrace and to embody, through the words of my lips and the works of my life, love, unconditional
benevolence toward all, and justice, fair dealing with all. And when I fail, which is daily, as long as I have breath and strength, to try again.
For what are you willing to die, so to live?
[1] The Hebrew scripture appointed for the day is Genesis 22.1-14.
