"What Is Our Best Sacrifice" (Abraham and Isaac)

            11/25/12                     Genesis 22:1-19                    Grace UMC

We have just celebrated Thanksgiving as a nation.  It is a time of year when, as we think of things we are thankful for, we often think of sacrifice.  We remember that there have been countless people who have sacrificed their lives so that we might be free in this country.  We also remember that our parents sacrificed and did without so that we might not have to.  As Christians, we often think about sacrifice in terms of what Christ did for us.  In Christ, we see that we do not only have other human beings who have sacrificed for us, but that even the God of the universe has allowed himself to be sacrificed for our sakes.  It is a sacrifice that does not only free us on the outside but brings us freedom in the depths of our humanity.

One of the most fascinating stories in the whole Bible to me is the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham is called to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the land of Moriah.  This story has been the focus of significant attention by those outside of the church in recent years.  Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist and committed atheist had the following to say, referring to the story of Abraham and Isaac.  "And not scorning the three delightful children who result— who are everything to me and who are my only chance of a human glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, I’ll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, “Yes, I’ll [kill] my kid to show my love of God,” I’d say, “No, f[orget] you.”"  Actually, his language is somewhat stronger than that.

This is not a recent concern.  Going all the way back to the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, the profoundly significant philosopher who casts a shadow even over our lives today, said this. "Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from visible heaven."  What is certain for Kant is the moral code.  It is higher than God and is able to stand in judgment over what God may or may not say or do.

Another interesting point of view surrounding this passage comes from Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and committed Christian.  He was deeply aware of the fact that, even though we consider Abraham a hero of the faith, if anyone else were to do what Abraham was prepared to do, we would not consider them a hero of the faith but a murderer.  What Kierkegaard wanted to know is why we don't think of Abraham as a murderer.  This is, of course what Hitchens and Kant were getting at in their own way, but whereas they came to the conclusion that, in fact, we ought to think of Abraham, as well as the God who set all this into motion, as murderers, Kierkegaard was gripped by faith in a way that would not allow him to rest content with that conclusion but wanted to press deeper.

So the first thing I want to do is to make it clear that if you have ever read the story of Abraham and Isaac with fear and trembling (the name of Kierkegaard's book on the passage) or with disgust or dismay, you are not alone.  There have been many who have found it to be profoundly disturbing.  If you have never read the passage and wondered whether that says some things about God that we might not want to hear, at the very least you should be aware of the fact that others have thought so and it is passages like this that those outside of the church often turn to in order to make Christians look foolish because, at least if looked at from the right angle, it can certainly seem that God is somewhat barbaric.

Now, I have never met a Christian who believed that this is the best way to read the passage.  In spite of all the barbarism that seems to be there, we are too strongly persuaded by Christ to believe that God is truly bloodthirsty and wanting child sacrifice.  But if that is the case, how should we read the passage?

By far, the most common way the story of Abraham and Isaac is talked about in the church is to say that the real point is not that God wants child sacrifice, since looking at the whole of the biblical tradition makes it clear that he doesn't, but that Abraham was prepared to give up the best that he had for God so we also should be prepared to give our best to God.  It is a common interpretation, but is that really what the story is about?

Kierkegaard uses the story of the rich young ruler that Jesus told to give up all he had in order to follow him to shed light on this kind of interpretation.  He argues that the rich young ruler would not have become like Abraham, even if he gave up the best that he had.  He says, "What is left out...is the anguish: for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations.  Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they [still] want to talk about Abraham.  So they talk and in the course of conversation they interchange the words 'Isaac' and 'best.'  Everything goes excellently.  Should someone in the audience be suffering from insomnia [that is, actually awake and listening attentively to the sermon], however, there is likely to be the most appalling, most profound, tragic-comic misunderstanding.  He goes home, he wants to do just like Abraham; for the son is certainly the best thing he has.  Should that [preacher] hear word of this, he might go to the man, summon all his clerical authority, and shout:  ‘Loathsome man, dregs of society, what devil has so possessed you that you wanted to murder your own son?’  And this [preacher], who had felt no signs of heat or perspiration while preaching about Abraham, would be surprised at the righteous wrath with which he fulminates against that poor man; he would be pleased with himself, for never had he spoken with such pungency and fervor before…If the same [preacher] had some slight excess of wit to spare he would surely lose it were the sinner to reply coolly and with dignity:  ‘It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday.’  How could a [preacher] get such an idea into his head?  And yet he did so, and the mistake was only that he hadn’t known what he was saying.”

If we read the story of Abraham and Isaac and say, "Abraham was willing to give up the best he had, Isaac, and so we should be willing to give up the best that we have," how can we possibly avoid the implication that we ought to be willing to give up our children, since that is the example?  If that conclusion disturbs us we must either reject God, reject the passage, or push deeper to see if it is possible that we have misunderstood the text.  Given those three options, I think it is best to choose to push deeper.

This is all the more clearly the right choice when we remember that God is consistently telling his people that he absolutely does not want child sacrifice.  The issue is deeper than we might think, but I believe that it will become clear that the God portrayed in this story is not bloodthirsty but is better and more gracious than we ever dreamed.

The question we have to ask is why Abraham was willing to do this at all?  Perhaps it is nothing more than what the writer of Hebrews says, "By faith, Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.  He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.’  He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead – and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”  It may have been that, but I think that it there is more to it.  Though this story is the closest Israel ever got to affirming child sacrifice, it was a common practice elsewhere in the Ancient Near East.  The followers of the Ammonite god, Molech, for example, practiced child sacrifice regularly, precisely because it was an offering of the best that they had.  Ancient tribes in South America played games not altogether unlike our modern game of basketball and sacrificed, not the losing but the winning team, again precisely because it was an offering of their best.

There is a certain logic to these practices that horrify us today.  If God demands from us total commitment, does that not trump even our commitments to our family?  In spite of the fact that this way of reasoning has been so common throughout history, it has been conspicuously absent in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Why is that?  The reason is that the obligation for total obedience to God does not just mean that we need to surrender our devotion to everything else when compared to our devotion to God.  It also means that we need to surrender the right to decide for ourselves what the best that we have to offer is.  We don't get to decide for ourselves what God wants, but we need to listen to him to hear what he has to say about the matter.

As frightening as the whole story can be and as often as God and Abraham get criticized for doing what they do, we must never forget one absolutely crucial point:  Isaac is not actually killed.  He survives the whole situation.  If the interpretation that says that Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac was nothing more than a willingness to offer his best is correct, can we not assume that the conclusion of the story tells us that that willingness is enough, that God will never actually require our best from us?  If that is so, then we can make a show about our willingness to give everything up while comforted by the fact that God will never actually demand it of us.  However, I don't think this is the case, I think there is something much more profound at work here.

Even though he was tied down to the wood and the knife was raised, Isaac did not die, but something did.  Blood was shed and something was offered to God, but it was not Isaac, the beloved child of Abraham.  It was a ram whose horns were caught in the thicket.  What do we read actually happened?  "Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place 'The Lord will provide.'"  The sacrifice of the ram is incredibly significant, above and beyond what a sacrifice of a ram would have meant in any other context.  The ram was not just offered, but was offered instead of Isaac, it was offered in his place.

This is where the interpretation of Isaac as Abraham's best has something to contribute.  At the end of the day, what was the sacrifice that God wanted?  Abraham was willing to offer what he would call his best.  His son was bound and he had lifted the knife to kill him, but God would not allow it.  Instead of allowing Abraham to follow through, he gave him a substitute.  That means that God in a very real sense did not want Abraham's best; in point of fact, God wanted a sacrifice that was better than Abraham's best.

Now, you might be wondering, "How is a ram a better sacrifice than Isaac?  After all, Abraham probably owned many rams, but only had one beloved son."  And yet, God didn't tell Abraham to stop, go back home, get one of his rams, and then bring it back.  Instead, God provided his own lamb.  Even if we might think that a ram is insignificant compared to a human child, the reason why it was a better sacrifice is not because of the value in the eyes of Abraham or any other human being.  It was a better sacrifice because it came from God.

I wonder if, sometimes, we think about sacrifice the way we often do because we like it.  If we either choose or are forced to make a significant sacrifice, there is that bit inside of us that feels pretty good about it in the sense that we feel that nobody can ever say to us, "You never had to sacrifice."  When we sacrifice, we can prove to ourselves that our devotion isn't just made up of words, but that it makes some kind of difference in our lives.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is extremely offensive, but not because of how we would ordinarily think.  It is not offensive because a bloodthirsty God commanded a man to sacrifice his beloved child.  It is offensive because, at the end of the day, God does not accept it, but provides a sacrifice in his place.  God knows that Abraham will go through with the sacrifice; after all, in any other culture at the time, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  But right when he is about to follow through, God stops him.  This is an act of mercy, but it is more than that.  It is a declaration that God doesn't want child sacrifice, doesn't want Abraham to give what he thinks is his best.  It is a sacrifice unwanted by God and so, in point of fact, it is not the best Abraham has to offer, regardless of what he might think.  The best sacrifice is the one that God gives in place of what we think is our best.

It is an offensive story because it makes it seem that God's ways are cheap, that it is too easy to be one of God's people.  This should come as no surprise to us, since that is precisely what people have said, both in the early days of the church and today, but is it really true?  Is it too easy?  It means a wholesale renunciation of doing things our own way, of admitting that sin impacts everything we do, everything we are, and everything we think, including our notion of what are the best things to offer as a sacrifice to God.  To follow God means to allow our own sense of justice and righteousness to be challenged and realize that the ways of God are not just different than ours, but deeper, richer, and fundamentally better than our ways.  It means that we need to give up our right to judge, not only the actions of others but even our own actions, and allow God to have his way.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is also tremendously humbling.  It tells us that we cannot make an appropriate sacrifice on our own terms.  We must open our hands in faith, emptied of all our supposed righteousness and goodness, and receive the sacrifice that God has to give in place of the best that we could ever give.  It is scandalous, it is an attack on humanity because it says that God is justified in insisting on what he gives instead of what we give, but it is oh so very liberating, because God has already made the sacrifice.  He has given us his Son.  It is a sacrifice that is absolutely free because it offered without price but it is desperately costly because it calls us into question to the roots of our being.  We cannot accept the sacrifice without it challenging us to our core, but it is a challenge to be freed from sin, to be empowered by the Spirit and live in a better way than our world has to offer.  It is a sacrifice that changes everything and it is better than any sacrifice we could ever have dreamed up.  Rejoice, for God is not waiting until you make the perfect sacrifice, only for you to trust in the one he has made on your behalf and in your place.  Let us pray.

AMEN

The Greatest of These (9/23/12)

          09/23/12                  The Greatest of These               Grace UMC

When I was in seminary, I had to try to find my way through the difficult tangle of mass that has come to be known as "modern theology."  Since the late eighteenth century, trying to understand every new movement that came along and the changes that took place in thinking is a cause for headache in even the most brilliant people I have ever met.  Don't get me wrong, not all modern academic theologians are bad.  In fact, some of the best theologians in the history of the church have lived within the last hundred years, but the mainstream of thought took a frightening turn by the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Every once in a while, my classmates and I, who are a fairly traditional bunch who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, God in flesh, that he was born of the Virgin Mary, that he died, was raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven, would find a thinker that didn't seem to be too bad.  Whenever this happened, a student would invariably raise their hand and say, "Dr. Colyer [our theology professor], I think this person makes a lot of sense.  I think they are saying the same thing that I believe."

I will never forget the advice that our professor would give in response to these kinds of comments.  "When reading modern theology, you need to always remember to not just look at the vocabulary, but to look at the dictionary."  What he was trying to point out is that words don't have fixed, unchanging meanings but mean what they mean because of how someone uses them.  Sometimes, you will find that you will hear someone use a familiar term in an entirely unfamiliar way.  Without going any further, our American political season seems to be full of this, where both parties use the same words but mean very different things.

What we find is that this observation is extremely relevant to the church and to Christian faith.  It is true that Christians use different terms than everyone else does, because we speak of incarnation, atonement, salvation, regeneration, and resurrection, but we also use a lot of the same terms that the rest of the world uses.  We speak of churches being successful or unsuccessful, but we do not mean the same thing as the business world does when it uses those terms.  Churches are successful or unsuccessful, not based on how many people come to worship on Sunday morning, not because of money in the bank, and not because they have cool programs that attract people.  The success of a church is determined by whether people are being transformed by the Spirit.  It is something that you simply can't represent on paper.  Church success is not, at the end of the day, something that you can see, but something that you can feel.

If we wanted to, we could make a list as long as you like of terms that Christians and the church use that look and sound like terms that other people use but are significantly different, but that would get boring before too long.  I want to focus more intentionally on the idea of love, because we can hardly find a place where the church and the rest of the world are more different than in our understanding of love.

Over a year ago, having been newly appointed to Grace United Methodist Church, I preached a sermon that used the same text from the first letter of John to explore the concept of "grace."  We have just heard the text again but for a very different reason.  I want to point out that, not only do words mean different things based on how they are used, they also take on different meanings, or at least might mean more, when they are spoken by particular people.

For example, Tertullian was a significant leader in the church in North Africa in the second and third century.  He has gained the reputation of being an extremely strict moralist, that is, he felt that people needed to live morally and that was the most important thing.  Eventually, toward the end of his life, he left the mainstream of Christian faith and joined a heretical group called the Montanists because they were, in his eyes, far more morally rigorous than the rest of the church.  It wasn't too long before he became convinced that the Montanists weren't being moral enough, so he made his own group that was supposed to be even more strict.  The point is that there are lots of times where Tertullian criticizes groups of people for being morally lazy.  That is, of course, a serious charge, but when someone like Tertullian makes it, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because nobody is good enough for him.  However, when he says, "People take this issue far too seriously," and he does say that from time to time, it means a lot.

Here is John, the son of Zebedee, who is writing to the church and talking about love.  What makes his words so interesting is not just that the Bible says it, but that it is John who says it.  Before he was transformed by the power of God through Christ and in the Spirit, John was a harsh person.  In Mark chapter nine, we read, "John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us."  In Luke nine, we read, "When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.  And he sent messengers ahead of him.  On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.  When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?'"

Perhaps most interesting is a story toward the end of Mark's gospel.  "James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, 'Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.'  And he said to them, 'What is it you want me to do for you?'  And they said to him, 'Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.'"  My point is that this is a man who was ready to stop anyone who wasn't part of his own group from ministering to others, who was ready to call down fire from heaven to punish those who did not yet understand, and wanted to sit on a great seat of power and was willing to boldly ask for it.

The story in the early church was that, toward the end of his life, and John was one of the very few apostles who died a natural death, he no longer had the strength to preach like he once did.  He would be assisted in front of the congregation and simply say four words:  children, love one another.  A sermon of four words, but they are not just four words.  They are four words that are bolstered by the entire life that was transformed.  When John speaks of love, they are the words of a man who has known what it is like to be decidedly un-loving, who has wanted power, who has wanted to strike down his fellow human beings.  They are, by their very nature, words of repentance.  They are not naïve words, words that he says just because it sounds like the right thing to say, but words that come out of a long history of having old habits burned out of him and replaced with love.

I want to turn now to the words of Christ that we heard a few minutes ago.  "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."  It is fascinating to me that when Jesus tells us what to do, it is to love one another, but, as I said earlier, we cannot assume, when Jesus says to love one another, that he means exactly the same thing as the rest of the world does when they say it.

How does our society talk about love?  On one level, we speak of love as an emotion that comes and goes; that we do not just fall in love, but that we fall out of love as well.  We talk about love as if it means that to love someone is to make them happy at all times and never seriously challenge them or stand against them or something they do.  We have a thriving sub-genre of literature today that seems to be dead-set on promoting an image of what a romantic, loving relationship can and should be that is nothing less than shocking and abusive.  Sometimes, when we say the word "love," we speak of enduring commitment, even when times get tough.  Other times, when we use it, we talk about how much we love pizza.

The question is, what does Jesus mean when he tells us to love one another, and he tells us right here.  He says, "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."  Now how has Jesus loved us?  He has existed for all eternity, in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Spirit and then willingly came and joined us in our world of space and time with all the hardship that entails.  Paul expresses this well in his letter to the Philippians.  "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross."
That is the kind of love that Jesus calls us to have.  It is not a love that counts the cost of what is needed before it acts.  It is a love, as the famous passage reads, that is patient, kind, not envious or rude.  "It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  Perhaps most importantly, it is not a love that waits for the the one it loves to get everything right, or indeed anything right but takes the initiative.  Again, as Paul points out so powerfully, "For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.  Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might dare to die.  But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

Here is a fact for you that, while it might not agree with what we might be naturally inclined to think and it might not agree with insights from the business world or other organizations, nevertheless is true to the gospel.  The single most important thing that will convince people of the truth of the gospel and transform the world is not preaching, it is not church music, it is not Christian programming, and it is not voting Christian values into law.  It is the witness of the people of God who have been transformed by the love and grace of God and then who have lives that share this love and grace with others.  There is no substitute for love.  To again cite that famous passage on love, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

If you wonder why the gospel doesn't seem to have the impact that it should in the world today, the first thing you should do is look at yourself and ask yourself a question and, for your own sake, do not assume you already know the answer.  Are you living as a witness to the transforming love and grace of God?  If not, that is your first step.  Pray that God would so transform your life that you cannot help but bear witness to God's grace and love.  Pray for the Spirit to move both in your life and in the lives of others so that real transformation might happen.  Do not give up and do not rest until God gives what he has promised.  I don't mean that if you aren't perfect or if you still have problems that God can't use you, but there is no limit to the deliverance and joy that God can give you if you will allow him to.

If so; if your life is marked, every day, by love, if you can look over your life and give thanks to God that, even if you aren't where you want to be, you are no longer where you have been, ask yourself how you can go out and share that with others so that they too can become such witnesses.  Every once in a while, you will hear someone say, in an election season like this one, that if you do not vote, you cannot complain.  You were given a chance for your voice to be heard, even if it is a small one and you didn't take it.  If we aren't being faithful in what God has called us to be about, we have lost all right to complain.  If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.

What is the first thing that people would notice when they enter this place?  Is it that the people love each other more than themselves?  Is it that it is clear that God is present in this place, that this is a gathering of people whose lives are marked by grace and in the process of being transformed?  Is it that, even if we can't quite put our finger on it, something significant is happening and we want to be a part of it?  If it isn't, we need to ask ourselves what we can do.

If you look in the New Testament, you will never find a single passage where the church is commanded to put on a well-crafted, professional quality worship service.  There is simply no place that describes the secret to the spread of the gospel as the development of clever church programs.  Nowhere will you uncover a hint that the best thing to do is to look at what seems successful to the outside observer and use that to develop ministries that may or may not resonate with the people who actually do them.  There are only two commands.  The first is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.

This command to love is absolutely central.  We are not told that people will know that we are God's people because of our big buildings, or that we have great social services, or that we have captivating preachers, or world-class musicians.  We are not told that the best way to find out if someone belongs to God is by what they affirm as a statement of faith.  We are given one and only one distinctive mark: love. We might wish that we were given something else to do since the idea that we should love one another sounds so much like what we hear in our world today.  In fact, love is actually the hardest thing we could be asked to do since the love with which we are called to love one another, real love, love like Christ's, is not only difficult but impossible.  It is a love that is so completely other than what the world is capable of that a person, a community that loves like Christ loves sticks out like a sore thumb.  They cannot be hidden, like a lamp on a lampstand or a city on a hill.  This is our calling and this is our promise, that we be people who love like Jesus loved because we are the ones in whom the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells.  Divine love and a transformed world are the inheritance promised to us.  Let us go and not just do nice things, Christian things, but go and be the people of God who love one another like Christ loved us so that all will know that we are disciples of Christ and that the world might yearn to join us.

Let us pray   AMEN