"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

Justification by Grace

10/23/11 Justification by Grace Grace UMC

One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.

But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.

Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.

The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.

Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.

Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.

When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.

Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.

So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.

You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.

We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.

Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.

I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.

The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.

This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.

But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.

Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.

Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.

AMEN