“The Story We Hate to Hear”
Genesis 22.1-19
A Sermon Preached by Dave Shull
University Christian Church – University
Congregational UCC - Joint Worship Services
You know the gods aren’t smiling on you when your one
chance to preach all summer is the Sunday this story shows up in the
lectionary. I mean, it’s summer! Why not a Gospel story about a nice
healing? Or a psalm praising God’s
kindness and mercy?
Alas, it
is not to be.
Today is
the one Sunday every three years this story appears on the list of assigned
scripture readings. So I am grateful you
are here. Let’s help each other listen
for a fresh word from God in this story we hate to hear.
Please
join your voices with me in prayer:
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me; mold me; fill me; use me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
I’m glad neither
of our congregations decided to make today “Bring a friend to church”
Sunday. This isn’t the kind of story
that leads most people to exclaim, “Now that’s the god I want to give my life to!” I talked to someone this week who loves this
story. But most people I know
don’t. Many Christians say it has
nothing to do with the God Jesus reveals.
At the same time this story raises a question all of us must face: What
does it mean to be faithful? For
Christians, that means, What does it mean to follow Jesus?
To hear
this question beneath the horror of this story, we need to enter Abraham’s
world.
In the middle east 3000 years ago, children were not
valued as children. Children exist only
to increase their father’s status and wealth.
So Abraham acts like any self-respecting male of his day would act. If sacrificing his son increases Abraham’s
status in God’s eyes, that’s what’s important.
Abraham feels no need to talk to Isaac’s mother. For she, too, has no value by herself. Besides, people at that time believed that
since God gave Abraham Isaac in the first place, God has the right to take
Isaac back (R.W.L. Moberly, Genesis 12-50, Sheffield Academic Press,
1995, pp. 43-45).
It’s easy for us to look back on Abraham and criticize
him for offering his son to demonstrate his faithfulness to God.
But what about the gods we offer our sons and daughters
and loved ones to? Often trying to live
faithfully, we unintentionally harm those we love. This story asks us, What does it mean to be
faithful? What does it mean to follow
Jesus? To answer that question, we need
to look at the false gods of society we find ourselves following that take us
away from the joy and justice Jesus calls us to create. We need to look at the false gods we’re
following that harm God’s creation.
I had dinner with a good friend last week. I mentioned having to preach on this story of
Abraham and Isaac. He was appropriately
sympathetic! I said I wanted to talk
about how it calls us to be faithful to God above anything and anyone
else.
My friend
got very quiet. Then he said, “I can’t
go there with you, Dave. For years my
parents have put God and the teachings of the Church above everything
else. That’s why they said they couldn’t
support me when I told them I was gay.
That’s why they wouldn’t let my partner and me stay in the same room
when we visit them. That’s why I wasn’t
allowed to tell any of my relatives about this man I loved. Being faithful to God was why my parents
didn’t even come to our wedding. They
said coming to our wedding would mean disobeying God. Throughout all of this, I’ve felt like
Isaac. And my dad has been Abraham. Sacrificing me to his God.”
My friend’s parents are sacrificing him to the god of
homophobia. Worshiping this god instead
of the God Jesus reveals to us has led them to harm someone they deeply, deeply
love. They do not wish to harm him. But their actions, and Church teachings that
bless those actions, slowly stripped him of his lifelong confidence he was the
beloved son of a compassionate God.
There are many other false gods we follow that can cause
us to bring unintended harm to those we love and to ourselves.
Parents
following the god of success can leave children feeling depressed knowing
they’ll never be excellent enough.
Childless
singles and couples worshiping the god of freedom can become so self-absorbed
they do not feel responsible for nurturing the lives of anyone else.
There’s
also the god of ‘I don’t want to tell you what to believe so I’m going to let
you find your own religious path.’ When
we’re raised by people who worship this god, no one teaches us how to make God
real. We never learn how to really feel
God’s love. And when we need to know God
is there, we end up lost. We can’t trust
we’re forgiven or don’t know how to forgive.
We can’t face the death of a loved one or our own death. We don’t know how to listen for where God is
calling us to go.
These days when I think about following false gods and
the ways we harm loved ones, I think of the war in
Sergeant
Eugene Simpson, Jr., was a career military man.
A bomb paralyzed him from the waist down.
A
newspaper columnist tells his story:
“[Sgt. Simpson’s] feelings about the military, at the
moment, are ambivalent. ‘Of course, I
still wish I could walk and still be in the military,’ he said. ‘That’s what I love to do.’
The columnist continues:
“But when
I asked if he still loved the military itself, he paused and then said: ‘Not as much.
That’s basically because we were over there, all these young guys doing
our jobs, but we really didn’t know why we were there. I ask myself, ‘What was our purpose?’ And to this day I still can’t figure out our
purpose for being there’ (Bob Herbert, Promises Betrayed, Times Books,
2004, p. 293).
We criticize Abraham for being willing to
sacrifice his son. Yet daily we
sacrifice our daughters and sons, and Iraqi daughters and sons, to the god of
fear. This false god tells us we can
kill our way to security. But it’s
killing our children instead.
Like many
stories in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac is bad news before it is
good news. That’s why we hate to hear
it. The story makes us admit that we
follow false gods and that causes harm.
The story calls us to confess that sin.
And this
story is good news because it calls us to answer the question, How can we live
faithful lives? How can we follow
Jesus? We know Jesus had a special love
for the people who lived on the margins of society. We know he kept telling fragile and hidden
people they were first in line at God’s banquet table. So we can be sure that following Jesus means
we will spend time befriending some fragile, hidden life. And we can be sure befriending that life will
help us understand what being faithful is all about.
Father
Henri Nouwen taught at Yale and Harvard.
He lectured all over the world.
He had the life most academics only dream of. But something was missing. During the last years of his life he
discovered his true calling: working and living as a chaplain in a community of
people with mental handicaps. With them,
Nouwen learned what following Jesus really means.
Here is
what he discovered:
“Just
after I moved in[to community with handicapped adults] they asked me if I would
be willing to take care of Adam. Adam
cannot speak. Adam cannot walk. Adam is what some people might call ‘a
vegetable.’ ‘Would you be willing to
wash Adam?’ they asked. ‘Would you be
willing to dress him and give him breakfast?’
“As I
began to take care of Adam, I slowly discovered what life is about. Adam began to teach me about the smallness of
living. As I bathed this
twenty-five-year-old man, washed his face, combed his hair, fed him, and
dressed him, I began to realize what an incredible gift life is. Adam spoke to me in a language I didn’t know
he could speak. He told me how hidden,
vulnerable, and deep life is. Being with
him gave me a sense of being closely in touch with living. After a while I felt an enormous desire to
leave my office and my books and be with Adam, because he would tell me what
life was about.”
Nouwen
realized when we say ‘yes’ to life we give hope to each other. He writes, “When we say ‘yes’ to unborn life,
‘yes’ to life on death row, ‘yes’ to the life of the severely handicapped,
‘yes’ to the life of the broken and the homeless – we give hope to each
other. Adam strengthened my hope. It wasn’t optimism. Adam is never going to get better. But he offers me hope. This hope can form a very strong bond among
people who are willing to go where life is fragile and hidden (Henri Nouwen,
“Fragile and Hidden,” in Paul Rogat Loeb, The Impossible Will Take a Little
While, Basic Books, 2004, pp. 114-15).
Being faithful to God today means befriending some
fragile and hidden life just as Jesus did.
Maybe it’s a life in your own family.
Or a life in a place like
Where
Jesus was is where Christians need to be.
Because where Jesus was is where most people in the world never go.
If you are not doing so already, somewhere there is life
on the margins of our world that you are called to befriend. Not a life to sacrifice to some false
god. But a life to see as sacred. A life to commit yourself to. A fragile, hidden life that will confront you
with hurt and brokenness. And that will
show you perhaps for the first time what being faithful is all about.