June 29, 2008

Climbing God's Mountain

Julianne Stokstad

In the last weeks you have become reacquainted with Abraham and Sarah. You have heard again how Abraham, the powerful and revered patriarch of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians was a deeply faithful and courageous man. God promised Sarah and Abraham a land and promised them a land where they had never been. This childless couple responded to God's call and set out on a journey filled with hope and trust. We cried with Sarah, as she grew too old to have a child and many descendants seemed an impossible. Then we laughed with her as she overheard God's messengers tell Abraham that she would become pregnant. They are so much like us in their varied human responses, striving to trust God in the complex circumstances of their lives. Yet throughout this story, there is another side as well: that is God's continuing faithfulness and presence in their lives.

Today's story about the binding or sacrifice of Isaac is rarely preached because it raises very difficult questions about the very nature of God. Even though we are not Biblical literalists here, you probably wonder why I chose this text. I preach it because I know that in wrestling what is difficult, we can learn about ourselves and about God. This text raises many questions. What kind of God would require such an awful act of extreme obedience? Why is this story even in the Bible? Does God test us like this? Could God punish an innocent little one, causing such fear and suffering? Are there times we must disobey what God commands?

This text is identified by biblical scholars one of the Bible's texts of terror. In it Abraham hears God's voice telling him not only to surrender, what he most loves, his beloved son, but that he is the one to do the sacrificial killing. Abraham, like Mary mother of Jesus, hears God's voice and responded with "Here I am." And then the story tell us he goes to fulfill what he heard God command. We don't hear his agony, only his complicity in this diabolical test. We don't hear Sarah's arguments or her weeping. What mother would not weep and refuse this? We don't even hear Isaac's yelling as his father binds him to the pyre and takes out his knife. Only at the last moment does Abraham hear God call STOP, Do not lay your hand on the boy. Here, I want to point out God saves the child!

When we climb the metaphorical mountain to know God and to live in God's ways, what are we to do with this text? There are a couple of ways to deal it. One way is to ignore it or if one must read it to just throw it out as not applicable to us. But I respect the Bible too much to do that with struggle. Jews, Muslims and Christians scholars and teachers have wrestled with this over the years. I think of human sacrifice as something primitive societies used in their worship, like the Incas and Aztecs. I don't think of it as biblical. But human sacrifice was a widespread custom in many ancient civilizations, including those of the Ancient Near East. Sacrifice of the firstborn was a common practice among the ancient Semitic races as the most pleasing gift humans could offer to their deities. It was a different time and a very different culture. Abraham was brought up and lived among idol worshipers who believed the gods were jealous and needed to be appeased: the dearer the sacrifice, the greater the appeasement. So when Abraham felt he must show or prove his devotion to God, it is not unexpected he would respond in the way of his culture. Did God really say to Abraham sacrifice your dearest son? I understand text as a voice of the culture at that time, a lens through which primitive peoples projected their violent ways on God. Over the centuries this text of extreme obedience to God has been misused by religious extremists and fanatics to justify violence in the name of God. Violence and murder I know are not ways of God.

With a 21st century lens, if someone hears a voice telling them to kill, we would diagnose this person with a mental illness, probably schizophrenia, and do everything we could to prevent violence. We would prevent the violence unless of course the killing was of an enemy of our country, then it would be condoned.

As a woman, as a mother, I unequivocally reject this text as a command from God. In seminary I had a good friend whose young child died tragically through a medical mistake. Her child, born with a malfunctioning liver, caught chicken pox in the hospital as she was awaiting a transplant. After years of depressing grief and guilt, my friend moved into anger and somehow ended up in seminary. Her life was consumed with questions of why this happened and where God was in it all. She was the first person I knew to preach on this passage and she rejected the call to sacrifice as a test of faithfulness. Basically she said, this is a cruel and sadistic test of faith. Thank you very much, this test I choose to fail. Like all parents I know, she would have gladly traded places with her child and taken over suffering and death so her child could live. Can this passage, which seems to be antithesis of our natural human response, have anything in it for us?

Scholar Bruce Chilton in his new book Abraham's Curse reviewed in the last Christian Century concludes: "Any voice that calls us back to the mount of human sacrifice in whatever form it takes in its myriad disguises is not God's. It is time for us, whether believers or not, to come down to the place of promise, where we can see that no moral value attaches to sacrificing any human life for any cause....."

One thing this text shows is a significant shift in human moral sensibilities away from human to animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice became the dominant form within the nation of Israel. The Jewish Torah has numerous rules about which animals to sacrifice and how to do it properly. Jesus taught us that the point is to love not to sacrifice.

Before we point the finger at horrible Abraham, let us look at ourselves. I see many ways we are still sacrificing our children in the name of culture, country and even God. Some of the ways I see in which we do this are: letting children go hungry. There is adequate food in our world to feed everyone, but we allow politics prevent the distribution or we might even think some children don't deserve adequate nutrition. I think about how hard it is here, now to raise money for EDFK, for just the few children in Mexico that we try to help. Another way we sacrifice our children is by sending them off to war. Even though fewer of our children are killed, no one comes back unscarred, physically or emotionally or spiritually. I think of our children right here in Marin, who are sacrificed to the cultural values of materialism, meanness, violence as a way to live and how many numb themselves from the pain and meaninglessness with drugs. I think of parents whose dreams for perfect lives for their perfect children are contradicted by who their children are. On this Pride Weekend in San Francisco, I cannot help but think of parents who reject or sacrifice their children because they are gay-lesbian.

Listen to the voice of God in our terrible text of sacrifice. Listen to the voice of God saying STOP! Do not harm the children, the little ones! Listen to Jesus' words from Matthew saying "whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple---truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward."

God doesn't want us to hurt each other, do violence to each other or for anyone to suffer. The voice I hear that is of God is the one that tells Abraham NO, don't touch the child! The God I know is God of creation, of love, of healing and wholeness, not a cruel and sadistic God.

God created a world in which many more good things happen than bad things. God is God, the ultimate mystery in our lives. I love God because the God I know is the source of all beauty and order around us, the source of our strength and hope and courage.

How, in the face of hard and challenging times, can we hear and know the presence of God? We need to look with the eyes of children, looking at the wonders of our beautiful earth, seeing them for what they truly are-- mysteries of God---tadpoles and butterflies; roses and poppies; beautiful babies and awkward adolescents. The great wonder is that we have each other. In our church community, we have the love and faith of others to hold us, to help us and to sustain us.

What, then, can this passage teach us about God? The story is really about resurrection, as Walter Brueggeman writes "the miracle by which God provides new life in a situation where only death is anticipated." God was faithful and ever-present to Abraham and God is faithful to us, whether we can see it now or not. Amen

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