The Place That God Had Shown Him: July 2, 2017 at Old First Reformed Church, Brooklyn

Scripture Lessons:

Genesis 22:1-14

Psalm 13: 1-6

Romans 6:12-23

Matthew 10:40-42

These are challenging and uncomfortable readings.

Paul, in his letter, calls us to obedience. He encourages us to become “slaves of righteousness.”

I have a hard time understanding obedience as a virtue. My instinct is to see obedience as a problem. And I have good reasons for this. Authorities that ask for our obedience are not always seeking our best interest. We do not need to look far to witness authorities abusing power and justice. In America today people of color face biased treatment in our justice system, encountering racial profiling and receiving disproportionate sentences. Pastor Meeter’s sermon last week illustrated how Abraham and Sarah abused their sexual and economic authority over their slave Hagar. And the sexual and economic abuse of women continues today. Should we encourage minorities and women to be obedient?

In recent years, American aggression in Iraq has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the displacement of millions of refugees. And the violence continues. Yet the United States of America asks for our obedience, and we tend to give it. What is the fruit of our obedience to the United States of America?

I was raised in a conservative religious home, where I was taught that people with homosexual attractions should suppress the nature of their bodies and minds, in obedience to religious authority. For many years I was obedient to such authority. But I, like many queer people, found that the rules of obedience I was taught seemed to have been written by someone without concern for my wellbeing. They seemed to be leading me towards death. Could such rules be written by God?

So I am skeptical of obedience to authorities. Often, obedience seems to be a sin, and rebellion a virtue.

Our brother Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, suggests that this is a misunderstanding. In reality, he writes, our choice is not between obedience and rebellion. Our choice is between obedience and obedience. We cannot free ourselves from obedience, any more than we can free ourselves from our bodies or our language or our thinking. We are all obedient to something. Our choice is in what we obey.

Perhaps most commonly in our culture today, we are encouraged to be obedient to ourselves. Follow your heart, we are told. Be true to yourself. There is a myth alive in our culture, that we have inside each of us a secret personal rulebook of me, written with the truth of who I am. And I am called in this life to discover what my own rulebook recommends, and to be obedient to it. Being obedient to myself, I am told, will make me happy-- I will find my true calling, my true passion, my true love. If only I can discover what my personal “truth” is, and be obedient to that, then I’ll be good. No problems.

But the truth is, we are fickle creatures. At least I know I am. My mind and even my heart-- changes day to day. Today I want something-- a certain object, or an experience, or a relationship-- and then when I finally have it, it doesn’t satisfy me as I hoped. Or it requires more work to maintain then I expected. Tomorrow I want something different. And so I keep looking.

If we cannot trust even our own self as worthy of our obedience, what should we be obedient to?

~~

Our reading from Genesis is one of the best known stories in the Bible. It is also one of the most horrifying. And it is a story about obedience.

God asks Abraham to kill his son Isaac as an offering to God. And Abraham obeys without complaint.

One way to engage with this story is to read Abraham as a moral exemplar. We should strive to have a faith like Abraham, who was so obedient and trusting of God, that he was even willing to kill his beloved son Isaac at God’s command. And God, who was finally convinced that Abraham truly respected him, allowed Abraham to keep his son. So, in this interpretation, we should offer full and unquestioning obedience to God’s commands, even when God asks us to do something horrible.

Some have suggested that this testing was such a challenge for Abraham because the request seemed to contradict what Abraham knew about God’s nature. The God who had promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars through his son Isaac, was now asking him to kill Isaac the very son God had given. The God who had seemed generous, overflowing with promises and hope, was now asking Abraham to do something barbaric and horrifying. God needed to see if Abraham would obey, even when the command seemed contradictory.

To me there is something off about these interpretations. This passage does begin with the words “God tested Abraham.” But why? Why would God ask Abraham to do something horrible, something that God doesn’t actually want-- the slaughter of an innocent?

Is God testing Abraham because God is insecure, and doesn’t trust Abraham, and is trying to find out if Abraham is truly faithful? This is almost like an ancient version of snooping through someone’s emails or text messages, to find out what they really think of you. These interpretations assume that God tested because God needed to know. I wonder if this testing is not for God, but is for Abraham.

The idea that God would call us to sacrifice our child is unthinkable to us today. But Abraham lived in a culture and world in which child sacrifice was not uncommon.

The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as well as the prophets and the Psalms, forbid and decry human sacrifice, which suggests that it was a common enough practice in the Near East during the time of the ancient Israelites, that it had to be forbidden multiple times in the holy writings. The book of Judges, narrating an event many generations after Abraham, describes how Jephthah, a judge of Israel, sacrifices his daughter after winning a battle against the Ammonites.

This is all to say that, in truly getting to know God, perhaps Abraham had a lot to unlearn. In Abraham’s world, in which stone idols were worshipped, and the gods were a terrifying force to be appeased with blood, perhaps the unthinkable was not that God might desire a human sacrifice, but that God might desire mercy.

It is remarkable that Abraham does not resist or try to bargain with God, as he does earlier in Genesis for the land of Sodom. Abraham doesn’t hesitate. As he reaches out his hand and takes the knife, the angel calls his name twice, as if concerned that Abraham in determination to kill his son might not heed the angel’s voice!

Perhaps Abraham felt he didn’t deserve this blessing of a child Isaac, born in Abraham and Sarah’s old age, this child who carried all their hope for future descendants. Perhaps Abraham always feared that God would take back this miracle child, this beautiful laughing boy too good to be true.  Perhaps Abraham feared that this God of promises was too good to be true-- that what God really wanted was for Abraham to suffer, and that God needed to be appeased with sacrifice. Who can believe in a God of truth, love and mercy, when what the world teaches is deceit, retribution, and death?

Perhaps all that fear and horror of God is appropriate, even obvious, in the land Abraham is coming from, a land of idols. But Abraham and Isaac, in this story, have gone on a journey away from that land. They rose early in the morning darkness, and on the third day they came to land of Moriah, and the mountain that God had shown them. And though they come from a land where the gods demand sacrifice and suffering, in this distant place that God has shown them, God does not demand sacrifices from human beings. In this place, God provides the sacrifice. God gives a lamb for Abraham.

Maybe it is only through this harrowing journey, through nearly killing his own beloved son Isaac, that Abraham can learn who God is. In the end, what did Abraham give over to the flames on the mountain? What beloved possession did he offer in ashes and smoke? Perhaps the fragrant offering that Abraham burned was his attachments and his assumptions about God.

~~

Who are you God? I know I carry with me burdens and assumptions about who God is, that are not true. But how often do I truly ask this question, “who are you God,” and wait, and listen in the silence for an answer? Do I wait for God’s answer with an open heart? Does God have to call my name two times in a row to get my attention?

We are wise to be careful with our obedience. Our brother Paul the apostle advises us so.

He says, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”

How blessed are we to be able to travel with Abraham. He learned through great pain, and through a lifetime of difficult journeys, who was the God to whom he was obedient, and Abraham burned in the fire the way that leads to death.

Let us not be afraid to ask God, who are you?, and let us be ready to listen to God’s answer.

Let us welcome into our hearts the words of our psalm, “Look upon me and answer me, O Lord my God; give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death.”

Over a lifetime of conversations and arguments, closeness and distance, tears and celebrations, we may come to truly know another human person.

In this world without end, may we come to truly know God.