Immediate Word

As modern preachers choke over the choice Abraham faced and the God who asked it of him, a not dissimilar culture clash is playing out in our headlines. While military families continue to take pride in their discipline, patriotism, and sacrifice, many other Americans are staying away from military service in droves, both because of their distaste for the Iraq engagement in particular and also because our society in general is losing its stomach for war. For months on end, recruiters in virtually every branch of the U.S. military have been unable to meet quotas, and conflicts have erupted over their presence and their tactics in the nation's schools.

Though the Genesis tale comes from a vastly different society and engages different issues, if we wrestle with the story of the binding of Isaac we may come up with a blessing to help us see our way more clearly in our current conundrums around military service.

Understanding the Akedah

The Akedah, or "Binding," as this story is known in Jewish circles, shows us Abraham nearly sacrificing the heir to the covenant, Isaac. In its final form it is presented as a story of the testing of Abraham's faith and obedience to God. If one reads beyond the bounds of Sunday's suggested lection -- to verse 18 or 19 -- the patriarch's obedience is both commended and rewarded. As with all the patriarchal narratives, however, there are different layers of development and meaning still discernible and, like all good literature, it is not so much a story that we read as a story that reads us.

It is likely that the oldest version of the story took shape to legitimize Israel's refusal of child sacrifice in a world where the offering of the firstborn was seen as the appropriate, substantial gift to the deity (compare Exodus 13:2 with the mitigating instructions in verses 12-13; note also the identification of the Levites as a substitutionary "sacrifice" for Israel's firstborns in Numbers 3:12-13). Von Rad sees the story at this stage having been attached to a sanctuary where the substitute animal sacrifices were offered (Genesis, p. 243). In that light, the story becomes not a horrifying account of child abuse but a remembered moment of revelation in which God's people took a large step forward.

That layer of meaning, however, is all but lost in the version that has come down to us. It appears in its present form to be substantially the work of the Elohist, who reflected on the ancient traditions from the vantage point of a northerner during the time of the divided kingdom. It is not clear whether he was writing early in that period, within a few decades of the schism, or whether he perhaps dates from as late as the catastrophic final decades of the Northern Kingdom, when a discerning eye could read the impending danger of fall and deportation. In any case, he writes as an exile from Eden, as it were: the golden age is over; the kingdom is divided and perhaps actively threatened from without; the future looks doubtful. In this situation, it is not surprising that what would especially grip him in the story, the element that he brings out with such pathos in the suspenseful telling of the tale, is the threatened loss of God's promise. "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love ..." (Genesis 22:2).

Isaac is not only the beloved child of Abraham's old age; he is also the key to the covenant promise of land and descendants. "In him every saving thing that God has promised to do is invested and guaranteed," points out von Rad (Genesis, p. 244). There is no longer even a backup plan: Ishmael has been sent away. In demanding that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, God incomprehensibly asks him to give up the future, to give up the hope for which he had left behind his past. God demands a cruel and extreme impoverishment, stripping away everything given and everything promised, to leave an old man far from home.

It is here that the Elohist's recurrent theme of test and obedience comes in. Can Abraham, out of the fear of God, let go of everything God offered? Can he grasp that the covenant promises are not legal title or personal accomplishment, but pure gift? This moment of test strips the complex relationship down to its barest bones: will Abraham, and by implication the nation tracing itself to him, be obedient to God through loss and bewilderment as much as through hope and prosperity? Subsidiary questions such as, "How do we know God asked such a thing?" or "How can we know what God wants?" are not even raised. The narrative is not about discernment but about obedience, and it puts the question in the rawest of terms.

Nor can the issue be left safely in the past as Abraham's problem. Our recent gospel texts have bluntly reminded us that the choice to follow Christ can cost one a great deal, including the family relationships that, in that day, represented not only one's closest affections, but also the source of an individual's social and economic security to a degree we today can scarcely imagine. As Mike Johnson noted in the Midrash online discussion of these texts in 2002, "For many people religion is a source of security. But to follow Christ is to be asked to give up that security, finally -- till you have absolutely no foundation left to stand on except the invisible living God.... Fred Craddock has said that those who seek to save their lives will lose them, but those willing to lose their life for Christ's sake and the gospel's will find it -- but that those who lose their life in order to save it will also lose it. The only security is in a total letting go.

In a sense, it is Abraham's response not to the original call, but [to] the call to sacrifice Isaac/the promise/his future/his legacy -- all that God had promised, basically -- that establishes Abraham as a man of "faith beyond faith," faith beyond security, "radical monotheism," radical faith in the living God that is later reflected when Jesus gives up life itself in that same radical faith taken to the max.

Of course, as Johnson subsequently noted, such radical faith is "not finally an achievement, but a coming to our senses. We really don't own anything. Whatever we have will finally be taken away from us, or us from it. Anything not in harmony with the Ultimate is destined for the ashheap. That's not super-sainthood revelation. That's logic 101." And many are those who can testify that life has a way of bringing us into abrupt contact with this reality.

All that being said, however, it is the rare modern reader who will not choke on the image of God presented here. If the actions here ascribed to God -- demanding the sacrifice of a child, and apparently reneging on all past promises -- were attributed to any human being, we would consider that person criminally abusive. Does such behaviour become less abusive and morally repugnant when considered to be done by an all-knowing and loving God, or more so? Many people have comforted themselves in times of horrendous loss by trusting that God had some purpose in it. Others in similar straits, however, are deeply revolted by the suggestion, and one of the first commandments for pastoral caregivers is to refrain from intimating that God had a hand in any tragedy.

Service and Sacrifice

These are issues that remain unresolved in scripture. The Bible gives us assertions of God's compassionate care and guardianship right alongside presentations of God's call to appalling sacrifice. Not least, of course, is the sacrifice of Christ himself, a sacrifice that most of the Christian communion has long been content to consider punitive and substitutionary. The strands of God's care, judgment, and demand are all prominent in scripture, and it appears that they must be held in tension as being equally true of God's relationship with us.

If the deepest roots of our faith tap into such contradiction, or at least paradox, it is not surprising that as a society we struggle with the tension between preservation and sacrifice, and the question of what may properly be asked of us. One of the ways in which that struggle has surfaced at present is in the question of military service -- specifically, serving in the American military whose primary present engagement is in Iraq. On the one hand, Newsweek in its June 20 issue ran a feature on the dedication of American military families with more than one generation serving (http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/8186600/site/newsweek/): "Incongruous as it may seem for the millions whose closest brush with battle is on cable, soldiers and Marines on the front line are proud to be there and willing to serve again." On the other hand, this is increasingly a minority choice. "The shared sacrifice of World War II," observes Newsweek, "is but a distant memory. During World War II, 6 percent of Americans were in uniform; today, the Pentagon says, the figure is four tenths of 1 percent."

Discussion about the meaning of this is, of course, intense. "'The whole country's undergoing patriotism lite,' says Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University professor generally recognized as the nation's leading military sociologist," who went on to suggest that if Jenna Bush or Chelsea Clinton were to join the military "the recruiting problems would be over." From his perspective, it's about patriotism and leadership.

Others take a different view. For many it is specifically the war in Iraq that is the disincentive -- not only that it is a particularly ugly and dangerous engagement, in which the risk of death or dismemberment is high, but that, in the eyes of many, it is an ill-conceived engagement in which the U.S. should not be involved. For them, it is not an Abrahamic question of obedience, but a situation demanding better discernment.

Of course, military service has other layers of meaning as well. "Military sons," notes Newsweek, "tend to spout worthy bromides about duty when asked why they followed their fathers to war. But their more personal motivations are not hard to divine. Combat has been a test (in some cultures the test) of manhood for millennia. There is no better way to win a father's respect than to defy death just the way he did. Indeed, the effort to surpass one's father's or brother's bravery has gotten more than a few men killed. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., a Navy pilot, cried himself to sleep when younger brother Jack became a hero for his PT boat exploits in World War II. Then Joe Jr. went out and volunteered for what was basically a suicide mission." At the same time, the magazine acknowledges, "There is no doubt that the military can encourage family values. There are undoubtedly a few fathers right out of Pat Conroy's 'The Great Santini,' about his abusive Marine Corps dad. But there are many more who fit the model of the Conways, or Ray and Tony Odierno, father and son trading tips on body armor and inexpressible love as they passed an ancient torch, in a tent in Kuwait, on the way to war."

Rather than pitting those who serve against those who don't, with each imputing the worst possible motives to the other, it might be worth letting our challenging scriptures read us in this difficult moment. As we hold our struggles up to the light of these ancient words, they may reveal to us not God's intent but our own: they may help us to see what we otherwise wouldn't see about what we are doing and why, and challenge us to reflect upon those choices in new ways. And then perhaps we might, like Isaac and Abraham before us, find ourselves suddenly free.



Team Comments

George Murphy responds: There are terrible texts in the Bible that we just don't read in public or preach on. No pastor, unless trying to be especially provocative, would abandon the lectionary to preach on the rape of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19. But there are other terrible texts that are in the lectionary, and in fact have such prominence in the tradition that a preacher has to go out of her or his way to avoid them. Our First Lesson, Genesis 22:1-14, for this week is the prime example. Frankly I think its placement in the Lutheran Book of Worship or Book of Common Prayer lectionaries where it's assigned for (respectively) the First or Second Sunday of Lent in Year B, is better. That encourages a focus on God's role in the story rather than Abraham's, as is likely to be the case in the Pentecost season when growth in Christian life is more the theme. But this Sunday is when we've got it now.

Abraham is called to obey, but obedience must be based on something. It can be based on fear -- I'll get punished if I don't follow orders. But the emphasis on Abraham's faith throughout the biblical stories about him suggests that his obedience in the story of the binding of Isaac is to be seen as a consequence of his trust in God. In order to understand the radical character of that trust, we have to remember that Abraham is not "simply" told to kill his son, horrible as that would be. He is told by God to destroy the son who was, by God's very own promise, to be the one through whom Abraham would have many descendants and be a blessing to all nations.

It's easy to trust in God when we can see the means by which God's promise will be carried out. And it's easy to despair of God's promise when we can't see how it could happen. But, as Kierkegaard pointed out in Fear and Trembling, Abraham is able to trust that God will be faithful when the very thing that God's promise depends on is removed. That kind of radical faith is in fact characteristic of some of Israel's later prophets around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. I may have quoted this passage from James Sanders' Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972, p. 87) before, but I think it's worth noting again to bring out the difference between radical faith and commonsense religion.

For the prophets were true monotheists, and nothing they said so stressed their monotheism as the idea that God was free enough of his chosen people to transform them in the crucible of destitution into a community whose members could themselves be free of every institution which in his providence he might give them. Their real hope, according to these prophets, lay in the God who had given them their existence in the first place, in his giving it to them again. Normal folk, in their right minds, know that hope is in having things turn out the way they think they should -- by maintaining their view of life without let, threat, or hindrance. And normal folk believe in a god who will simply make things turn out that way. For them it is not a question of what God ought to do that is clear: he will do what we know is right for him to do, if we simply trust and obey. Nobody in his right mind could possibly believe that God wants us to die in order to give us life again, or to take away the old institutions he first gave us in order to give us new ones.

That's a profound theological theme, but we need to be careful about applying it to questions about people being willing to trust and obey political leaders or military commanders. Oh, the question of trust certainly is relevant there. Nobody expects a president to be able to guarantee the safety of soldiers in places like present-day Iraq, but if people have doubts about the reason we're involved in war or don't trust that the president is telling the complete truth about the situation there, or that everything possible is being done to supply troops adequately, or believe that the United States can finally succeed in bringing about a stable democracy in Iraq, then they're going to be reluctant to put themselves in that situation. Whether those various doubts are justified or not, they probably account in part for low enlistment levels.

But the parallel fails in one important way. The President of the United States -- like any political or military leader -- does not have the ability to create ex nihilo, to bring life out of death. Thus it's reasonable to require some indication that a political or military operation can succeed before committing ourselves to it. (One of the traditional criteria for a "just war" is that success must be possible.)

Abraham's faith and obedience are certainly legitimate topics for reflection. But as I indicated at the beginning, I think this text has more to say about God than about Abraham. After all, if Abraham's faith is an important element then the story is pointing toward the one in whom he had faith. The story demands genuinely theological reflection, something that has often been hampered by over-psychologizing, over-history of religionizing and over-moralizing.

The modern tendency to judge the way God is portrayed in the text by our moral standards can be a special problem. We would consider a human immoral who would demand that a father sacrifice his son, the argument goes, so we can't believe in a God who could do that. Actually the initial premise is questionable. While it would be wrong for one person to demand such a sacrifice simply as a proof of obedience, there are situations in which an officer might be expected to send a subordinate on a mission on which he or she would certainly die in order to save a larger number. (Star Trek fans may recall a Next Generation episode in which Troi failed a test in a simulation -- a failure that would have resulted in the destruction of her ship -- because the possibility of issuing such a command didn't occur to her.)

But recall that we are not dealing with a narrative in which God does require the sacrifice of a son: The "simulation" is stopped at the last minute. The idea that the story carries memories of a time when human sacrifices were ended undoubtedly has some truth to it, truth that is of more than historical interest. When we look at this in the context of the New Testament, the sacrifice of the son is not made by any human being but by God. Of course here we can expect to hear all the recent rhetoric about divine child abuse, but that simply doesn't make its point. Unlike Isaac, Jesus is not pictured in the gospels as ignorant of what is going to happen but as one who accepts his role. And like Abraham (at least in expectation) -- but unlike the caricature of the supposed divine child abuser -- God experience the loss of his son. As J¸rgen Moltmann especially has emphasized in The Crucified God, the Father as well as the Son suffers in the event of the cross.

The binding of Isaac as a type of the crucifixion has been common in Christian thought, but there is surprisingly little reference to the Old Testament story in the New. Hebrews 11:17-19 is the only explicit reference. There may be an allusion to Jewish traditions about the story in John 8 (cf. Bruce Schein, Following the Way [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1980], pp. 122-23). But in a sense the most significant connection is a contrast. In Genesis 22:16 (which goes beyond the limits of our text) the angel of the LORD commends Abraham "because you have not withheld your son, your only son," while in Romans 8:32 Paul reminds us that God "did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us."

Carlos Wilton responds: You're right, Chris. Sometimes we read the story, and sometimes the story reads us. That's certainly true of Genesis 22, the perpetually vexing story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.

To modern minds, the story conjures up dark visions of religious fanaticism. If Abraham is willing -- in response to what he hears as a divine command -- to wrap the cords around his son's body and lay him face-up on a hard stone altar, then how is he any different from a Jim Jones or a David Koresh? Where is the boundary between faith and fanaticism -- and what is it that leads otherwise sane and balanced believers to cross it?

Such are the troubling questions we encounter, as we try to open up this unspeakably ancient story with the modern intellectual tools at our disposal: psychological, sociological, theological. Yet very likely, there are some stories -- and this is one -- that cannot be much illuminated by dispassionate scholarly analysis. These stories belong to a very ancient stratum of tradition indeed. They predate the written word. They may even predate the very religion of which they have subsequently become a part. Very simply, they are what they are.

Maybe the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah is more drama than anything else. And not just any drama -- maybe it's closer to the dark, religious dramas of ancient Greece, divine spectacles in which the players wore masks and spoke with the voice of the gods. As we read these ancient words, and walk with Abraham and Isaac along the steep and winding mountain path, we come to experience the wonder and the dread of an encounter with the God whose name cannot be uttered. The story speaks to us on a deep, emotional level.

The God who speaks to Abraham before he climbs Mount Moriah is a fierce, unpredictable, even dangerous deity. Yet the God who speaks to him after his ascent, on the mountaintop -- graciously pointing out the ram in the thicket -- is a God who is compassionate, even kind. Many scholars think this story embodies the historical transition from human to animal sacrifice, and the corresponding transition from a terrifying deity who must be propitiated, to a God of love who does whatever is necessary to save the people.

Maybe this text provides a homiletical opportunity to ask what sort of God our people expect to encounter in worship -- a God of wrath or a God of love? J. B. Philips' famous book Your God Is Too Small may have some usefulness here. Many tortured souls today are perversely looking for a God of wrath, a God they need not so much to worship as propitiate. When they hear such a God speaking a gracious word, they may feel just as surprised as Abraham!

I'm struck, too, Chris, by what you say about how this passage closely follows Abraham's banishment of Hagar and Ishmael. I don't think I've ever read the Mount Moriah story in the context of this earlier episode. I've treated it as an isolated account. Yet what if Mount Moriah is the sequel to the Ishmael episode? What if God -- who (unbeknownst to Abraham) has already dealt benevolently with Ishmael -- is using the Mount Moriah dilemma to teach Abraham a hard lesson? Abraham has dealt cruelly with Ishmael. He has discarded the child of God's promise, not to mention the boy's mother with whom he has shared a bed. Now, God is dealing cruelly with Abraham -- at least up until the very last minute, when Isaac is miraculously spared. Maybe, as Abraham raises the knife, he feels for the first time the agony Hagar felt, as she sat down at a distance to watch the death-throes of her son. Maybe for him to feel that agony is the point of the story.

Many preachers and scholars have pointed out that the story of the sacrifice of Isaac has but a single theme: obedience. Obedience is a hard sell, in this self-indulgent society. Military recruiters were having a hard-enough time selling obedience, even before the roadside bombs started exploding in Iraq. Now, it's no wonder some pundits are declaring that the volunteer army is an idea whose time has not only come, but also gone. In a society that increasingly idolizes personal choice, who wants to be obedient anymore?

It's just another challenge in trying to interpret this difficult, but emotionally compelling, passage.

Carter Shelley responds: The following material comes from chapter 7 of my book Preaching Genesis 12-36. Chalice Press has graciously allowed me to reprint it here. The homily I provide at the conclusion I wrote in the form of a dramatic reading that includes Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and a marriage counselor.

Should you decide to use the sermon I provide, be sure to cite the source, Chalice Press, and also the name of the author. Most congregations are so appreciative of a little variety in our homiletical offerings, they have no quarrel with the use of other resources as well as one's own original work.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

Biblical Background

In reading this biblical text aloud to the congregation, you may want to change some of the pronouns to proper nouns in order to avoid confusion as to who is speaking: God, Abraham, or Isaac.

Why does God send them to the land of Moriah? The emphasis in verse 2 to Isaac as Abraham's "only son" adds poignancy from several realms: now that Hagar and Ishmael have been expelled, Isaac is indeed the only son. We who've read the earlier part of the story also know how long and hard has been the struggle to get to this point where Abraham has the son so long promised and waited for. God offers no explanation for why he makes this command. Abraham doesn't ask God why, either. God does acknowledge how precious Isaac is to Abraham in the words, "the son whom you love."

Verse 3 reveals nothing that Abraham is thinking, leaving our own imaginations wide open to consider what as a parent he must feel.

The intimacy and tenderness of the conversation between Isaac and Abraham in verses 7-8 heightens the emotional tension of the situation.

Abraham replies elliptically, "God will provide." It's ironic because, of course, God did provide Isaac as fulfillment of the promise of a son. It's further ironic to those of us who know the full story ahead of time, because God does indeed provide an alternative sacrifice after he has tested Abraham. Finally, those words, "God will provide" have become a stock phrase in Christianity, sometimes lightly, frivolously, piously, or sincerely offered at times of need. The danger today is in forgetting how costly and wrenching can be the need that proceeds God's provision. In this instance, God provides only after Abraham and Isaac have both had the heart torn out of them in full.

In verse 12 there is ambiguity about the voice speaking to Abraham. It is first identified as the angel of the Lord, a messenger, and then at the end of the same sentence, God speaks directly, "from me."

While one can conclude one's reading at verse 14, the story ties up more neatly if one includes verses 15-19, where once again God reiterates the fullness of God's promises to Abraham and Abraham's offspring, who have now been saved and will live to produce future generations.

The next biblical text records the death of Sarah. For the mother's death to come on the heels of the near death of her son cannot be unintentional. Elie Weisel interposes, "Abraham was perhaps wrong in obeying, or even in making believe that he was obeying. By including Isaac in an equation he could not comprehend, by playing with Isaac's suffering, he became unwittingly an accomplice in his wife's death." In her fictional account of "The Unbinding of Sarah" in Biblical Women Unbound: Counter Tales, Norma Rosen has Sarah declare to God before her death"

"You made time slow for me, God, as I hurried toward Isaac's rescue. Now time rushes me toward rescue from all but You."

She heard laughter at her ear, felt embraced and lifted toward light. At the same moment, she knew that the God she talked and laughed with was no more than a merciful illusion God had laid across the darkness that separated them. She would reach beyond the illusion only when life had left her. (59)

Walter Brueggemann notes in his Genesis commentary that it seems God is proving God's steadfastness by reiteration of the promises made. In this one, the tables are turned and it is Abraham's opportunity to prove his loyalty and resolution to put God before all other loyalties, even those to family.

This text may be the most important one any believer can read or hear. The earlier texts offer a God who responds to obedience and loyalty on the part of the faithful with bountiful blessings and rewards. It is a model many contemporary Christian preachers and televangelists still proclaim. But faith and life are not a simple a matter of faithful devotion rewarded with blessed abundance. Many of God's loyal servants find life extremely difficult and God's role in it baffling. Genesis 22:1-24 certainly fits into this more complicated reality. Of it Brueggemann observes, "Only now do we see how serious faith is" (185). It can cost a man his only son.

Renowned Jewish writer and holocaust survivor Elie Weisel notes that identifying Genesis 22:1-19 as "The Sacrifice of Isaac" is inaccurate. Isaac is bound to the altar by his father Abraham, but Isaac is not actually sacrificed. Weisel also points out that in sacrificing Isaac, Abraham will also destroy God. If Isaac dies, there will be no future generation to whom Abraham may pass his knowledge of God or his faith in the one true God. The first patriarch would also be its last monotheistic believer (72). So, not only is much at stake for Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah; much is at stake for God as well.

Observations and Questions This Text Invites

1. Often explained as the story of how the Jews came to not practice human sacrifice. Rather, they understood this story as God's way of showing human sacrifices are not what are wanted from God's faithful followers.

2. The testing of Abraham's devotion is another aspect of this text that receives emphasis. This reading made a lot of sense in Puritan New England, but it is less appealing in the 21st century where God appears to be playing a cruel and sadistic trick on Abraham. Perhaps Abraham had made Isaac more important to himself than God. Many devout parents would be deeply torn by such a choice.

3. What about Sarah? Where is she in this story? Isaac is her child, too. Was her circumstance irrelevant in a patriarchal culture?

4. Perhaps this text is a corrective for human misunderstanding of divine will. But the way it is worded, God clearly calls Abraham and orders him to sacrifice his son.

Theological Implications

It's important here to resist the temptation to jump too hurriedly to the obvious Christian parallel by reading this book as anticipatory to God's giving of God's only son. Such an interpretation certainly was not intended by the Elohist author who, in this instance, so skillfully recounts a very old and very important story of the testing of the first patriarch. Such tests, by implication, may also be expected of faithful Israelites and Judeans as children of God and children of Abraham.

Both the structure and content of Genesis 22:1-24 emphasize that the test God places before Abraham is necessary, because God really doesn't know how Abraham will respond. Verse 2 and verse 12 frames what occurs in between. "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love." "You have not withheld your son, your only son." The God of Abraham is not omniscient and omnipotent, thus this test is necessary to determine exactly how strong are the bonds between God and man.

For those of us raised with a Calvinist understanding of God, such an interpretation of God as limited and not all-knowing may be uncomfortable; however, in reading the Bible one needs to continually remember that the God presented in it is God as understood by the authors. It is not God whose divinity evolves over the pages of the Old and New Testament, but human insight into who God is. By the time this story of Abraham is documented, its oral tradition has been in existence for centuries. Abraham's break from the polytheism of the surrounding cultures was already a radical move. The notion of a personal, engaged, singular deity was also new. An anthropomorphic presentation of God through conversations, messenger appearances, and an inability to anticipate the behavior of human beings indicates vestiges of an earlier theological understanding of God and offers proof of the oldness and authenticity of this text.

Before one jumps too hastily to a condescending attitude toward this biblical text and a God who shares human characteristics, of wanting to test loyalty, and of not being able to predict outcomes, it's important to recognize that most of us relate to God anthropomorphically ourselves. The outrage and discomfort that many folks feel when new feminine or gender-free language is used to describe God is one example. How dare you pray to God as "Mother" or "Wisdom; it's a sacrilege!" Well, is it a sacrilege because Jesus doesn't pray to God explicitly as Mother or is it sacrilege to use a "she" pronoun for God, because God really is male and physically complete with male genitalia? Is God human? Is that heretical? When we bargain, bribe, cajole, plead, and pray, we often treat God as though he/she/both! is human.

Ironically, in this text where God does not know what Abraham will do, Abraham treats God with the reverence, fear, and awe that emphasize God's otherness. Unlike the bartering over Sodom and Gomorrah or Abram's constant reminders to God in earlier texts that God has not fulfilled the most urgent promise of a son, in this instance Abraham hears the command and moves to obey at once.

Preaching Strategy

My sermon builds on the notion that children are often baffled by the actions of adults and the fact that children often take responsibility upon themselves for parents' actions. Children who need to make sense of their world would rather assume they are the cause of parental abuse rather than try to comprehend the vagaries of adult conduct.

My sermon is written for three voices in addition to that of the preacher. It can be read as one might do a readers' theater, with the minister and three volunteers practicing it together in the sanctuary before it is preached to the congregation. Ideally, the part of Isaac would be read by a 6 or 7 year old who is comfortable speaking in church. (I have plenty who speak up loud and clear during the children's time; I bet many others do, too.) The minister would also read any narrator explanatory sections and the brief part given to the marriage counselor.

The point in the sermon where God intervenes to stop the sacrifice is described by Isaac in terms of rain with the statement that the rain represents the tears of God. In my reading the text thusly, I am drawing upon Walter Brueggemann's reading of an anthropomorphic God who does not know ahead of time what Abraham will do. I incorporated into Brueggemann's interpretation my own belief in God's tears of grief shared with Abraham and Isaac over the pain of such a sacrifice along with tears of remorse at having caused such heartache.

There are some wonderful literary resources available to use with this text. Elie Weisel's Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends includes a chapter on "The Sacrifice of Isaac: a Survivor's Story." This resource is especially valuable because it does not whitewash the harshness of God's initial test with a reference to Christ and substitutionary atonement:

In Jewish tradition man cannot use death as a means of glorifying God. Every man is an end unto himself, a living eternity; no man has the right to sacrifice another, not even to God. Had he killed his son, Abraham would have become the forefather of a people -- but not the Jewish people. For the Jew, all truth must spring from life, never from death. To us, crucifixion represents not a step forward but a step backward: at the top of Moriah, the living remains alive, thus marking the end of an era of ritual murder. To invoke the Akeda is tantamount to calling for mercy -- whereas from the beginning Golgotha has served as pretext for countless massacres of sons and fathers cut down together by sword and fire in the name of a word that considered itself synonymous with love (76).

Sermon: "Holocaust"

Isaac:

"Father, the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" I asked.

"God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." he replied.

"Later he tied my hands and feet with rope, not looking at me as he did it. He had said, 'God will provide the lamb for a burnt offering,' " but I am not a lamb. I am a boy, old enough to talk in sentences, old enough to know that wood and fire and a knife mean the making of burnt offerings, but I am too young to understand this. I am crying, crying hard. I don't ask why. It won't make sense if he tells me. Adult explanations rarely do:

"It's God's will."

"Ishmael is not really your brother, so don't weep at his leaving."

"My son, you are the best part of God's promise."

"I am a boy old enough to talk, old enough to know that wood, fire, and a knife mean a burnt offering is to be given to God. But I don't understand this. The tears run down my cheeks like two tiny waterfalls.

I don't ask why. Like any small child I assume I've done something horribly, terribly wrong. I don't know what it is, but it must be something. My father would never harm me without cause.

One time I took the one toy of another child in our camp. My father, normally gentle with me, thrashed me harshly, and made me take it back along with another toy and an apology. He explained to me that I was special, chosen, a promised child, that I would be greatly blessed by God and am already much cherished and loved by mother and him. He told me I was lucky to have so many toys, plenty to eat, clothes to wear, and a warm tent in which to sleep. The servant's child had only the one toy. I had many.

"But he's a servant!" I cried. I didn't know servant children got the same as me. Wasn't the servant child there to wait upon me?

"Isaac, you will be a man some day with large responsibilities. It will be your job to take care of all those in your tribe. They are under your protection and will look to you for fair and just treatment. Was it fair to take that boy's only toy when you have so many?"

"I don't get to have all the toys?" I asked.

"No, you don't get to have all the toys."

"I want it," I stated.

"It isn't yours," my father replied.

"Doesn't everything here belong to you, Father?" I asked.

"No. Everything here is on loan from God. None of it really belongs to me or to you."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Isaac, what happened when you took the toy?" he asked.

"The servant child started to cried and tried to get it back."

"Then what happened?"

"His mother sharply grabbed him by the arm and told him to 'Hush!' and to let me have the toy."

"And he did?"

"Yes, but he didn't want to give it to me, and he kept crying. She dragged him to their tent and told him she would slap him if he didn't stop fussing so."

"How did you feel then Isaac?"

"I was glad to have the toy."

"Why do you suppose he cried?" my father asked.

"He was sad. He wanted his toy back."

"Do you blame him?"

"I wanted the toy, too!" I protested.

"Well," my father replied, "It is not yours to keep. You must return it. And with it you must select another toy, one that is precious to you, one that has given you much pleasure. You must take back his toy along with a second toy and give both to him along with your apology for taking what does not belong to you and for causing him unhappiness and sorrow. Isaac, you have abused your power as the son of the master by taking the toy of the child of a servant. Do you understand?"

I was crying again. "No," I said.

"You will do it anyway. Perhaps someday, when you are older, you will understand."

"But I didn't understand then and I don't understand now. I don't understand and I am afraid, afraid my father will kill me."

"I'm sorry Daddy," I sobbed. "I'm sorry." I cry, not knowing what I have done.

Abraham:

"God," Abraham prays without words, silently, internally to himself trying not to notice the fear and bafflement in his son's tear-stained face. "I want my boy back. I know that all I have has been given to me by you, but I do not understand this command. I know he is really not mine to keep, because without you he would never have been born to Sarah and me. Is he therefore as precious to you as he is to me? Is that why you want him back now? He is so young, so beautiful, and so new to life. There are no blemishes on his skin. Every part of his is perfect and fresh. His small fingers, his ten toes, his bright eyes sparkling with new sights and his tongue ever active asking question after question about the mystery we call life. His is a miracle of newness born from two tired, dried up old bodies. To have such vitality, such aliveness born for us was truly the best gift you God could ever give or create. I understand why you want him back, but I confess I want him, too. I didn't know I could love this much. Is that it? I love him too much? I haven't forgotten you, Lord God. I could never forget you, but it's true I may love him more. He is love itself. He's unsought hugs, endless energy, and infectious laughter. You have not crawled into my lap at the end of a meal and fallen asleep secure in the knowledge that I will hold you, warm you with my arms, and keep you safe. Is that it God? Are you jealous of our intimacy? Do you long to be touched, held, comforted, and petted like a young child? Show me how to do it, and I shall gladly offer such love.

"But if this act is your way to have me prove my love for you, it seems cruel, contradictory, and unworthy of your greatness. Are you really a God who cares more for adulation and idolatry than you care for promises and relationships? Are you jealous of my son? I am doing what you command, but I do not understand. The act itself may kill me along with him."

Isaac:

"Although he is old, he picks me up, holds me close for a minute and puts me on top of the pile of wood. He doesn't look angry like he was about the toy. He's crying. That frightens me even more than the fire and the knife. My father who knows everything and is master of everyone and everything I know, my father is crying.

"Suddenly, the sky is crying, too. Later, father would say it was God who was crying. God, who had ordered the sacrifice, couldn't bear what He Himself had done.... In commanding my father to sacrifice me, God was sacrificing my father and all the promises God had made to him: the promise of descendants, land, fame, and being the father of a great nation. All that bright future would be split asunder with a knife and a fire. I sobbed. My father sobbed, and God sobbed. And with the tears of the last of us three, I did not die.

"The tears of the last of us put out the fire, stayed my father's hand, and revealed a ram caught in the thicket. The ram would die, not I."

Marriage Counselor and Sarah:

"They came to me for help. She couldn't bear to look at him anymore, be in the same room with him, or sleep with him. 'How could he?' She wept. 'After all these years of waiting, of wishing and hoping, how could he do it?'

"But I didn't," he protested. "God intervened."

"Yes, but you were going to," she countered. "You had him bound on the altar, lying there on top of the wood pyre ready to cut, willing to kill. You would have done it, too."

"God told me to Sarah," he said quietly.

"God's always telling you what to do!" she exclaimed. "And where has it gotten us? Over 100 years old and no permanent home or grandchildren. Yes, we got our son, finally, we got our son, but how much heartache and uncertainty did we have to endure first? Decades, generations! And you, you fine old coot and believer, you would have extinguished our one little light of hope and joy. You would have killed it all just because God told you to do it."

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away," he replied.

"That may be true father Abraham, but it's a sadistic God who operates in such a way. I've had enough of you and your God!"

"Sarah dear, we've been through so much together."

"Apparently not enough that you would include me in your plans to sacrifice Isaac," she said bitterly. "Did you ever think of me when you woke our son and stole away with the dawn? Did you think even once what I might feel, what I might want? Making a choice between my God and my child, it's not a contest. Even God would understand my choice."

"That's because you are a woman. You don't understand the higher obligations. I owe allegiance to God before all others. It was a test, only a test."

"Did you know that at the time?"

"No."

"Would you have rent our son in two?"

"Yes."

"And, you wonder that I can't look at you, think of you, and be with you without this burning, tortured knowledge that you were prepared to sacrifice our son to a principle of loyalty and obeisance. I spit on your loyalty. I reject a God who could ask such a thing."

"He didn't ask it."

"Ultimately, no, but initially, yes. And you were prepared to act; you did act. You miss the point Abe. It's not God's rescue I reject; it's your willingness to act. You would have killed he who is most precious to you and me, all for a religious principle, all for God."

"Sarah, it was the hardest thing I've ever done."

"That I can believe."

"Your love of Isaac is not greater than mine. Your dreams for his future are no bigger than mine."

"He's all we have."

"He's not even the start of what we have Sarah."

"You'll never understand what it means to be a mother, old man."

"And you'll never understand, old girl, what it means to be a patriarch."

Minister's Concluding Remarks (optional):

In commenting on the sacrifice of Isaac story in Messengers of God author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel observes that the word God uses in telling Abraham to sacrifice his son is " 'ola, which means an offering that has been totally consumed, a holocaust" (71). "Holocaust," the word makes us think almost immediately of Hitler, World War II, six million Jews gassed, gunned down, systematically sacrificed to the fire of Semitic hatred and Arian ideal of a superhuman race.

The sacrifice of Isaac is explained to the reader by the Elohist narrator as God's testing of Abraham's faith, but it's a test which creates more questions than any patriarch, devout Jew or Christian can answer. Christian biblical scholars often see the ninth hour rescue of Isaac as a precursor to God's later saving of humanity through the substitutionary death of Jesus of Nazareth. But that does not explain the hell Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah went through nor does it explain the deaths of millions of Jews in this century or the persecutions, pograms, and unmerited sufferings of the Jewish Diaspora ever since their dispersal from Judea in A.D. 70.

Both the sacrifice of Isaac and the Holocaust leave the dutiful, dedicated Christian and Jew theologically and emotionally numb. God promises chosenness and blessings. Then God takes it all back. No Isaac. No future. No offspring, no chosen people. It makes no sense. It's nonsense. In Genesis 22:1-19 and in Europe in the twentieth century, what does it mean to be the child of Abraham and Sarah? It seems to mean a knife in the heart or a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Lord God if this is how you treat your friends, is it not better to be your enemy? At least then, the fire and brimstone is quick and sure like that of Sodom and Gomorrah. At least then one has a reasonable answer for what has occurred. The bad ones get zapped while the wandering Arameans and Diaspora Jews struggle and toil through religious persecutions in Russia, contemptuous generalizations in America, and ongoing resentment, bigotry and hate almost everywhere else except Israel. Despised as the traditional outsiders by many in the first world, feared and resented by their Middle East neighbors in the second world, they are a people who have been sacrificed on the altar and cut to the heart over and over again in history. Sometimes a ninth hour rescue has occurred in the shape of a ram caught in the bushes, but often it has not.

Gerhard Von Rad, a post World War II German Old Testament scholar says God provides the ram once God is certain Abraham will indeed sacrifice his son. The word used to prove Abraham's allegiance is the Hebrew word for fear. "I know that you fear God." To fear God means to obey with no guarantee of reward. It might be called "blind obedience," or "dumb obedience" as Sarah might bitterly term it, but such an understanding of what it means to fear God misses the active part which Abraham as believer must place in the human: divine relationship and in his obedience.

From Abraham on, Jews have feared God. They have circumcised their sons as commanded. They have lived the way of the Lord and taught it to their children. They have kept themselves distinct in their racial and religious identity. They have feared God and as a people they have survived.

As a result, the rest of the world has feared them for this self-declared chosen status, for their posterity who have managed to survive their conquest by empires and attempts at their annihilation: Assyria, Babylon, Rome, Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany. It almost ended at its very beginning with the death of a much loved, only son. It seemed like it would end when Assyria wiped the Northern Kingdom Israel off the face of the earth and again when Babylonia marched the gentry and royal leaders of Judah off to Babylon for assimilation and extinction. It wasn't over then. It wasn't even over in A.D. 70 when Rome put down a rebellion and expelled all remained Jews from Judea, spread out into the entire world not to return until 1948 when the sons and daughters of Isaac and Rebekah would fight their way back once more from genocide and virtual erasure to establish the modern nation state of Israel.

Fear God and survive, maybe not literally but posthumously.

Fear God.

The original text concludes nicely at verse 14 with God's naming of the Mount "The Lord will provide." But that ending is both ironic and hollow after what has just transpired. So the Elohist and Yahwist authors at this point add a final reminder of the ongoing themes so central to the story of Abraham. The promises are reiterated after they have almost been obliterated: a son, descendants as numerous as the stars, a land of their own, and fame for their progenitor. It all comes true. But the costs of fearing God and obeying God seem awfully high. There's a haunted look in the eyes of Abraham and Isaac and Sarah. They know how close they've come to losing it all. They say, it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The question for Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, God, and us is the same: Is it?

Popular imagination -- collective memory -- adheres rather to the tragic interpretation of the text. Isaac did not accompany his father on the way back because the divine intervention came too late. The act had been consummated. Neither God nor Abraham emerged victorious from the contest. They were both losers. Hence God's pangs of guilt on Rosh Hashanah, when He judges man and his deeds. Because of the drama that took place at Mount Moriah, he understands man better. Because of Abraham and Isaac, He knows that it is possible to push some endeavors too far.

That is why the theme and term of the Akeda have been used, throughout the centuries, to describe the destruction and disappearance of countless Jewish communities everywhere. All the pogroms, the crusades, the persecutions, the slaughters, the catastrophes, the massacres by sword and the liquidations by fire--each time it was Abraham leading his son to the altar, to the holocaust all over again (Weisel, 94-95).


Related Illustrations

From Chris Ewing:

The Parable of the Old Men and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac, the first-born, spake and said, "My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?"
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretch-ed forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, "Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead."
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
-- Wilfred Owen, English poet killed in WW1

***

As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
-- Oscar Wilde

***

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
-- Karl Kraus

***

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.
-- Robert Ardrey

From Carlos Wilton:

In referring to the study of scripture, Harry Emerson Fosdick said, "Read until you stumble upon yourself on its pages."

***

"We are trained to read for information, but the Bible is a story, not an encyclopedia. It's a story that includes us. We can only enter the story by being submissive. We can't take control of the story."
-- Eugene Peterson, addressing the Company of Pastors Luncheon at the 2003 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly in Denver

***

There was a man who volunteered to serve at a soup kitchen run by an order of nuns in Chicago. After his first day he confided to his priest, "I didn't feel any love for the men there."

The priest, replied, "So what? The nuns don't go to the soup kitchen to feel good about what they're doing. They go there to feed people. Jesus simply said, 'Feed my sheep.' Are we admirers of Jesus or followers?"

***

Our business is not to think correctly, but live truly; then first will there be a possibility of our thinking correctly. One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is that those who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning Him rather than to obey Him.
-- George MacDonald

***

Tourists flock to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery to watch military guards march crisply back and forth in front of the tomb. At the end of each soldier's watch, another one marches up to take over. As the new soldier assumes the solemn duty, the retiring soldier says ceremoniously, "Orders remain unchanged."

That's the way it's always been: day after day, month after month, for years. The orders remain unchanged. Guard the dead. Give them honor.

There are other orders that remain unchanged: the commandments of God.

***

There was a man who worked for the security department of a large department store. One annoying problem kept recurring. A certain door was wired with an alarm, but customers kept using it, ignoring the large sign that warned, "Alarm will sound if opened."

One day, after responding to the umpteenth false alarm, the security officer happened upon a simple, but elegant solution to his problem: a small, hand-lettered sign.

The sign read, "Wet paint."


Worship Resources

By Julie Strope

Theme: As Christians, twenty-first-century friends of Jesus, we must consciously decide where, when, why, and to whom we give our loyalties and our energies. As we consider the actions and words of Jesus, and the possibilities of the kingdom of heaven, we choose to be "obedient" to the principles of scriptures: love God, love yourself, and love your neighbor for there is no one beyond of the love of God. Our actions and our attitudes reflect this basic decision.

CALL TO WORSHIP (based on Psalm 13)

Leader: This place is sanctuary -- a place and a time to remember God's constant love.

People: God restores our strength and we are glad!
We sing to God -- of goodness, of hope, of sorrow ...

Leader: Sometimes God seems to forget our troubles, and enemies seem to be all around us.

People: In reality, though, God is present and will help us endure;
God will inspire us to do what needs to be done.
We will be attentive to life's necessities.

Leader: Thanks be to God for divine presence and wisdom working within us!

HYMN SUGGESTIONS

Psalm 8: "Lord, Our Lord, Thy Glorious Name" (GOTT SEI DANK DURCH ALLE WELT)

"God's Law Is Perfect And Gives Life" (HALIFAX). Stanza 1 of this hymn would work well as a choral response to the WORD OF GRACE.

Psalm 25: "Lord, To You My Soul Is Lifted" (GENEVAN). Presents a similar theme as the Psalm for the day.

"Hope Of The World" (DONNE SECOURS)

"Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love" (CHEREPONI)

"O God, We Bear The Imprint Of Your Face" (SONG 1). These three stanzas acknowledge God's design in our bodies, our similarities with Jesus and our human kin.

"O For A World" (AZMON)

"O Savior, In This Quiet Place" (ST. STEPHEN). These stanzas would be a nice lead-in to intercessory prayers.

"O Praise The Gracious Power" (CHRISTPRAISE RAY). This is an upbeat way to send people on their way. The refrain would also fit well with the theme of the day with "your cross" sung as "your love."

PRAYER OF ADORATION (based on Matthew 10:40-42)

Holy One --
What a day! Thank you for life and its joys. We see your love manifest in people, in places, and in actions. We experience your hospitality in this space and in the voices of people gathered here. We have chosen to be your people, to be loyal and available as your hands, feet, and voice in this world. In this hour, we are listening attentively for your voice. Amen.

CALL TO CONFESSION (based on Romans 6:12-23)

Leader: When we decide to follow Jesus, we choose to live lovingly and to behave wholesomely. Consider your thoughts and behaviors. As we notice areas of living that are not "light" for others to see God's love, we can name them before God and invite Holy Spirit to set us in a different way.

COMMUNITY CONFESSION (unison; based on Romans 6)

Gracious God --
We know that thoughts motivate our behaviors.
We see that hurtful actions foster retaliation.
We hear that an eye for an eye blinds people.
Reveal our thoughts and behaviors that inhibit your kingdom coming to our global village.
Point out our attitudes and prejudices that block justice.
Deliver us from our addictions to power over others.
Turn our loyalty from culture's priorities to collaboration with your spirit of life. Amen.

WORD OF GRACE (based on Romans 6)

Leader: We have no reason to continue doing wrong, for we have been set free! We've been put right with God. Hallelujah!

CONGREGATIONAL CHORAL RESPONSE

"O Praise The Gracious Power" (CHRISTPRAISE RAY stanza 7)

O praise the living Christ With faith's bright songful voice!
Announce the gospel to the world and with these words rejoice:
We praise You, Christ! Your cross [sing "love"] has made us one!

A CONTEMPORARY AFFIRMATION (based on Matthew 10:40-42)

We believe God is generous,
welcoming everyone who journeys with Christ.
We believe that Jesus is God's messenger
and in him we see how to participate with the kingdom of God.
We experience Holy Spirit empowering us to be hospitable
to people different from ourselves and
to people who need companions, food, and water.
We believe that inner peace is our reward as we embody the goodness of the living God!

OFFERTORY STATEMENT

In our culture, being God's hands and voice require money, skill, talent, and commitment. Our plates are plenty large. Share what you have.

DOXOLOGY

"Now Thank We All Our God" stanza 3

THANKSGIVING PRAYER

Living God --
Thank you for Jesus who was obedient to your claim on his life. Thank you for the ways you claim us and live through us.
We welcome your Spirit to fill this place and to use all our gifts to make your love palpable in this world. Amen.

INTERCESSORY PRAYERS (praying for ourselves, others, and the world)

Leader: Energy of the Universe --
In so many ways, you have come to us.
In so many places, you invite us to create with you a society that blooms with goodness and grace.

Yet --

Speaker 1: We are held back by our pasts -- previous perceptions of the Holy,
painful losses, precious memories of what were.
Leader: Give us new dreams of what is possible.
Speaker 1: Strengthen us to carry out the dreams that come.
Leader: Creator of the Universe --
We pray for this planet and its creatures.
Speaker 2: We see the magnificent waterways and mountains;
We walk through the woods awed by the sounds of birds and the colors of green!
Speaker 1: We feel very small and insignificant when we think of all that needs to be
done to care for the earth and its systems that support life.
Speaker 2: Strengthen us to guard the goodness you have set before us.
Leader: We pray for collaboration in our government so that peace may come to us and
to Iraq.
Speaker 1: We pray for peace among the tribes in Palestine and Israel.
Speaker 2: We pray for peace between religious leaders throughout the world.
Speaker 1: See the children and adults who have no place to call home, no place to grow
and learn about gentleness and hope for easier tomorrows.
Speaker 2: Impress upon us and world leaders the possibilities
for neighborliness across national and tribal boundaries.
Leader: Healing God -- We are made of clay and are worn away by disease and we
wear down and chip with the years.
Speaker 1: Heal us as you heal the earth; strengthen us to welcome each day.
Speaker 2: Heal those who seek your gracious touch; strengthen them to receive your
grace and the love of those around them.
Leader: Halt the wars -- inside and outside of us -- they destroy so much l