Genesis 22: 1-14 Psalm 13
Romans 6: 12-23 Mt. 10: 40-42
Grace & peace to you from the God who created us, Jesus who redeemed us, and the Holy Spirit who comes to us as comforter and advocate. Amen.
Sarah wished for a child. She hoped for a child. So great was her longing for a child with her husband Abraham that she gave her servant girl Hagar to Abraham to bear him a son. It’s all there in the 16th chapter of Genesis. As families often are, the relationships between Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Hagar’s son, Ishmael, were complex and difficult.
So, imagine what it must have been like when some time later, when Abraham was quite old and Sarah was beyond her time to conceive, that messengers from the Lord told Abraham that Sarah would, in fact, have that child she had longed for with all of her being. When Sarah overheard the conversation, she laughed! And why not? She laughed with perhaps disbelief and with some sadness. And then the Lord told her that it was indeed true. That God’s promise to Abraham, that he would have descendants as many as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the shore, would come true through her. And Isaac was born.
So I must wonder when I hear this morning’s reading from the 22nd chapter of Genesis…where was Sarah in this story? Why don’t we get to hear her voice? Was she away and unaware of God’s command to Abraham that he sacrifice…that he kill…this beloved child whom they had longed for? Was she absent and uniformed of God’s instruction that the child through whom the promise was to be fulfilled was to be taken up and sacrificed as an animal would be sacrificed in this time?
Surely, I think, if Sarah knew of this plan, she would have prevented Abraham from taking Isaac. And surely, I think, Abraham himself should have at least made an attempt to reason with God over this one.
We hear this story and we receive it in a multitude of ways. We hear it as a story of just how great Abraham’s faith was. We hear it as a story of how God tested Abraham. We hear it as a reminder that we do not always know what God is up to. But friends, I must tell you, that I cannot hear around certain pieces of this story in a way that makes any kind of sense. How could God, who had supplied the heir for Sarah and Abraham take that child from them? After all, God knew how much they loved this son for whom they had longed. And God was clear that it was Isaac that was to be taken up to Mt,, Moriah. “Take your son” Not Ishmael who is not the child of your wife. “Your only Son”. Only Isaac was the child of Abraham and Sarah. “The one whom you love”. Oh, yes, they loved him with love that comes from hearts filled with longing. And offer him there as a burnt offering.
So. So we must look at context. We must remind ourselves what was happening at the time that this story was written down and would be read and heard. We must determine whether we need it to be historically accurate in order for it to be true. And we must determine what and how it speaks to us now.
One of the things we know is that this story was written at a time when the Jewish believers were taking great pains to illustrate the fact that God did not require human sacrifice. This practice, which seems unimaginable to us, was once something that believers in Yahwah, the God of the Hebrew people, thought that God required of them. And this story provides for them a concrete illustration of quite the opposite.
Another thing that this story teaches us is that God is present in unforeseen and unfair circumstances.
Let me share with you a story, that is true both historically and otherwise. Marie had longed for a child ever since she was one herself. When people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she wanted to be a Mommy. But as the years passed, there was no one in her life that Marie felt called to share parenthood with. No one special enough to father her child. And so she felt her own special kind of barrenness.
Fortunately, science had advanced enough to provide Marie with other options. Some would say that God is very present in these scientific advancements. And so, Marie saved her money and prayed and researched and eventually heard the happy news she had been longing for for many many years…”congratulations! You’re going to be a mother!”
The months that followed were filled with the usual pregnancy milestones…first kicks, ultrasound that determined that her baby daughter was healthy, furnishing the nursery, and childbirth classes. In those childbirth classes Marie and the other expectant parents were asked to write out their “worst case delivery scenario”. Marie wrote that she was afraid that she would have a long, difficult labor, have to have a c-section, and be separated from her child in those moments following the birth. And that is exactly what happened. But the story ends happily, with a healthy baby girl and a happy mother.
But there are other stories. There are other mothers and fathers whose stories do not end happily. They end with babies who are terribly ill or have birth defects or who, for reasons we will never understand in this life, die.
And what I cannot accept out of these stories and the millions of other examples of unforeseen and unfair tragedy is that God would be capricious enough to cause such pain. I do not believe that this is our God.
The Psalmists words from Psalm 13 wrap themselves around the stories of pain that each of us know. That we have heard or perhaps that we have lived through. How long shall I have perplexity in my mind and grief in my hear, day after day? And maybe the perplexity and grief is not about a child that is lost, but is about something equally painful and equally unfair, and equally devastating.
We might say that Abraham’s story ends well, after all the angel of the LORD intercedes before Abraham kills his son and provides a ram for the sacrifice instead. But tell that to the parents who have held a stillborn infant in the delivery room. Tell that to the parents who have received that middle of the night phone call. Tell that to the adult child caring for a parent who no longer recognizes them. Tell that to the young man whose fiancée was swept out from his arms in the Alabama tornadoes.
If the faith of Abraham means that I have to be willing to offer the life of my own child, I will fall short. And I do not believe that this is what is to be learned from this.
I believe that what we best learn from this story is that God provides in the midst of terrible events. That God can take an event that is difficult and somehow find a way to get us through it. We may still suffer and we may still grieve and we may still think that we simply cannot move on, but God is there. God is saying ‘look over here’.
Let me tell you the rest of Marie’s story. When her baby girl was born there in the operating room, she was not initially a healthy baby. The long labor had taken its toll and her color was grey and she had no cry. The specialists whisked her away to the other side of the room to work on her, to suction her lungs and massage her chest and encourage her to breathe. And while that was happening, God said to Marie ‘look over here’. And surrounding her in that room, visibly, as real as I am to you today, were the people she had loved in her lifetime that had died. Present with her there. The communion of saints. One of those moments when the veil is very thin and one of those times when we hardly know what to do with what God is showing us. Like when God told Abraham to take Isaac, his son, his only son, the one he loved, up the mountain to sacrifice. But friends, we must be present for what God is bringing into our lives and we must be present to the way the ordinary things are used in extraordinary ways. God may be saying to us, right now…’look, over here’.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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