June 26, 2005 Genesis 22:1-14
Isaac: One Child Almost Left Behind
The Fathers’ Day card my son sent me this year had a picture of a carload of misbehaving miscreant children, with the caption, “And Dad said, ‘If I have to turn around one more time, we going to drop you all off at the next rest stop and go on without you.’” Inside, these words: “Happy Fathers Day. And thanks for never leaving me behind.” Like most parents, I’m pretty sure I made that threat on more than one occasion, or at least thought it. But of course I never would have actually done it. I might have stayed at the rest stop myself, however, and let the rest of them go on!
Today’s scripture lesson is the story of one child who was almost left behind, not at the rest stop, but on a primitive sacrificial altar. And it is one of those stories that I wish weren’t in the Bible, or at least in the lectionary. I’ve been preaching for twenty-nine years now, which means it’s come up ten times, and I’ve always avoided it. But I figured I shouldn’t duck it forever, and the hard and troubling questions that it raises. After all, the aqedah, or “the binding of Isaac” is considered one of the central stories of our Judeo-Christian faith, attested to in part by the fact that nearly every major religious painter has done the scene, and that many churches have renderings of it on walls or stained glass, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where I am told, if you look up from the altar up to the right you would see the binding of Isaac right next to a mosaic of Christ on the cross, an invitation to consider the obvious parallels. So it has traditionally occupied a foundational place in our faith story.
That doesn’t make it any less troubling, however! What can we say about a God who would ask someone to do such a terrible thing, or to at least be willing to do it, as it was “only a test?” What can we say about Abraham, who we think of as the George Washington of the faith, the great patriarch, who earlier in Genesis left everything he knew behind, set out at God’s command for a new land, to create a new people and a new way of being in relationship with the divine? What do we make of the fact that he was willing to sacrifice his own beloved son? Is he any kind of model for us?
And even if we trust that with our resources of Biblical criticism, and knowledge of the ancient history of our faith tradition, and our experience of a very loving and compassionate God – the God who in Jesus called children into his midst and said the kingdom of heaven is best known through them – even if with all of this we feel confident that we can at least come to some understanding of this story, then we still have to struggle with how children themselves might hear it – children who hear things more literally, take metaphorical stories at face value; children whose biggest fear is that the ones they trust the most for protection, for life itself, might abandon them or turn against them. Amber and I kicked around all sorts of approaches for the children’s time, even considered sending the children out before the scripture lesson, but in the end she decided to take it on, and I think her job is a lot harder than mine!
So what has this story meant, and why has it been such an important part of the story of our faith? One point that frequently comes out of the story, knowing about the ending and the ram in the thicket, is simply that “God provides.” God may ask a lot of us, and sometimes we may take issue with it, wish God wouldn’t ask so much, but in the end God also gives us the resources to do what is asked. If you’ve read Genesis, you know that there is a parallel here with the story that precedes it, the story of Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham’s other son. Recall that Abraham and Sarah had been promised children, but were unable to have them. After much frustration, and following a common custom of the times, Sarah gave her slave, Hagar, to Abraham, so that she could bear a child, who would legally be Sarah’s offspring. It was only after this that Sarah, in her extreme old age, did become pregnant. She thought the idea of a woman in her 80's having a child so ludicrous, that she named the child Isaac, which means “laughter.” Since she now had a child of her own bloodline, she didn’t want Ishmael to inherit the promise, so she had Abraham cast out Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, where they would have died had it not been for God’s intervention. God provided food and shelter. Ishmael lived, and thrived, and according to tradition, became the father of the Arab peoples. So, too, in the present story, God intervened at the last minute. Even then “God was still speaking!” Just as the knife was about to come down, an angel dramatically stayed Abraham’s hand, and from out of the brush, a ram appeared – the first scapegoat. Abraham named the place, “The Lord will provide,” for God indeed provided, and always provides what we need to do what God asks.
A second thing that interpreters have made of this story is to remind us that “this is a test, this is only a test.” We’re told that right up front, knowing what Abraham does not know. It seems in the Bible that God is always testing people – Job and Jesus come to mind. Maybe it’s like passing your medical boards or the Bar exam before being allowed to go out into the world and practice your craft. In Abraham, God was about the business of doing something new in the world, about creating a great nation, fashioning a new people, and God had to be sure that God was working with the very best person for the job, someone absolutely trustworthy and loyal. God can’t go forward with this enterprise if the one through whom God is working is going to refuse to carry out orders, if he’s going to have anything less than absolute trust. And if he would do this, sacrifice not only his son but his future, then he would do anything God asks! As E.A. Speiser puts it in his commentary on Genesis, “It was one thing to start out resolutely for the Promised Land, but it was a very different thing to maintain confidence when all appeared lost. The fact is that short of such unswerving faith, the biblical process could not have survived the many trials that lay ahead.” (Anchor Bible, p. 166)
That’s certainly true, and yet to us this seems like a very cruel, even sadistic, kind of test of faith, one that I would surely fail, and want to! But at the time, it was not quite as shocking, for child sacrifice was a common religious practice. And historians note that this was a kind of turning point in the evolution of the faith, a repudiation of that custom. God was indeed still speaking, and when God’s people listen, they move down a path of moral improvement. For example, the lex talionis, the Old Testament law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, was an improvement over the previous practice of death for the loss of an eye or a tooth, limiting the amount of retribution that could be inflicted. And Jesus said later, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist and evildoer...turn the other cheek and go the second mile.” And the prophets denounced not just child sacrifice, but sacrifice altogether, as when Micah said (as we heard last week), “Shall I come before God with burnt offerings....thousands of rams....my firstborn....?” No, what God requires is justice, and mercy, and humility! That’s where our faith is heading, where Abraham’s faith was heading. But at the time it hadn’t gotten there yet, and what he was asked to do wasn’t all that unusual.
And so the story is not about child sacrifice, as such. It is certainly a detail that is central to the story, but it is highly contextual. We are not asked here, if we would be willing to do the same thing. But as one commentator says, “The story does press a question on us: We will have a radical and exhaustive faith like Abraham’s? Will we commit ourselves to seeking security radically and exhaustively in... God? Never mind our grand schemes. Never mind the acquisitions we routinely gather for profit, power and prestige. Never mind the usual instinct of ‘me first,” or ‘my family first,’ or ‘my group first.’ The story presses on us the utter completeness of Abraham’s entrusting himself, and what he loved most dearly, to the trustworthiness of God. The story presses us to have faith comparable to this.” (Dana Martin, Christian Ministry, September 1996)
So it’s not about child sacrifice so much as it is about radical and complete faith, and we have to translate it into terms that we can relate to today. What is it that God asks us to do? What do we have to give up to be faithful? What preconceptions or attachments or notions or idolatries, what possessions or plans to we have to sacrifice to be faithful to God’s call?
That’s something each of us has to answer for ourselves. But this morning, thinking about faith and this story, what I am wondering is, Do we have the faith to NOT sacrifice our children?
William H. Willimon, for years the Chaplain at Duke University, and now the United Methodist Bishop of Birmingham, Alabama, puts it this way: “Maybe the question is not, ‘will be sacrifice our children?’...but to which God, upon which altar will we sacrifice our children? We are all busy sacrificing our children to some god, laying their lives upon some altar. So the question is not if we shall be like Abraham and be willing to sacrifice our children to our god, but rather which god shall have the lives of our children?”
In the midst of the first World War which was to claim his own life, the poet Wilfred Owen drew a parallel between this biblical story and what was happening in Europe, which he called “The Parable of the Old Man 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, the 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 stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying,
Lay not a hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him.
Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Does the story ever change? The old have always sent the young off to war. Sometimes the young go willingly, because there are causes worth fighting for and dying for, but at other times, perhaps most of the time, they are simply pawns, children sacrificed on the altar of empire.
The count in Iraq is now over 1700 US soldiers, who knows how many Iraqis? Even before the war, it is estimated that 500,000 Iraqi children died of the effects of economic sanctions, their inability to receive proper medicines. But we don’t believe in child sacrifice any more, do we?
In Africa the genocide in Darfur, and the AIDS epidemic sacrifice children by the millions.
A report this week in the medical journal Lancet suggests that $5.1 billion spent on disease prevention and treatment in the world’s poorest countries could save 6 million children under the age of five each year – an average of $887 per child saved, an exceptionally good bargain when you consider that any of us would spend many, many times that if our own child’s life was threatened. $5 billion is about 6 per cent of the amount spent on tobacco products in this country annually. We’ll find a way to pay that, because we don’t believe in child sacrifice any more, do we?.
The Children’s Defense Fund reminds us that gun violence continues to plague our communities, taking nearly 30,000 American lives each year and that more than 3,000 of these senseless deaths are children and teenagers. Gunfire kills more young people in America than the most common diseases of our time. Thousands more children are injured, lose a loved one, or live in fear of gun violence. On top of this, the gun industry is exempt from complying with any federal health and safety requirements, such as internal trigger locks. Toy guns and teddy bears are subject to higher consumer health and safety standards than firearms. According to the Center for Disease Control, the rate of firearms deaths among children under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined. American children are 16 times more likely to be murdered by a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die in a firearm accident than are children in these other countries. Grim statistics, but at least we don’t believe in child sacrifice any more, do we?
Lost in all the debate over “saving” Social Security is the fact that our national debt, which was on track to be retired a few years ago, has now grown larger than ever. I’ll leave it to you economists to figure out what it all means, but one thing I do know is that it is our children who will be faced with paying for it, or living with its consequences, which can’t be good. And I do want my children to be able to afford a nice nursing home for me!
Well, I could go on, and speak of the environment that we’re leaving the next generation, or the educational system, which is broken and leaving children behind all the time, or the scandal of 11 million children in this country living in poverty, but I think you get the picture. We may have trouble with this old biblical story, but perhaps we shouldn’t speak too harshly of it without first examining our own lives, our own way of living. For we sacrifice our children every single day to things far less worthy, far less important than what Abraham was asked to do.
And so I ask again, Do we have the faith to NOT sacrifice our children? Do we have the faith to listen to the “Still Speaking” God, and practice not sacrifice but justice and mercy, and embrace Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s belief that "The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children?" And Garrison Keillor says, “Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.”
That’s a long way from where we started, with this old and troubling biblical story, which in a way I’ve turned on its head. You may even have more questions now than when I began, but that’s fine with me – I’m not here to provide all the answers so much as provoke you to think about things in a new way. And in the end, this is a story not so much about Abraham’s faith as it is our faith – faith being not so much what you believe, but who you trust, and most importantly, faith is how you answer the question, “What am I going to do now?”
