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Gobsmacking obedience! Trinity 5: Sunday 26th June 2005 Genesis 22.1-14 | Romans 6.12-23 | Matthew 10-40-42 Abraham nearly sacrifices Isaac; sin = death; rewards in the KoG
There is an element of choice presented to us in the readings today, and unusually I know, I’d like us to think about the Old Testament reading because of the problems it throws up for us. Making sense of the Bible...
It was a real encouragement to see a group who were struggling to make sense of the Bible and their corporate and individual experience as disciples. They knew that the Scriptures are important, but they also knew that things are not always straightforward or obvious. Well, had the group been studying today’s Old Testament reading they may well have added that to the list! What is it all about? - does God really demand child sacrifice to test the faith of his closest friends? The nature of sacrifice...
“Have you ever put a child at risk?” “Well there was this one time when I came within a nat’s crotchet of slitting my son’s throat and burning him as a sacrifice, but otherwise, not really...” It’s a troubling and morally ambiguous story... and as we read the story (at least) two ways of looking at spring to mind:
or
or
More than just a moral story...
There are several echoes of this story picked up in the NT: one is in our gospel reading where the identity of the disciples and their reception is bound up with that of Christ and God the Father. To welcome the apostle is to welcome both Christ and the Father - to reject the disciples is to reject God! Just as the life of father Abraham was bound up with the life of Isaac the son, so the mission of the disciples is bound up with the mission of God... The second echo is in the sacrifice of a son... Isaac carried the very wood for his own sacrifice up the hill of Mt Moriah... who else do we know who carried the wood of his sacrifice in the form of a cross up the hill of Calvary to make the ultimate sacrifice for us? True sacrifice is costly Maybe it’s the whole idea of sacrifice that we find so troubling. And if we do we are not in bad company. The prophets often said to the people that sacrifices were not what God required, but changed hearts and lives: justice and mercy... But there are sacrifices that don’t involve bloodshed that we can better identify with. There is a line on some of the Iona liturgies which says “We shall not offer God sacrifices which cost us nothing...” and there is that reminder that a true sacrifice is a costly exercise.
A true sacrifice is a costly experience - whether the cost is in emotion, time, money, priorities or convenience; whether it is at the expense of doing something else we might prefer to be doing; whether the sacrifice is the cost of what we perceive as truth... Sometimes it helps us when looking at the scriptures to see whether, rather than a literal reading of the text, there is a principle which is applicable to us in a different culture and time. This was something we explored in the housegroup on Wednesday. If there is something in Abraham’s story about the child sacrifice being, not quite a red herring, but certainly not God’s aim; then is there also the possibility that God may just be asking “unthinkable” things of us - which may turn out to be more about changes of attitude or slaughtering the “sacred cows” we hold so dear... Lateral thinking Abraham could have deflected God’s call by arguing (as he did over the destruction of Sodom in chapter 18) about the semantics of how God would never normally countenance child sacrifice, therefore he wouldn’t go on any journey to any mountain, but stay at home, and miss completely the experience God had for him to help him grow in obedience, however grotesque we today might consider the context of that learning. I wonder whether this echoes something of what we go through when we try to hear God’s voice?
There has also been much in the media about how corrupt governments in Africa will not make the best use of a cancelled debt, and it would be better to put strings on the gift of relief by demanding that the debt relief only came with the establishing of a Western understanding of democratic government... that way we could be seen to be willing to forgive the debt, but equally unable, so it wouldn’t happen... We would be giving ourselves the perfect excuse of not actually doing anything, whilst pretending to want to... Maybe God is calling us as a nation to do something apparently stupid, wild and naively generous... who knows where it will end? Who knows what it will achieve? We can be only be certain that this degree of uncertainty will no longer put us in charge.. it truly becomes a gift, and a true gift comes without strings attached. You wouldn’t give somebody a box of chocolates and tell them that they couldn’t eat the coffee creams... Giving a box of chocolates as a gift actually runs the risk that the recipient might choose to give the chocolates to somebody else, or throw them away, or eat the whole lot in one sitting and be sick... But the giver cannot demand how the gift is used. In giving the gift of forgiveness through Christ, God does not demand that every human being MUST accept that gift... God TRUSTS us to respond; God INVITES us to respond, but the choice is ours. Global citizens
God apparently asked a ridiculous, obnoxious thing of Abraham that causes us revulsion, but through which Abraham grew and developed as his faith was put under pressure. The story as we have it might still raise more questions than it answers - partly because our cultural and theological understanding are so very different - but it is also disturbing because it challenges our deeply held prejudices and priorities, our view of the world and even of God... Our options as we consider this story are those which faced the house group on Wednesday: they could have conveniently forgotten about the questions which vexed them, they could have given up on them and turned to more familiar passages and safer questions to which they knew the answers. Perseverance
The same choice faces us if we find this particular incident unpalatable. We can choose to ignore it or forget about it, or retreat to something we know about. Or we can take a risk and engage with an uncomfortable story and try and sit with it and take it to God in prayer and meditation asking him to show us what he wants us to know, to do, the people he wants us to be... Abraham had a choice before him when he thought he heard God asking the impossible of him. We have choices before us. Part of our sacrifice may be in giving up control, in walking hand in hand with God into the deep and dazzling darkness, the unknown future. Maybe God is calling us to forsake the safe, the known, the comfortable... maybe the sacrifice God is asking of us is similar to that of Abraham - not to go and slaughter the nearest child (tempting as that might occasionally be!) - but to trust God for the future. Our future. His future. God asked much of Abraham and he responded with obedience - an obedience which might leave us gobsmacked (to use a theological term); maybe God is also asking much of us. How will we respond?
Fr Andrew J Perry
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A bloke goes
into a shop called “Wives R us”, where you can shop for the wife of your
choice. The man at the desk explains that down the corridor there are doors
and on the doors are descriptions the potential wife within and that the man
should make a choice according to the label on the door. So, eagerly, off he
goes. The first door says “Average” and he thinks “I can do better than
that”. The second door says “Pretty good”, again he thinks that he can do
better than that. The third door says “Very good”, and although he is
tempted he can see a few more doors ahead. The next door says “Amazing!”,
and he waivers a little before moving on. The final door says “Way Out”, so
he flings open the door, walks through and gets run over by a bus in the
street...
On Wednesday I was privileged to
be invited to one of the house groups to be grilled with 6 questions that
had come up in the course of their discussions and upon which they wanted
some fresh light shedding. Although they were quite different in nature,
ranging from the concept of original sin, to gay and lesbian partnerships
and when the first Bible was put together.. they all had one thing in common
- they were ultimately about how we interpret the Scriptures.
Imagine if Abraham was applying to
be a FROGs teacher at St John’s.. can you imagine the Criminal Records
Bureau check he’d have to complete...? 
As
21st Century Westerners we may find the story repugnant and distressingly
primitive, but to reduce the story to a simple moral encounter maybe to over
look the fact that the father’s life is bound up with the son. Isaac, the
miracle child of his old age, is to be Abraham’s future: literally and
metaphorically. To sacrifice Isaac is tantamount to Abraham offering God his
whole future, his life: so what was God really asking of Abraham?
There is an old, rather dark joke
about why God asked Abraham to kill a child - the answer is that if he’d
been asked to kill a teenager it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice at all...
In wiping out the African debt
maybe we’ll learn something more about being global citizens; maybe we’ll
learn to be less patronising to peoples we think of as inferior because they
have a different culture; maybe we’ll learn something about justice in other
trading systems; maybe there will be a knock on effect for our farmers, on
the clothing we buy, on the way we use the earth’s resources... But in fact
we just don’t know what the outcome will be - the only thing we can be sure
of is not being in control, and that is a frightening thought!
They choose instead to pursue
those difficulties, to hang on, despite their confusion and the buffeting
their faith took during the time of uncertainty.