Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 8A, June 25, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Love, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Beginning last Sunday, and all through the week, so many people asked me, “what are you doing with The Binding of Isaac?” Seriously.  In emails, in person, on the phone.  And my response has been, “I don’t know! What are YOU doing with The Binding of Isaac?” Oy. So today I’m to start my sermon with a poem – it’s from David Whyte – called “Sometimes.” [1]

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

The Binding of Isaac, the Akedah, as it is called in Hebrew, raises questions that can make or unmake a life, that have patiently waited for us, that have no right to go away. The Binding of Isaac, whose name means laughter, for many of us, produces tears we cannot stop. Do we worship a God Who used to (or still does) test faithfulness by asking for the sacrifice of an only child? What, in heaven’s name, is God doing here? What, on earth, is Abraham doing in response to whatever he thinks God is doing?

The story of the binding of Isaac has generated library shelves full of interpretations and myriads of commentaries, the earliest written in the Bible itself, starting with the verses immediately following our Torah portion this morning. The stories of Abraham are prequels to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, three religions that trace their ancestry to the man from Ur. The Torah commentary that I use most often strongly cautions against succumbing to the temptation to try to discover a single understanding of this story because there are so many possible meanings. [2] Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have differing interpretations between and within their traditions, but the “sacrifice” or the willingness to sacrifice a beloved son has a place at what Yvonne Sherwood calls the nerve center of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it sets nerves on edge when the story gets retold. [3] Each of those monotheistic (only God) religions has important stories of “only” sons: Ishmael, Isaac, and Jesus (who are all described in the Bible narratives as having siblings, by the way, so we might not understand what only means). The location of this story is traditionally associated with the mountain where Jerusalem is now located.

Since the early years after Jesus’ crucifixion, his followers compared his binding to the wood of a cross to the binding of Isaac to the wood for a sacrifice. I don’t like that pairing one bit. There isn’t nearly enough criticism in Christian writings about the kind of father who would be willing to kill his own son; or the kind of god that would devise such a horrendous test of faith. I’m drawn to the rabbinic tradition that Abraham’s wife Sarah collapsed in shock and died when she learned that her husband had taken their son up the mountain in response to a divine instruction. In the Biblical record, Abraham and Isaac never spoke to one another again – indeed Isaac never saw his father again until he arrived with his brother Ishmael to bury Abraham. In other words, this is not a story where everyone lives happily ever after, just because Abraham demonstrated some kind of obedience, or just because a messenger from God intervened.

How are we to read this ancient story in a way that matters, in a way that makes a difference? Are we to understand ourselves as Abraham, being tested or proved to be reliable in our fidelity to the Holy One? Are we to understand ourselves to be Isaac, bound to an altar as a pawn in some crazy game of chicken to see whether Abraham or God will back down first? Are we to understand ourselves to be the ram, caught in the thicket at just the right (or wrong) place and time?  What are we to understand about sacrifice, real and symbolic, violent and non-violent? What kinds of sacrifices are wastes and what kinds of sacrifices are edifying or productive?  How long does one have to wait to know whether a sacrifice was fruitful? Who decides? [4]

One of my friends from seminary [5] used this story to teach that “Father” Abraham’s understanding of God and of how he understood God’s will in his life was shaped by his social location – that is, gender identity, race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, ability, and personal experiences. Since this story comes near the end of the Abraham narrative, we know a lot about his situation.  When Abraham first heard God tell him to pack up and go off to the promised-land, his response was to get up and go. Although there was some risk, Abraham  took relatives and his wife, servants, and his possessions with him.  He did not interpret God’s direction as unbelievable or impossible. But later, when God told him that Sarah, well advanced in years, would bear a son, Abraham challenged God.

When God told Abraham that a city would be destroyed because of the unjust inhospitality of the residents, Abraham bargained with God, convincing God not to destroy the city if there were 50 righteous men, and then not to destroy the city if there were 40 righteous men, and so on until God agreed that if Abraham could find ten righteous men in the whole city, God would not destroy it. There’s significant precedence for Abraham to express disbelief and even argue with what he hears God tell him.  So why wouldn’t Abraham argue with God when he heard God ask him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac? (In Hebrew narrative, Abraham hears God asking very politely – it’s not an order. God says “please,” although it is not translated. I wish Abraham had politely responded, “no thank you.”)  Perhaps he did not because in Abraham’s cultural context, women and children and slaves were all property of ruling men. As property, they were to be used as needed. Earlier in Genesis, Abraham was ready to sacrifice his wife Sarah to ensure his own safety not once, but twice. Once he told the Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister and sent Sarah as a gift to be part of Pharaoh’s harem because he feared Pharaoh would kill him otherwise. Later Abraham repeated that deception to King Abimelech, again to save his own life. In both cases, Sarah returned to Abraham, but through God’s intervention, not Abraham’s.

Then there’s the story we heard last week of Abraham banishing his oldest son, Ishmael, and his son’s mother, Hagar, into the wilderness with only a skin of water and some bread. This was effectively a death sentence from a very wealthy man. With so few provisions, it was not likely that Ishmael and Hagar would survive. Again, it was God who intervened to save them. By the time Abraham heard God calling him to sacrifice Isaac to prove his faithfulness, Abraham’s predisposition to sacrificing his dependents for his own well-being was well established.

So perhaps God was speaking to Abraham – but if so, I doubt that Abraham understood. The Hebrew text actually bears that out in this story with its repetition of the verb ‘to see.’ To see is also to discern, to hear, and to understand, and to provide (pro-vide from Latin is to see in advance – to anticipate a need). Every time Abraham says, “Here I am,” what he’s literally saying is “See me.” [6] In the story, when God first spoke to Abraham, Abraham responded in actions – gathering the materials for the sacrifice and Isaac, but importantly, he does not see or understand. His response really is blind obedience. Later he sees the mountain far off in the distance and when Isaac asks him where the sacrificial lamb is, he tells Isaac that God will provide, in Hebrew, God will see to it. What God sees, I think, that Abraham has it wrong and sends a messenger to intervene. When the messenger of the Lord tells Abraham to stop his sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham looks up, and in seeing the ram caught in the thicket, finally understands. Abraham names the place, “the Lord will provide,” or, in Hebrew, “the Lord will see.” What Abraham finally sees is that he needs to put the knife down. I wonder how long the messenger of the Lord was trying to get his attention. I wonder how long the messengers of the Lord have been trying to get our attention – to put our weapons down. How long have the messengers of the Lord been trying to help us see that violence is always the result of our inability to see, to hear, to understand. I wonder how long it will take until we see that violence is not God’s will.

Understanding God’s word or God’s will has never been very easy as far as I can tell.  Not in Abraham’s time, not in Jesus’ time, not in our time.  What scripture may be holding up for us today is the complicated good news that, as the old saying goes, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” Perhaps at Emmanuel Church we should say, “Believe it or not, God is present.” And perhaps the struggle to see and hear the Holy One creates connection between existence and the meaning of existence. What scripture may be holding up for us today is the complicated good news that we gather in the name of God Who desires to dwell with us and in us and that messengers from God are always along our path trying to get our attention. Let us pray for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to understand that, rather than being Abraham, or Isaac, or the ram in this drama, we can be the angel, the messenger from God, intervening to stop violence.

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