Scripture: Genesis 21: 1–3; Genesis 22: 1–4
I remember as a kid in church on Sunday mornings, when we became old enough to stay in worship instead of going to church school, there was this revelation that the children’s message didn’t always tell the whole story.
Once the youngest among us had gone to church school, I realized that sometimes adults were really grappling with a whole different set of difficult topics in a different way from a children’s message or a Sunday school classroom.
The children’s message was only just the beginning, and the adults could go a little further later in the service.
That’s how I feel today — that the scripture is inviting us to grapple with some difficult themes around sacrifice, family, and what lengths we will go to for God. Isaac indeed means laughter, but there is not much humor to be found in this story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his child. It’s one of the more difficult texts in the Bible.
Add to that it has not been a humorous week in American civic life, or in many of the international settings where armed conflict, genocide, and starvation are ongoing. As a Boston Globe headline read on Friday, “Charlie Kirk’s death shines a spotlight on worsening climate for political discourse on college campuses.”1 This assassination is a terrible event in a series of violent moments that reveal each time what we already know in so many ways, that we live in a chaotic and volatile time.
It is perhaps no comfort that the book of Genesis that we are reading this month in worship contains a series of volatile and chaotic events, one following the other.
Here’s a quick summary of what follows after last week’s creation narrative in Genesis chapter one: Eve and Adam are expelled by God from paradise. The story of the first siblings, Cain and Able, includes one brother killing the other. God then floods the earth with the idea of restarting creation a second time, only to think better of it and allow a single boat of creatures to continue. The tower of Babel is destroyed and then the two cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by fire and brimstone.
And despite these difficult moments, the Genesis narrative is one of the most powerful and meaningful stories ever written, because somehow in the bleak struggle, there is a messy and beautiful process going on — God is adapting to humanity, and humanity is adapting to God. It’s a divine love story, deeply flawed but somehow moving on through the generations.
This Genesis scripture is part of Jesus’s scripture — the stories of God and humanity that he heard that shaped him as a child.
The book of Genesis doesn’t get any easier after the binding of Isaac in chapter 22. It doesn’t get more peaceful. It offers no easy answers. Trauma is passed on from generation to generation. But everywhere you look there is hope in the wreckage of humanity that through knowledge and faith in God, some other way of living might be possible.
The name that Abraham gives for this possibility of a new way of living is the covenant — covenant is the name of a promise made to God and to other people. In the United Church of Christ denomination, church membership is a kind of covenant made to God and to each other to walk in faith seeking to live lives inspired by the model of Jesus.2 Abraham believes that if he and Sarah can live within the rules of the covenant that God has made with them, that they will be the start of a great and numerous family, extending thousands of generations, living in relationship with a great God.
It’s a hopeful and powerful message of promise that feels like it comes crashing down when God unexpectedly asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac who is the most precious thing to him in the whole world and whose own existence is a miracle after the unlikeliness of Sarah and Abraham even having Isaac in the first place.
Abraham hears a voice that says, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Why? Why? Why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice his child?
It doesn’t ring true to our understanding of God, and it doesn’t make sense for the fact that Isaac is the promised child who is necessary to making possible God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah.
What is equally hard is that Abraham seems to go through with God’s request, right up the very final moment of sacrifice.
We would like to believe that Abraham’s true act of faith in God was knowing — knowing even into the final seconds — that God would never actually make him go through with this impossible act and that he could go through the motions of gathering wood and hiking several days to Moriah . . . knowing that the sacrifice was all a farce.
We might even consider that Abraham has been so beaten down by, and desensitized by, past struggles that he can no longer exercise his own free will. In the past, he pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, and then had to watch as the cities were destroyed anyways. God made Abraham send his first son Ishmael and his beloved Hagar into the wilderness, knowing he would never see either of them again.
We are left to wonder if Abraham has been so oppressed, so discouraged, that he has no resistance left when God comes to ask the impossible of him, and he goes along with the request?
Is God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son because this is something that is absolutely impossible for him to do?
Is God helping Abraham find his agency again? Is God trying to make Abraham resist and change God?
Friends, the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11th this week was a reminder that we too are wounded people, even if the passage of time is making the wounds hurt in a different way.
After Sandy Hook, we’re all wounded.
After the killing of Michael Brown, we’re all wounded.
After the loss of many people in our beloved community we are wounded.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re going about our lives every day, still wounded, having gained knowledge about ourselves and our humanity, but having lost much, too.
Is God trying to wake Abraham up from his woundedness by asking him to do something Abraham will and cannot do?
This is a generous reading of this scripture, but perhaps we live in a time that requires generous readings — and requires generous people.
How will God wake us up from our woundedness? How will God help us heal?
I would say that Abraham comes out of this story changed for the better. He lives out his days as a generous, thoughtful, considerate man — interconnected positively with everyone he meets.
The collateral damage of this story seems to be Isaac. Though Isaac’s life is spared, it is noted in scripture that Isaac very rarely speaks again. Imagine Isaac’s version of this story . . . he is brought right to the brink by his father and God. Trust is broken. While Abraham seems lighter, Isaac seems to be the new bearer his family’s trauma, and passes it on to his sons who steal from and fight and trick each other. And yet somehow they too end up okay in the end.
Every generation responds to its own challenges in its own way.
God will have to work differently to divert the trauma of Isaac.
God is working differently with us too.
We are living through a movement into hurt — it is left to us to bring hope, love, justice, and possibility with us into the hurt, knowing that healing will be needed on the other side — as Sarah and Abraham know too well.
May we be awoken to new possibilities.
Amen.