Rev. Sarah Buteux                                                                         June 26, 2005

The Aqedah

7th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 8

Genesis 22:1-14

“Aqedah,” the title of our sermon for today, means binding. The story of the “aqedah” within scripture is one of the few stories in the Bible with a name.

It is the story of a man named Abraham who bound his son Isaac, laid him upon an altar, and lifted a knife with every intention of sacrificing his son in obedience to a God who was really only testing him.

It is the most famous, most troubling, or perhaps I should just say the most famously troubling of the stories held in common amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims. 

The Aqedah. The Binding.

If you do not attend religious services often, (perhaps you just happened to wander in this morning, you were invited, or really just came for the music) you may be sitting in a pew right now thinking that this is precisely why you avoid going to church.

You may be secretly thinking to yourself that you are not sure which is worse, having to listen to this kind of twisted, abusive, misguided, patriarchal, rhetoric, or watching a well intentioned liberal protestant minister do her very best to warm up, and thereby admittedly contort, this ancient story into something akin to chicken soup for the modern soul. Bleck.

Or you may be sitting there thinking, yeah right, the story of Abraham.  That one about the guy whose faith was so great that he was even willing to sacrifice his own son. But hey, he passed the test, right?  God let him off the hook and they all lived happily ever after, which just goes to show you that (now gosh, which one was it) God won’t test you beyond what you can bear.

Or maybe it’s more like: if God closes a door he’ll open a window. Or is it just that when bad things happen to good people it’s really only God testing them and if they would just chin up it would all soon be over, so really God’s just calling us all to trust in him more. Or is the true moral of this story that we should love God even more than we love our own children…if I may be so bold, double blech.  

The truth is some texts in scripture leave us with more questions than answers, and in this case, that is actually a good thing. This is not a text for imitation, but for introspection. This is a story that is supposed to make you think, and rethink, and then think again.

Soren Kirkegaard, opens his famous treatment of this story in Fear and Trembling (1843) by admitting that he loved this story as a child and paradoxically, came to admire it more and more throughout his years while admittedly understanding it less and less (III 61).  That is how it should be.

Before I take a humble stab at what I think this story is all about, I want to give you all a chance to speak. Tell me, what questions does this story raise for you? Or, what do you find hard about it? Perhaps I would do better to ask, what don’t you find hard?  Where does it snag at your conscience or cause you to wonder about the nature of scripture, or maybe the goodness of God, or what it means to be truly faithful? What questions do you have about this story?

-Does God really test us?

-Didn’t Abraham have two sons?

-If Abraham would argue for the lives of good people in Sodom and Gomorrah, why would he not argue with God for the life of his own son?

-Does God really value child sacrifice, or blood sacrifice?

-Is it okay to kill people if God tells you to do it, or in the name of God or for the glory of God?

These are all good questions, and if nothing else this is a good exercise.  I know I’m probably preaching to the choir, saying this in a United Church of Christ, but it is good to question the scriptures. 

It is healthy to wonder, and wrestle, and even at times disagree, because for one thing if you are going to engage scripture at that level, it is at least a mark of how much you care, and for another, the Bible isn’t some sort of answer book, where you can just flip through the pages, pick a verse and divine a course of action for your life.

It wasn’t assembled like this –from Genesis to revelation, just to tell you, as an individual living in the 21st C. exactly how to think and what to do in any given situation. It’s a gift of wisdom collected over thousands of years to help you, God willing, learn to think for yourself and discern through reading, prayer, and meditation, alone and in the context of community, how you should live and how you should love. 

Otherwise, at least in the case of this story, we’d all be aspiring to become wealthy male, slave holding, child sacrificing, polygamists, and that is definitely not the message I want to leave you with here this morning.

A colleague of mine by the name of Lawrence DeWolf, gave a wonderful sermon on this very story right after September 11th ( you can just imagine how it would have resonated then, with a whole host of people killing others in the name of God), within which he quoted the Biblical scholar James Sanders, who once said that “we have to stop looking at the Bible as a manual for morality, and begin to see it as a mirror of our own identity.”

Lawrence continues, “We can’t take a story like this one and say, ‘There it is. God wants us to act like Abraham.’ What we must do with Bible stories like this one – and there are many like this one – is look into them to see God and humanity in relationship.

To see (a) truth about ourselves and God that we can’t find anywhere else. Mirrors don’t just show us what we want to see, “ says Lawrence, “What’s most important about mirrors is that they show us what we can’t see on our own” (from a sermon entitled “The Binding of Isaac,” by the Rev. Dr. D. Lawrence De Wolfe, 6/30/02). 

So if this is not a story about how parents should act, or how we should love God more than we love even our own children, what is it a story about?  And even that is the wrong way to ask the question or approach this text, because that implies a moral, and I don’t think there is a neat and tidy moral to this story. For all the obvious parallels, this isn’t one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables or even a Greek myth. 

This is the story of a man, a man named Abraham, who had been called by God decades ago to leave his father’s house and travel to a land that God would show him.  It is the story of a man who was promised by this same God that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand upon the earth.  It is the story of a man who believed and waited faithfully (if we sidestep for now that unfortunate event with Hagar) for over a hundred years before his beloved wife Sarah did conceive and bear a child… one child… and that child was Isaac.

In short it is the story of a man who has already been through a lot.  And so, when we think about why God would test this man, perhaps rather than speculate about the goodness or fairness or even the mind of God, for who can fathom such things, we should take a closer look at Abraham and all he has been through and ask, “what does his struggle say about the human condition…human nature… perhaps, human limitation?”. For that is something we can comprehend. 

If we look into this story as Sanders and DeWolfe suggest, the way one looks into a mirror, what do we see about ourselves? That means not using the story like a crystal ball.  We are not looking into it to see who we should be, or even who we will be, but who we are right now.

If we look into the mirror of this text at the face of our fellow traveler Abraham, we see a man who first and foremost had great faith in the promises of God. Enough faith to leave the country of his birth, travel to a new land, engage in battles, argue with God, maintain hope over many desolate years, even let his first son, (and we’ll come back to the problem of Abraham having two sons, but the text saying take your only son) even let his son Ishmael go off into the desert with the promise that God would provide for him as well. And now, in his old age, Abraham finally had the pleasure of cherishing the fulfillment of God’s promise in the form of his last remaining son Isaac.

So looking at all this, I wonder: is it possible that this same Abraham, after all he had been through, had come to a place where he put a little too much trust in his beautiful son Isaac?

Is it possible that Abraham in his later years, reflects our very human tendency to place our hope, ground our sense of security, and even come to worship or make holy (which is the literal Latinate meaning of sacrifice, sacre ficere) the gifts of God rather than God in God’s self?  God, who is the giver of all good gifts.

Is it possible that we have a tendency to place our trust more in the gift than the giver?

It is not just possible, it is often true, true that after years of hard work, served unbegrugingly with great love and faith, that we get to a place of comfort and security where we - as churches and as individuals, trust more in what we have been given than in the Giver of all good gifts.

I think immediately of churches with large endowments, who never spend any money on anything new, lest they be caught up short come some rainy day.  What happens to those churches spiritually? They die. Oh sure physically, they’ll probably stand there forever, but spiritually… they die.

Or people who amass wealth but then live in fear that someone will take it from them, so they dress in shabby clothes, refuse to have any fun if it would cost them money, and never do anything to attract attention, lest someone catch on and sue them for all they’re worth.

And then there is the person who gets a new fancy sports car and insists on parking in the far corner of the lot or worse yet, never actually takes the car out of the driveway, lest an errant shopping carts or some really bad driver scratch the finish or total the car.

On a more serious note, I remember after I was first married, lying awake at night in my bed terrified that something might happen to my husband Andrew, rather than simply enjoying the comfort of having a partner in the here and now, and trusting that the God who had brought this person into my life out of love for me, would love me and care for me and provide for me, no matter what happened to Andrew. I’m sure new parents have felt some form of this anxiety as well, as they have looked down upon their new born children.

The point is, there are gifts that come into our lives that we fear we cannot live without. It is, I believe, part of what it is to be human.  Perhaps this story about Abraham and Isaac is here in part to teach us that we can and will go on living, no matter how much we lose, because we will always have God.

Phyllis Trible, a professor at Union Seminary, whose name may be familiar to those of you who watched the PBS program about Genesis with Bill Moyers, says that the literary key to this text is found in the words, “Take your son, take your only son whom you love, Isaac,” for these words, in a story that is known for its sparseness, belabor just how precious Isaac is to Abraham. 

There is a Jewish Midrash, or interpretation, that touches on this as well, and also serves to explain why Isaac is referred to as an “only son.” I told you I’d come back to that. In the Midrash, this sentence that Trible points to, is actually seen as one side of a conversation between God and Abraham.  So the line,  "Take your son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac..." when coupled with Abraham's response to Yahweh sounds something more like:

God: Abraham, take your son...

Abraham: Which son?

Your only son.

I have two sons.

The one whom you love.

But Yahweh I love both of my sons

Isaac!!!

Oh, I was afraid you meant that one.”

In that one line, Isaac is revealed to Abraham as his most beloved son, and indeed, his most beloved of all things. Trible says that the “gift,” meaning the boy, has become a substitute for the “giver,” meaning God.  Abraham is in danger of worshipping his son, who to him represents the fulfillment of the promise in the future, instead of God, who holds the future and made the promise in the first place.

The fact that Abraham would go to such lengths and actually intend to sacrifice his son, (and again remember, “sacrifice” means to make holy), serves to underscore this imbalance to Abraham. And so, in testing Abraham in this way, “God reminds him that his son is a gift, but the future is not in Isaac’s hands. 

It’s in God’s hands.  Even if something terrible happened to Isaac, God could and would find a way to fulfill the promise.”  (AHA 6/26/05). So perhaps Abraham’s faithfulness was not so much proven that day, for who could have doubted his faithfulness, but refined and reoriented to focus more fully on the sovereignty of God.  It’s a thought.

We all have a tendency to get attached to those things we love the most here on earth and come to trust in them for our sense of wellbeing. We come to trust more in the gifts that God has given us - be they people, homes, jobs, churches, than we trust in God, because these things give us hope for the future.

The Aqedah is a powerful and painful reminder that all these earthly blessings shall come to pass, whereas God, the giver will still be, forever and always, as God has always been, the same yesterday, today, and forever, as God was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen and amen. This is the God we serve. Let us give thanks to God.   

Would you pray with me.  O Lord, I am reminded of the words of St. Paul, that neither death nor life…nor things present, nor things to come… nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from your love, felt so fully in the love of Jesus the Christ.  May we go forth this day, renewed in our sense of love for you and your love for us. May we go forth this day renewed in our understanding. And may we go forth with our trust placed more fully in you.  All this we pray in the name of the Holy One, Amen.