Journey to Myself
Genesis 22:1-14
Well, if Lent is supposed to be about self-denial then I must be in the spirit of things, because I’ve denied myself a simple sermon text. The strange story of Abraham and Isaac has to be among the most difficult and challenging texts in scripture. And it is not the lectionary reading for this morning.
In fact, throughout Lent, I won’t be preaching from the lectionary. Instead, each Sunday we will hear one of our members discuss some aspect of mission, and I will follow with a reflection on some aspect of God’s calling. The two are intimately related.
If I had to sum up in a single phrase what the Bible is all about, I’d say it is the story of God calling humankind into deeper relationship with God and with one another, and God’s promise to be faithful to the relationship. It’s a long, complex, multi-layered and multi-voiced story of call and response, and the calling has a particular, identifiable content: love.
That calling is the foundation for all mission work that we engage.
And it all starts with the call of Abraham, without whom there is no story to tell. Perhaps more to the point of the reading this morning, without Isaac there is no story to tell, either.
God calls forth a people, and begins, for some reason, with a wandering Aramean. Remarkably enough, when God calls Abraham always responds the same way, “El Emunah: Hineini
God of faith, here I am, I am ready.”
My friend, Noah Budin, used that phrase to frame a song, and his “Edge of the Ocean” stands for me as one of the clearest responses to this inscrutable text.
God says, “Abraham, leave your home and go to a place that I will show you.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Abraham, you and your ancient wife, Sarah, are going to have child.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Take that child and sacrifice him.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
The text presents us with three fundamental questions: What are we to make of this relationship between God and Abraham? What are we to make of this God who would make such outlandish promises and such outrageous demands? And what are we to make of this man that he should trust the promise and say, “yes” to the demand?
Beyond the text we should certainly also ask what has any of this to do with us?
To begin with we can confess our ignorance in the face of this story, and acknowledge that gallons of ink and thousands of pages have been devoted to it or inspired by it and even if we are well informed by all of that we remain ignorant nonetheless.
Some says this story represents the repudiation, in ancient Israel, of human sacrifice, perhaps in the same way that some argue that Jesus’ call to “love your enemies” – which comes in the form of, “you have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, ‘love your enemies’ – is a repudiation of the practice of capital punishment.
In such a reading, this difficult text becomes simply one more part of the explanatory mythology of ancient Israel that distinguishes it from its neighbors. And, as such, it really has nothing to say to us. It becomes merely a cultural artifact. We can read it that way, and there may be some truth to it, but it is not a truth worth meditating on unless you are considering reinstating human sacrifice.
So let’s take the text more seriously, own up to our ignorance in its face, and explore the questions the text insists upon.
Who is this God who calls? And, moreover, why would God call one of us in the first place?
Think about that. If God is, as some would say, “eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible; one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” then why would such a God be in need of relationship with human beings?
Perhaps there is a clue in the heart of our Trinitarian theology. If God is named at all accurately in the traditional, orthodox affirmation of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” then whatever else we may make of that naming, one thing is clear: at the very heart of God is a relationship. The essence of God is relational. God desires relationship. Just as the Psalmist sings, “my heart longs for God,” and as Augustine said, “my heart is restless till it rests in thee,” God’s heart is also restless and longing for companionship.
Imagine that! God wants to be in relationship with you! And, in particular, wants to be in a relationship marked by trust, and God desires relationship with the authentic you.
All of which I take to define faith, and to describe faith as a journey to yourself, your authentic self created by God for God.
In that sense we Christians, like our Jewish sisters and brothers, are children of a wandering Aramaen.
Who is this wandering Aramaen, this Abraham?
While Jesus is, as the book of Hebrews says, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Abraham is in this sense its father figure. Abraham shows what it means to live into a trusting relationship with the Holy One, into faithfulness, in other words.
As such, Abraham also takes the first journey of faith, and makes that for all time the best description of a life of faith. Along the way he finds himself, takes on a new name even, and discerns his calling to be the father of a great nation. His is a journey unto himself.
And along the way his faith is put to the test time and time again, never more so than when God demands Isaac.
The demand is at once a double inquiry to Abraham: who are you and to whom do you belong?
Put slightly differently, are you trusting and in whom do you place that trust?
The text speaks this same demand to us: who are we, and to whom do we belong?
Are we trusting, and in whom do we place our trust?
Walter Brueggemann puts it this way, “The life of Abraham” – and I would say our lives as well – “is set by this text in the midst of the contradiction between the testing of God and the providing of God; between the sovereign freedom which requires complete obedience and the gracious faithfulness which gives good gifts; between the command and the promise; and between the word of death which takes away and the word of life which gives.”
If we resist the temptation to domesticate the text it remains scandalous in its insistence that God remains beyond every human effort to grasp. In other words, if we let the text stand it witnesses to a God who will not be domesticated, who will not be put to use for our purposes but who demands instead that we bend our lives to God’s purposes even when they are inexplicable to us.
For it is only when Abraham follows God’s call completely that we understand what this testing is all about. It is not, after all is said and done, the faith of Abraham that is tested here. It is the faithfulness of God.
As Brueggemann concludes, “It is the same God who tempts and provides. The connection is that God is faithful. In the end, our narrative is perhaps not about Abraham being found faithful. It is about God being found faithful” (195).
Abraham responds to God by saying, “here I am.”
God, whose presence is revealed in the calling, in the vocation, responds to Abraham’s moment of extremity by saying the same thing, “here I am.”
And in this call and response, Abraham discovers who he is and to whom his life and that of his long history of progeny belong. You and I: we belong to God.
We discover this belonging again and again, on its most intimate terms, when we respond to God’s call to risk, trust God provision for the journey, and take a step out on the journey to ourselves.
Well, if Lent is supposed to be about self-denial then I must be in the spirit of things, because I’ve denied myself a simple sermon text. The strange story of Abraham and Isaac has to be among the most difficult and challenging texts in scripture. And it is not the lectionary reading for this morning.
In fact, throughout Lent, I won’t be preaching from the lectionary. Instead, each Sunday we will hear one of our members discuss some aspect of mission, and I will follow with a reflection on some aspect of God’s calling. The two are intimately related.
If I had to sum up in a single phrase what the Bible is all about, I’d say it is the story of God calling humankind into deeper relationship with God and with one another, and God’s promise to be faithful to the relationship. It’s a long, complex, multi-layered and multi-voiced story of call and response, and the calling has a particular, identifiable content: love.
That calling is the foundation for all mission work that we engage.
And it all starts with the call of Abraham, without whom there is no story to tell. Perhaps more to the point of the reading this morning, without Isaac there is no story to tell, either.
God calls forth a people, and begins, for some reason, with a wandering Aramean. Remarkably enough, when God calls Abraham always responds the same way, “El Emunah: Hineini
God of faith, here I am, I am ready.”
My friend, Noah Budin, used that phrase to frame a song, and his “Edge of the Ocean” stands for me as one of the clearest responses to this inscrutable text.
God says, “Abraham, leave your home and go to a place that I will show you.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Abraham, you and your ancient wife, Sarah, are going to have child.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Take that child and sacrifice him.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
The text presents us with three fundamental questions: What are we to make of this relationship between God and Abraham? What are we to make of this God who would make such outlandish promises and such outrageous demands? And what are we to make of this man that he should trust the promise and say, “yes” to the demand?
Beyond the text we should certainly also ask what has any of this to do with us?
To begin with we can confess our ignorance in the face of this story, and acknowledge that gallons of ink and thousands of pages have been devoted to it or inspired by it and even if we are well informed by all of that we remain ignorant nonetheless.
Some says this story represents the repudiation, in ancient Israel, of human sacrifice, perhaps in the same way that some argue that Jesus’ call to “love your enemies” – which comes in the form of, “you have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, ‘love your enemies’ – is a repudiation of the practice of capital punishment.
In such a reading, this difficult text becomes simply one more part of the explanatory mythology of ancient Israel that distinguishes it from its neighbors. And, as such, it really has nothing to say to us. It becomes merely a cultural artifact. We can read it that way, and there may be some truth to it, but it is not a truth worth meditating on unless you are considering reinstating human sacrifice.
So let’s take the text more seriously, own up to our ignorance in its face, and explore the questions the text insists upon.
Who is this God who calls? And, moreover, why would God call one of us in the first place?
Think about that. If God is, as some would say, “eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible; one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” then why would such a God be in need of relationship with human beings?
Perhaps there is a clue in the heart of our Trinitarian theology. If God is named at all accurately in the traditional, orthodox affirmation of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” then whatever else we may make of that naming, one thing is clear: at the very heart of God is a relationship. The essence of God is relational. God desires relationship. Just as the Psalmist sings, “my heart longs for God,” and as Augustine said, “my heart is restless till it rests in thee,” God’s heart is also restless and longing for companionship.
Imagine that! God wants to be in relationship with you! And, in particular, wants to be in a relationship marked by trust, and God desires relationship with the authentic you.
All of which I take to define faith, and to describe faith as a journey to yourself, your authentic self created by God for God.
In that sense we Christians, like our Jewish sisters and brothers, are children of a wandering Aramaen.
Who is this wandering Aramaen, this Abraham?
While Jesus is, as the book of Hebrews says, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Abraham is in this sense its father figure. Abraham shows what it means to live into a trusting relationship with the Holy One, into faithfulness, in other words.
As such, Abraham also takes the first journey of faith, and makes that for all time the best description of a life of faith. Along the way he finds himself, takes on a new name even, and discerns his calling to be the father of a great nation. His is a journey unto himself.
And along the way his faith is put to the test time and time again, never more so than when God demands Isaac.
The demand is at once a double inquiry to Abraham: who are you and to whom do you belong?
Put slightly differently, are you trusting and in whom do you place that trust?
The text speaks this same demand to us: who are we, and to whom do we belong?
Are we trusting, and in whom do we place our trust?
Walter Brueggemann puts it this way, “The life of Abraham” – and I would say our lives as well – “is set by this text in the midst of the contradiction between the testing of God and the providing of God; between the sovereign freedom which requires complete obedience and the gracious faithfulness which gives good gifts; between the command and the promise; and between the word of death which takes away and the word of life which gives.”
If we resist the temptation to domesticate the text it remains scandalous in its insistence that God remains beyond every human effort to grasp. In other words, if we let the text stand it witnesses to a God who will not be domesticated, who will not be put to use for our purposes but who demands instead that we bend our lives to God’s purposes even when they are inexplicable to us.
For it is only when Abraham follows God’s call completely that we understand what this testing is all about. It is not, after all is said and done, the faith of Abraham that is tested here. It is the faithfulness of God.
As Brueggemann concludes, “It is the same God who tempts and provides. The connection is that God is faithful. In the end, our narrative is perhaps not about Abraham being found faithful. It is about God being found faithful” (195).
Abraham responds to God by saying, “here I am.”
God, whose presence is revealed in the calling, in the vocation, responds to Abraham’s moment of extremity by saying the same thing, “here I am.”
And in this call and response, Abraham discovers who he is and to whom his life and that of his long history of progeny belong. You and I: we belong to God.
We discover this belonging again and again, on its most intimate terms, when we respond to God’s call to risk, trust God provision for the journey, and take a step out on the journey to ourselves.
posted by David Ensign at
1:43 PM
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