Transcription
Our first reading today is from the book of Genesis, chapter 22, verses 1 through 14, on page 15 in your Bible.
The Command to Sacrifice Isaac. After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. He said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac. He cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey, the boy, and I will go over there. We will worship, and then we will come back to you. Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife, so the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, Father, and he said, Here I am, my son. He said, The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham said, God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. And he said, Here I am. He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught it by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place, the Lord will provide, as it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. The word of the Lord.
And our New Testament reasoning from the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew chapter 10, verses 40 through 42. Hear God’s word.
Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. And whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of the righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous. And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of the disciple, truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward. This is the good news. The Gospel of our Lord.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we thank you. We thank you for your word that lights our path and guides our hearts and shows us the way to be your servants. And so Lord, we ask that you would guide us and keep us and lead us. May your word light our path and guide us to be your people in this world. A people who find up the brokenhearted. Who serve their God in every way. In your name we pray. Amen.
So, the Akedah as it’s titled. Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain and we have literally one of the most difficult scriptures there is. Because it’s not easy to look at that moment and not have some feels. Now, I’ll be honest. There are a lot of baggage pieces that every one of us brings in. We bring our relationships to our own parents to this scripture. We bring our own relationships of our own children into this scripture. And the problem is that all adds a lot of minutia and mess to this. Because we identify ourselves with either Isaac or Abraham in this moment. And let’s be honest. There’s a lot in it that happens. But there’s also a lot that happens that people have added on. I remember sitting in Old Testament class and our professor pointed out. We don’t know what happened when they come down the mountain between Sarah and Abraham. Can you imagine that family dinner? So, what did you do today up on the mountain boys? Well mom, dad tied me up, laid me on the altar and was grabbing the knife. We laugh because it’s one of those awkward moments. But this is truly difficult for us to have to navigate. And we talk about it somewhat. But we don’t talk about it in depth. And we miss the point of what Isaac is in this story. Isaac is not just Abraham and Sarah’s only son. They’re one and only. No. He is the child of the covenant. Not a child of the covenant, but the child. He is the one through whom God is going to continue His promise to Abraham. Yes, I understand if you’re reading in your scripture you’re going to say. But Abraham has Ishmael. And Ishmael has a part to play but not involved in this. Yes, Abraham and Sarah decide that God’s promise is taking too long. And so they introduce Abraham to Hagar who is Ishmael’s mom and was a servant or slave of Sarah. It’s a whole mess. And yet Isaac is the child through which God’s promise will be fulfilled. God’s made two promises at this point to Abraham. Sort of. The first promise is that God will look out for Ishmael, his other son. God will care for him and carefully care for him. But there is a caveat because Ishmael is not tied to the great covenant he made. That’s Isaac. Through Isaac the promise will happen. Through Isaac the descendants of Abraham will number as many as the stars. Now, remember what Sarah does when she hears this whole promise? She laughs. Because she’s really up in years and Abraham is really up in years. And yet, God’s promise delivers Isaac. Isaac is not just a son. He is the tangible representation of God’s promise. He is the continuation of God’s promise for generation to generation to generation. Without Isaac, the promise is broken, is done. And so we weigh in this moment whether or not God is going to break that promise by making Abraham sacrifice Isaac. But there’s a lot more to go into the salad, so bear in mind. Abraham and Sarah haven’t exactly been the most faithful people. In moments where they were supposed to trust in God, what do they do? When they go visit various cities, Abraham goes and he looks at his wife and says, she looks pretty good, and the king’s kind of given her an eye. I’m her brother, not her husband. So you don’t have to kill me, you just have to give me a dowry. He does this multiple times. And what does God think about this? Abraham, why are you doing this? I’m your God. I am with you. I have you protected. You don’t need to lie about who your wife is. Because I’m with you. So Abraham hasn’t been the most faithful guy throughout this whole covenant. And yet God still is with him.
And so as Abraham goes up the mountain, every step he goes along, you can imagine in his head is playing out, what am I doing? What is on the table? What is going to happen? I am going to sacrifice the covenant that God gave me for the covenant that God gave me. There’s a real circuitous logic that’s bound to be going through his head. And all along, we have failed to wrestle with moments like this in Scripture. We treat it as an allegory. Well, it’s a symbol. It’s something else. Abraham knows somehow that God’s going to pull it through. God knows that Abraham’s going to… Stop cleaning up Scripture that’s messy. It’s meant to be messy. It’s meant for us to look at Abraham and say, every step he takes, emotionally, spiritually, and possibly physically, hurts as he goes up the mountain. We see his hope that he is clinging to as he goes along. We see Isaac kind of tagging along, not putting two and two together. Oh, Dad, what’s going on? Where are we going? What are we doing? The Lord will provide. The Lord will provide. The Lord will provide. It’s almost a mantra that allows Abraham to get one foot further ahead than the other. Every step as he goes. And every time Isaac says, Dad, where’s the sacrifice? Abraham’s heart must break every time.
We can’t clean this up. We can’t ignore what’s going on here. We have to wrestle with what is going on. We have to engage with it. See, when we look at Abraham’s words to the two men at the bottom of the mountain, we see that glimpse of hope that he is clinging onto with both hands. He tells them, we will worship and we will come back. We, not I, we. Abraham is clinging in this moment to God’s faithfulness, to his trust in what God is doing. Abraham has no clue how this is going to turn out. All he knows is that God is with him. The Lord will provide. That’s the mantra that keeps him going, keeps him walking, keeps him faithful and following. The hope of what he believes that the Lord will provide, that he will come down the mountain with his son, is in tension with what has been asked of him. And he has to get to the point where he is able to walk one foot, trusting in God and knowing at the same time what has been asked. And then he gets there. And he lays his son, not just his son, he lays the covenant that God made with him on the altar. And he is willing to eliminate that covenant because God told him.
Now, when we look at this Scripture, we’re like, well, but doesn’t he have all of Scripture to lean back on? You’ve got to remember, this is Genesis in the 20s. We’ve seen Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and Noah, and then we kind of run into Abraham. So there’s not a wealth of history, of relationship between God and humanity. There are a few moments up to this point. So God is making up this relationship as God goes. Abraham and Sarah can’t say, well, God’s been faithful for all the… Wait. So God chose… No. They are the first. Kind of like when the disciples were setting out. They were the first followers to go and do and be after Jesus. It’s a scary time for them because they are building the relationship from scratch. There’s not even a recipe that they can pull out. And yet, we have this test. And there are a couple of lessons in the test. And the first is more general. When Scripture makes you uncomfortable, guess what? That’s not bad. When Scripture makes you uncomfortable and you have to grapple with it, you have to wrestle with it, you have to ask questions about it, that’s not bad. That’s where faith happens. That’s where growth in faith happens. As we navigate moments like this, when we look at Abraham and we wonder, how could you do this? What is going on? As our faith goes, when we wrestle with Scripture, when we wrestle with what it says, guess what? That’s faith getting deeper. None of us can ever say to Abraham, well, you have Ishmael. No. Because we wrestle and struggle with this. And that teaches us how to wrestle and struggle with other Scriptures. The easier, easier ones. We can wrestle with them better because of what God has taught us in the difficult passages. The other piece is to trust in God. We see Abraham literally do nothing but trust God in this moment. He is trusting God from the time he gets up and goes towards the mountain to every step along the way up the mountain. He is trusting that God is going to do something different. That the Lord will provide. Provide in this moment something else. Something other than His Son. Other than the covenant. And so he trusts God implicitly. Doesn’t make his journey any easier up the mountain. It doesn’t mean that when Isaac asks the questions, well, we got everything but the sacrifice, Dad. Where’s that? It doesn’t mean that Abraham’s heart doesn’t shatter into a million pieces when that happens. But it means he can still put one foot in front of the other and go up that mountain because he has trust in God that the Lord will provide.
So as I said before, struggle with Scripture. Struggle with the hard stuff. Struggle with the deep stuff. But also more than anything, as we struggle in life, as we struggle with what God has asked us to do, let us put our trust in God. Let us put our faith that God will provide. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, let us return to God from our gifts.
You have longed for sweetness and for faith.