Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 26, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We are people of faith. Faith is what distinguishes us from people who have no faith. Since having faith is a central part of our identity, it ought to be pretty important to us to know what faith is. I don’t mean what the specific content of the Christian faith is. I mean: What do we mean by the word faith? If we have faith, what exactly do we have? There is a wide-spread misunderstanding of what faith is that is shared by people both inside the church and outside the church. People in our culture generally understand faith to be taking as true facts for which there is little or no evidence. We say that we take on faith things we can’t prove to be true. This morning I want to contrast that understanding of faith, which I take to be a misunderstanding, with faith as it is demonstrated in the story of Abraham, and specifically in the story we heard this morning of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

The story of Abraham is a foundational story for all three of the world’s great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It begins when God comes to Abraham at his home at Aram in Mesopotamia and tells him to take all of his household and go to the land of Canaan, which God promises to give to him and his ancestors. So Abraham, his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, and all of their households leave their homes and head for a place they don’t know far away across the desert. This migration of Abraham is an act of faith, but it has nothing to do with believing as true facts for which there is little or no evidence. At least, I don’t thank that’s the most helpful way to look at it. Abraham’s response to the call of God is a pure act of trust, of faith understood as trust. Abraham went even though the whole undertaking was dangerous and, from the world’s point of view, uncertain at best. I imagine his friends back in Aram even called him mad. Abraham’s migration is a pure act of trust, trust in God, trust that God will be true to God’s word. The story of Abraham and Sarah continues with the birth of Isaac-I’ll skip the troubling story of Hagar and Ishmael for now. Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age as God had promised earlier in the story. More about that later. Isaac is himself a result of Abraham’s trust in God, but the ultimate story of Abraham’s trust in God is the story we heard this morning.

The story begins: "God tested Abraham." God told Abraham to go to a place God would show him and there to offer Isaac as a burnt sacrifice to God. That means exactly what it sounds like. In the story God tells Abraham to burn his son to death as an offering to God. And Abraham sets out to do it. The story gives hints that Abraham was troubled by God’s command. He concealed his intentions from Sarah, whom he left behind, from Isaac, whom he misled at best, and to the people who went with him on the journey, whom he left behind as he and Isaac went the final distance to the place of sacrifice. Abraham was troubled, but he went. He was prepared to do it. He took with him everything he needed to do it-wood, fire, and Isaac. He set about doing it. He tied up his son and placed him on the pyre. That’s when the angel of the Lord, which in the Old Testament really means Yahweh himself, put a stop to it. Abraham’s statement to Isaac earlier in the story that God would provide the animal for the sacrifice, which sounds like a lie when Abraham says it, comes true, and Isaac is spared. In the story the Lord intervenes once the Lord is convinced that Abraham truly “fears” God, the Old Testament way of saying truly has faith.

This story appalls us. We are shocked, outraged, even sickened that God would demand such a barbaric thing from any person and that Abraham, supposedly such a paragon of virtue, would be prepared to do it. When I saw that this story was in the lectionary for today I sure was hoping that there would be something else I could preach on; yet here I am, preaching on what is for us perhaps the most difficult story in all of Scripture. So let me suggest a way of approaching this story that may not only make it more palatable but perhaps may even make it edifying for us in our own faith lives.

We start with the fact that this story is just that, a story. Most of our problems with it stem from the fact that we hear it not as story but as history. I invite you this morning, if you can, to set aside any assumption that you may have that this story actually happened the way Genesis tells it. The passage is not history. It is a story told by the authors and editors of Genesis, who could tell some really good stories.

It is a story, not history. Beyond that, it is a particular kind of story. It is in fact a myth. Now, myth here doesn’t mean what you may think it means. It doesn’t mean a story that people take as true that is not true. Rather, a myth in this sense is a story that Scripture tells not to convey facts or to tell what really happened. Rather it is, as the great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says somewhere about all Old Testament stories, a story about the relationship between God and creation, between God and us humans. It is a story intended not to convey facts but to make a point about how we are to relate to God.

So we ask not did these things really happen but what does the story say about how we are to relate to God. Recall that the story begins "God tested Abraham." That means that God wanted to find out something about Abraham. The story ends when God is satisfied that Abraham has pass the test: "Now I know that you fear God." So what was it that, in the story, God saw in Abraham that satisfied God?

Now first of all, let’s not get hung up on the idea that what God saw in Abraham was a willingness to kill his son in a literal sense. Yes, in the story Abraham was willing to kill his son; but that’s a mythic element in the story or, if you prefer, that willingness is a metaphor. It points beyond its literal meaning to a profound truth about our proper relationship to God. It points to the fact that our proper relationship to God is one of ultimate trust.

God tested Abraham, and Abraham trusted God. As we enter into the world of this story, this myth, we can be sure that Abraham was as appalled by the command the God of the story gives Abraham to sacrifice his son as we are, and probably even more so. You see, the story’s command that Abraham kill Isaac isn’t just a command to commit infanticide, as horrible as that is. Isaac is more than a son to Abraham. He is himself the product of God’s providence in Abraham’s life, the miracle child of Abraham’s and Sarah’s old age. And he is even more than that. He is the vehicle through which God was going to fulfill God’s promise that God would make Abraham the father of a great nation, of multitudes as numerous as the sands of the seashore. Abraham had trusted God’s promise, God’s word, ever since he left Aram so many years earlier. And now God was telling him to kill the only means there was of God delivering on that promise that Abraham had trusted for so long. God’s call to Abraham to kill Isaac-remember that’s story not history-had to seem to Abraham not only as a call to child murder but as God’s reneging on God’s promises, God’s betraying Abraham and everything Abraham had built his entire life around.

And still Abraham trusted God. In this story Abraham has every reason in the world to tell God to go to hell. He had every reason to say: If that’s the kind of God you are I have no need of you, no use for you. If you won’t keep faith with me in this way, if you’ll break your word and back out of your commitments in this way, I am well rid of you. I’m not going to kill my son. Not for you, not for anyone. Get out my life, you with your fickleness and your betrayal. If that’s how it is with you, be gone! That’s the reaction we want Abraham to have. It’s the reaction we’d have, probably. It’s the reaction the story wants us to have.

And it’s not the reaction Abraham has. Having every reason in the world not to trust God, Abraham trusts God. He trusts that he is safe with God though his whole life, his whole world seems to be crashing down around him. He entrusts himself to God when from a human point of view he is foolish at best to do so. That’s the lesson of the story. That’s what this myth is saying about the relationship between us and God. Faith is trust. Faith is trust that we are safe with God no matter what, though our entire lives, our entire world be crashing down around us we are called to trust God, to entrust ourselves to God.

In the story God provides a ram for the sacrifice, and Abraham’s world, Abraham’s life is restored. That’s myth too. That’s myth that says we are safe with God no matter what. It doesn’t say God will always provide the ram, that things will always turn out all right from a human perspective when we trust God. That’s much too literal a reading of the story. Mythically it says something much more powerful. It says: You are safe with God no matter what, whether God provides you a ram or not. It says: You are safe with God, you can trust God no matter what. Though you die-and we all die-you are safe with God.

So, friends, live in that faith, live in that trust. That faith, that trust is the greatest treasure we can have in our lives. It is immensely liberating. It frees us from narrow, selfish concern about ourselves and what will happen to us. It frees us to live joyful and free as disciples of Christ, free joyfully and courageously to live the life God sets before us, to answer the call of our Savior to live lives of discipleship committed not to narrow selfish concerns but to the welfare, the abundant life of all of God’s people, all of God’s creation. That faith, that trust, brings us peace in all things, the good and the bad; and it is the only thing that can. That is the faith of Abraham. That is the faith of Jesus Christ. Let us strive to make it our faith as well. Amen.