Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 29, 2008

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.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I hate the story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It is a vicious, brutal, primitive story that in no way reflects the God that I know in my life and that we see principally revealed in Jesus Christ. That God, the one I am convinced is that true God, never would command anyone to kill anyone, and never has. The story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and of Abraham’s willingness to do it is just that, a story. If it is supposed to be a story that reveals something about the nature of God, it isn’t. At least not for us, not today, not if you take it at all literally. Understood literally it has nothing to say to us about the nature of God, and there’s just no way around that conclusion.

So if this is such an awful story, why did I include it in our worship this morning, and why am I talking about it? It’s in large part due to a rule about preaching. If there’s a Bible story that you really don’t like and that you desperately do not want to preach on, that is probably precisely the one that your should preach on. So this past week I really wrestled with this story trying to find something, anything, in it that I could preach on. I came up with a couple of things. Yesterday afternoon I had finished a sermon on one of those things when I decided I didn’t want to preach that sermon. It’s not bad. I just didn’t think it was very interesting or that it was anything you’d find very interesting. So I went back to the drawing board, or the computer actually, and tried again. This sermon is the result. It’s title is not what’s in your bulletin. It’s title is “Putting God First.” So here goes as I try to preach something out that horrible story that might be of some use.

We are all shocked at the notion that God would ask Abraham to kill his only son as a sacrifice to God; but, like I said, this is a story, not something that ever actually happened. So we don’t have to assume that God ever did that. We are also shocked at Abraham’s apparent unquestioning willingness to do it. His reaction amounts to nothing more sophisticated than the bumper sticker you may have seen that says “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Yet if we don’t take the part of story that has God demanding the sacrifice of Isaac literally, then I suppose we don’t have to take Abraham’s willingness to kill his son literally either. Perhaps in this story both God’s demand and Abraham’s compliance act not as fact but as myth or as symbol. That is, perhaps they stand for something different than the literal words might suggest. What might that something be? Could it be something that actually has some meaning for us?

I think maybe so. Try looking at the story this way. What is Isaac to Abraham? He is of course Abraham’s son. The story calls him Abraham’s “only” son, which he wasn’t, actually. Abraham also had his son Ishmael, born to the slave woman Hagar. But perhaps Genesis here calling Isaac Abraham’s only son when he wasn’t plays a role in the symbolic meaning of the story. Calling Isaac Abraham’s only son highlights how important Isaac was to Abraham. Let’s recall the story of Abraham for a minute. God had called him and his people to leave their home far to the east and to migrate into the land of Canaan. God promised to make Abraham a great nation there in Canaan, that is, to make him the ancestor of so many descendants that they would amount to a nation. Yet in their old age Abraham and his wife Sarah had not had any children. Then, God intervenes, and Sarah conceives Isaac.

After Abraham, at Sarah’s insistence, has sent Ishmael and his mother off into the desert where by all rights they would have died but for the intervention of God, Isaac becomes, as far as Abraham knows, the only possible means by which God’s promise could be fulfilled. Abraham can have grandchildren only through Isaac, therefore if Isaac dies before he fathers children, God’s promise is nullified. So God in this story telling Abraham to kill Isaac is, if anything, even more outrageous than it appears to us on the surface to be. Isaac’s death would be not only the death of a beloved child. It would be the death of a promise of God on which Abraham had relied for many, many years.

Seen symbolically, God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac is then about the most radical demand on Abraham that God could possibly have made. It was a demand to kill a beloved son. It was also a demand to give up hope in the promise God had made to Abraham that had induced him to leave his home and venture into unknown territory where he would be despised as an alien. The literalism of the story is: God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The symbolism of the story is: God made a demand on Abraham that he give up the things that were the most important things in the world to him, his son and his hope for the fulfillment of God’s promise.

And the story says Abraham did it, or rather, he would have done it if God hadn’t intervened at the last minute and stopped him. The literalism of the story is that Abraham was willing to kill his son Isaac if he thought that was what God wanted. The symbolism of the story is that God calls us to subordinate everything in our lives to God. The demand of faith is absolute. God’s demand is that we make God more important than any and everything else in our lives. God’s demand is that we be willing to sacrifice everything for God.

Here’s another way of looking at it that might help. The great 20th century theologian Paul Tillich called God, among other things, the truly ultimate, that is truly the highest, most supreme, most transcendent reality that there is or ever could be. He called faith “ultimate concern,” that is, having a highest concern in our lives, something that we place above everything else. If faith is having an ultimate concern, everybody has one. But if our ultimate concern is not God, that is, if our ultimate concern is not the truly ultimate, then our faith is false, it is idolatrous, because we are ultimately concerned with something that is not ultimate.

I don’t know if Tillich liked the story of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Not because he believed in child sacrifice. Of course not. But because the story illustrates so well his conception of faith as ultimate concern. In this story, God truly is Abraham’s ultimate concern. Abraham truly will subordinate absolutely everything else in his life to God as he understand God. And he apparently will do so quite readily, perhaps even happily. The story gives no hint that Abraham felt at all bad about having to kill his son to comply with a command from God. It presents Abraham’s actions as perfectly matter of fact, something Abraham had no difficulty doing at all. Symbolically that says: God was truly his ultimate concern. In other words, for Abraham God truly was God.

Which raises the question for us: Do we truly make God our ultimate concern? Is God truly God for us? Or is something else more important to us? I suspect that if we’re honest the answer to that question is no, we don’t make God our ultimate concern, and yes, something else is more important to us. For many Americans our nation is more important than God. Tillich called nationalism one of the two great idolatries of the twentieth century. It remains one of the great idolatries of the twenty-first century. For many other Americans worldly wealth and success are their ultimate concern. Tillich called that concern the other great idolatry of the twentieth century, and it too remains one of the great idolatries of the twenty-first century. Or maybe our ultimate concern is our family. If I’m honest, I think I’d have to say that my family is my ultimate concern. I don’t know that if somehow I had to choose between them and God that I’d choose God. I quite doubt that I would. One thing I know for sure. Even if I were morally certain that God wanted me to kill one of them or even reject and renounce one of them, I wouldn’t do it. Even if I thought I was putting my immortal soul at risk, I wouldn’t do it. So, is God my ultimate concern? Can I honestly say that I let God be God in my life? No. Not really. Perhaps if you are honest you have to give the same answer.

So where does that leave us? On one level it leaves us in utter dependence on our belief that God would never demand such an unthinkable thing of us, although I am convinced that God does demand that we put God before country and before wealth and worldly success. But mostly it leaves us in utter dependence on God’s grace. It leaves us to rely on our certainty that while God makes great demands on us, God does not abandon us when we fail fully to meet them. For us Christians there has ever been only one person of whom we can say he truly made God his ultimate concern. That, of course, is Jesus. We know that God demands of us what God demanded and got from Jesus, total faithfulness, total devotion. total faith. And we know we don’t give it.

So what are we to do? Keep trying. When faced with any choice, any decision, ask the question: Is the choice I’m making or the answer I’m giving putting God first? If it isn’t, can I make a different choice? Can I put God first? If I can’t, can I at least move God up the ladder of priorities a bit? Asking those questions and struggling with the answers is the least that God demands from us as disciples of Christ. We can ask those questions and struggle with the answers without fear because we know that God’s grace doesn’t depend on our answers. God’s grace depends on God, not on us. In that horrible story from Genesis we can at least see that Abraham put God first. God won’t ask us to kill anyone. God asks us precisely never to kill anyone. Yet when God does demand something ultimate of us, will we, like Abraham, put God first? Perhaps with God’s grace we can. Amen.