Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 26, 2011

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.

So we just heard everyone’s favorite Bible story, right? I mean, don’t you just love it? God tells Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. And Abraham, we are to believe, is perfectly willing to do it. He’s perfectly willing to lie to his son and say nothing to his wife in order to do it. Abraham, the legendary ancestor of three great faith traditions that are named the Abrahamic faiths after him—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has no problem obeying what he takes to be the voice of God telling him to kill his son. “You want me to kill my son, the son of my old age, the son through whom you have promised to make me the ancestor of many nations? Sure. No problem. I’ll get right on it.” And he does. It paints a lovely picture of God and of our ancestor in faith Abraham, doesn’t it? God is bloodthirsty. God’s knowledge is limited, since God doesn’t know how much Abraham is willing to do in order to be faithful to God. Abraham is willing to commit infanticide. Wonderful stuff. It just gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling all over. I’m sure we all love it. And yet. And yet somehow I’m getting the sense that you don’t love this story. Let me see a show of hands. How many of you love this story? (If anyone raises their hand say something like I want to talk to you afterwards.) How many of you hate this story? Hmm. I guess you don’t love this story. Go figure. Who knew?

I’m kidding of course. I hate this story too. Everyone I knew hates this story. Yet it is one of the most important stories for the Jewish tradition. It is well known is Islam, although in that tradition it is Ishmael nor Isaac Abraham is told to sacrifice. It has been important in the Christian tradition too. Some Christians say it is a foreshadowing of God’s willingness to sacrifice Jesus. That’s nonsense, but it’s in our tradition. The great Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about it. It has been the subject of theological discernment for millennia in all three Abrahamic faiths. It’s a story a lot of people of faith know even if they hate it. It’s a story that it’s really easy for preachers like me to ignore. There are other texts in the lectionary for today that I could preach on. So why this one? Why this one that I suspect we’d all rather forget?

I chose the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, sometimes called the binding of Isaac, since Isaac was “bound” but not in the end sacrificed, in part because I so want to avoid it. For us preachers really wanting to avoid a text is usually a pretty good indication that we need to preach on it. But I also chose it because as much as we dislike it, as much as it makes us really uncomfortable, I think there is a lesson in it that we need to hear and to consider. That lesson of course is not that God wants us to sacrifice our children and that we should do so, not even that we should be prepared to do so. God has never wanted such a horrible thing from us or from anyone; but there is a lesson here nonetheless.

I suspect that most of you, like me, would consider Abraham a murderer if he had actually killed Isaac because he thought God had ordered him to do it. We don’t think Abraham is justified at all in his apparent willingness to kill Isaac at God’s command. We think he should have told God to take a hike, that there was no way he was going to sacrifice Isaac. Yet in his book Fear and Trembling that deals with this story Søren Kierkegaard says over and over again that Abraham is justified in willingness to kill his Isaac. He says that Abraham must be justified in his willingness to kill Isaac or else faith has no meaning. If faith is faith, Kierkegaard says, we have to be willing to do whatever it demands. Either we have made a commitment to follow God or we haven’t, he says. There’s no part way in faith, or so Kierkegaard claims. Well, maybe you aren’t prepared to go that far. I’m not at all sure I’m prepared to go that far; but I think Kierkegaard has a point. I think the story of Isaac and Abraham has a point, a point for us that we need to hear.

The great twentieth century German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote a book called, in English, The Cost of Discipleship. In that book he made essentially the same point that Kierkegaard was making a hundred years earlier. He accused Christians of believing in what he called cheap grace. He meant that we Christians are extremely happy to accept God’s grace, but we make God’s grace cheap because we don’t give anything in return. We don’t think that God makes any demands on us in return. We gladly take God’s grace. We may then say thank you, although often we don’t even do that; but we then go on our merry way living as before, not perceiving that God’s grace comes with any demands on us. Not perceiving that God’s grace comes with any divine expectations attached. I know that the passage we heard from Romans is kind of dense, but Paul is there dealing with the same issue. People said to him, as they have said to me, that if God’s grace truly is free then we don’t have to do anything to earn it, and we don’t have to do anything in return. That’s cheap grace.

Bonhoeffer insists that grace is not cheap. One reason that it is not cheap is precisely that it makes demands on us. Let me suggest that that is what the story of the command to sacrifice Isaac is about. Of course none of us believes that God ever did or ever would order a father to kill his son or that God could ever desire such a thing. So we don’t understand this story literally. To understand it we ask the questions that Marcus Borg suggests that we ask of all Bible stories: Why did, in this case, ancient Israel tell this story and why did they tell it this way? I think they told this story and told it this way at least in part to make a point about what having faith in God means for us, in Christian terms to make a point about what God’s free gift of grace means to us. The point of the story for us is that God’s grace is indeed truly free. It doesn’t come with strings attached, but it does come with demands attached. It comes with divine expectations attached. God doesn’t require anything from us in response to grace, but God does expect something of us in return for grace.

What does God expect from us in return for grace? The story of Abraham and Isaac tells us. What God expects from us in return for grace is obedience. Or if you don’t like the word obedience any more than I do, which is to say not at all, then use faithfulness. What God expects from us in return for grace if faithfulness. Faithfulness to God’s will for creation and for us. Faithfulness to God’s vision for the world, to God’s dream of the world. God expects us to do God’s work in the world as a response to God’s grace. God expects God’s grace to transform us into God’s witnesses and God’s workers in the world.

And here’s the thing about grace. If we really get it about grace, we will see that we really have no choice but to respond in the way that God expects. That’s a point that Paul is trying to make in the passage we heard from Romans. If we truly get it about grace, we cannot go on living as we did before we knew God’s grace. I didn’t use the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” in this service because it really is a Good Friday hymn, but it has a line that sums up really well what I’m trying to say, and what the story of Abraham and Isaac can say, to us. That hymn ends with the line “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” There’s the lesson in the story of Abraham and Isaac. The love of God that we know as God’ grace demands our lives, demands our all.

And we don’t get it. I don’t get it. How many of us can say that we respond to God’s grace by giving everything we have and everything we are in the service of God? I can’t. I doubt that any of you can. Which doesn’t mean we just get to ignore the story of Abraham and Isaac. It doesn’t mean we can ignore the demand that God’s grace makes upon us. Sometimes the best way to understand a Bible story is to hear it asking us a question. I think that works with the story of Abraham and Isaac. That story ask us: Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son if that were really what God wanted. What are you willing to do in response to God’s grace? God doesn’t want us to kill, of that I have no doubt. But God wants something. What is God demanding of you? What is God demanding of us? What are you willing to do? What are we willing to do? It’s a horrible story, but its asks us really good questions. It makes a really good point. Grace doesn’t come with strings, but it does come with expectations. What are we prepared to do to meet those divine expectations? Amen.