Homily for Proper 8, Year A

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Richmond VA

Lectionary Texts:

I have a pretty vivid memory of young school-aged Sarah in the church basement classroom with my friends where our Sunday School teacher would enact bible stories on a felt board with cut-out figures.  I liked the stories about Abraham and Sarah, especially the one when the three visitors come by the tent by the oaks of Mamre and Sarah fixes them cakes made of flour and water, then laughs when she hears she will bear a child in her old age.  My friends would snicker a little about “old Sarah” but I liked the hospitality and the humor of that story. Then, there was the story of Sarah and Hagar, details of which were brushed over for adult content on our childish ears, but the point of the story as my young mind remembers first hearing it was that God was honoring a promise to Sarah and also taking care of Hagar and Ishmael.  I seem to recall a palm tree and a well of water appearing around them on the felt board, and we talked about what a cold drink would feel like when we were thirsty, and how this kind of thirst was beyond any of that.  I took away the recognition that we sometimes do some not great things, but God always cares for us, and for those we hurt..

And then, there was the story of Abraham and Isaac.  There isn’t a pleasant, felt-board kind of way to tell this story.  It was shocking and horrible.  I think my teacher tried to move the bushes and the ram quickly into the picture before we really had a fully formed picture in our minds of Isaac bound on the pile of wood he’d been carrying, but honestly I felt pretty bad for the ram, too. My teacher tried to make a direct connection to Jesus, but that didn’t take for me, either.  I just remember thinking, “why would God tell Abraham to do that?”

I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped wrestling with that question, honestly.  And when I saw that the lesson appointed from the Hebrew Scriptures for this day on which I was appointed to preach here at St. Mark’s, with this group of people I also knew I could wrestle with it here.  You aren’t afraid to wrestle with scripture, and that’s a good thing. So,  I decided to take up the challenge.and wrestle with this story a bit from the pulpit.  

I don’t have a felt board with me today, and spoiler alert: there isn’t anything that I can offer up that makes this story any less jarring.  But what I did come away with after a week of rabbit hole diving into religious studies perspectives and academic sense-making is the realization that I am not alone in my wrestling. Jewish, Islamic and Christian scholars all struggle with the same core fundamental questions that this pivotal narrative from the Pentateuch raises for us.  The scholars I read raised some questions and observations about the text that have helped me name my struggles…and most importantly my search has reinforced that this text says what it says, and it raises important questions for us to ask, even if they don’t have easy answers.  

In Jewish life and literature this story, referred to as the Akedah הָדֵקֲע, or the “binding of Isaac” becomes a central story of self-sacrifice and obedience to God’s will. In the prayers of the high holy day of Rosh Ha-Shanah, there is an appeal to God to remember the Akedah: “Remember unto us, O Lord our God, the covenant and the lovingkindness and the oath which Thou swore unto Abraham our father on Mount Moriah: and consider the binding with which Abraham our father bound his son Isaac on the altar, how he suppressed his compassion in order to perform Thy will with a perfect heart. So may Thy compassion overbear Thine anger against us; in Thy great goodness may Thy great wrath turn aside from Thy people, Thy city, and Thine inheritance.”  In this prayer, Abraham, Isaac and all of God’s people are bound together.

Even with the centrality of this story within Jewish faith, rabbinic literature questions the meaning and intent, particularly around the opening phrase, “God tested Abraham.” Considerable attention is paid to the ways in which Isaac is either centered as the victim or the hero…or perhaps both. I learned through the writings of medieval rabbinic scholar Nacḥmanides,who  in the 12th Century wrestled with this story and within it the problem of reconciling God’s presumed omniscient foreknowledge with the gift of human free will.

Putting that more clearly: how is it that an all-knowing God can both know what is to happen, and allow us to choose with perfect freedom?  And what is the nature of this “test?”

It has made me wonder what the real test is here between God and Abraham.  Was it a test of loyalty and obedience, the way that the story might be read in an archetypal way?  That’s sort of like giving a “true/false” test: are you obedient, or not?  That seems like a very high priced test for what, as a teacher, I think of as a pretty shallow form of assessment.  

I think we often treat this story as if it was a multiple choice test, a sort of logic puzzle of God’s intent and Abraham’s actions: what if Abraham protested on moral grounds and a love of God evident in his child?  What if Isaac had bolted or had himself called out to God for help?  What if the timing was just off and the ram hadn’t caught Abraham’s eye, or the angel was just a second too late urging Abraham to hold forth and Isaac was already sacrificed…would God have brought him back to life?  It turns out that scholars have been wrestling with those questions for years, too.  

And maybe, just maybe, the answer could be “D”: God would have been with them, in all of the above.

So, I have to conclude after a lot of reading and wrestling this week that this story isn’t a true/false test of obedience, nor is it a multiple choice test of which path was the right path for Abraham and Isaac that would lead to a gold star from God.  I’m choosing to believe that it was an open-ended essay, the kind of test that we give when we aren’t looking for one right answer and instead, we want to see how the lessons being taught are being taken up and applied.  It helps us know where and when and how we need to keep reshaping the kind of care and teaching we provide as we seek to produce people who can carry out their mission with integrity.  In other words, maybe the test wasn’t about the actions of Abraham and Isaac at all.  Maybe it was God’s way of more fully understanding God’s creation.

If we keep wrestling with these ideas, our own eyes are opened to a few things: blind obedience isn’t always the right answer.  In the way this story has been conveyed through the years, Abraham was being obedient, and so was Isaac. That obedience looks like silent submission and it would have led to a tragedy unless divine intervention had not taken place.  

It makes me wonder if through this encounter, God could foresee the need for humanity to be able to question more, to allow for us…God’s creation…to ask God hard questions, and to be open to hearing God’s response.  That is the way that relationships evolve and deepen.  As the narratives of the descendents of Abraham continues through Genesis, we do see evidence of Jacob’s wrestling with an angel…or perhaps with God…even tangibly.  Jacob is marked from it, but not destroyed.  And in the great sacrificial story of our Christian lives, God-made-human Jesus who takes on the ultimate role of the perfect self-sacrifice first prays in the Garden at Gethsemane for this cup to pass from him before his betrayal.  And he is betrayed by humans and our free will to destroy.  But he is not abandoned, not even in death. Death no longer has the victory.

There is a welcome questioning that becomes evident in God’s self-giving, every bit as much as there is a desire for God to have a loving and trusting covenant with humankind as God’s creation.  And maybe that means there is more than one way for the story of God’s providential love to play out, not only in history but in our lives. We aren’t pawns living a scripted life, puppets dancing on the end of God’s strings. It becomes more of a “choose your own adventure” story, where the journey emerges as we are writing it with our lives.  But that story isn’t complete without God’s participation, either, which is the relationship God desires of us.

I don’t think we need to reach a peace with this story. We can still wrestle with it, and we can have permission to raise questions about it, even really hard ones.  Some of us can find comfort that the horror was stopped before it happened.  Some will see it as a historical morality tale, moving from sacrifice to symbolism. Some of us can stand bewildered as to why this seemed necessary in the first place, whether it was fact or myth.  We can also use our discomfort to generate empathy and be present in solidarity with those who live with human inflicted horror in this world every single day, including violence inflicted in the name of God.  We can remind them that they are not abandoned by God, even when the circumstances seem incomprehensible to us.  The best way to show that is by showing up and remaining present in their lives.  I picture that loving presence like walking back towards home, down the mountain, after this story comes to its conclusion.  I can’t imagine that Abraham and Isaac had words.  Sometimes we don’t need words, just presence.

If I did have a felt board, and I had only one figure that I could place on it at the end of this lesson, it would be this: a broken heart, fit together. Still broken, but together.

I choose to believe that everyone in this story was tested and broken open: Abraham, Isaac, the servants…and yes, perhaps even God.  We might need to retell the story because it doesn’t all tie up nicely.  Even our broken heart, fit together, still has evidence of being rent open after we stand in the presence of this ancient narrative.  And perhaps that is the nature of the test: not trying to get all the answers right.  But being willing to ask the hard questions, to sit with the unknowing, to accompany each other, and to be open to the learning that continues to emerge step by step through our lives.

Fresco from the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception (Washington, DC)