Genesis 22:1-14
Saint Matthew 10:40-42
For churches a tale as old as time was played out in the pages of last Sunday’s New York Times.
First Baptist Church of Williams, Alabama had called 35-year-old Tim Thomas to be their preacher. It may not have been the best fit right from the beginning but the fissures grew greater when one day he was in his office “when several African-American children were playing basketball outside. One of them came to ask to use the drinking fountain in the church and Mr. Thomas pointed the child toward the door where the water was.
When a congregant, who was white, saw the black child approaching . . . he pulled the door shut not to allow the boy inside. The pastor was upset – it wasn’t the first time he’d seen that behavior.”
Because most Baptists’ don’t follow any standardized set of reading Mr. Thomas began choosing some really radical stuff to form the bases for his Sunday morning messages.
One Sunday he chose the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” one says. But then Mr. Thomas added his own translation, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst and have the door shut in their face.”
Then he decided to preach on our gospel today, “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”1 Suddenly, the relationship between the people and the pastor was showing strain.
You know how this goes. A meeting was called and a disgruntled group came to confront their pastor. He had, as they say in the south, “stopped preaching and got to meddling.”
A branch of local Baptists – and remember that in the South there are more Baptists than there are people – anticipating the recent Supreme Court decision starting hiring gay people for clerical positions within the fellowship. (Not clerics, mark you, but support staff like clerks, and secretaries, and business managers.) “It was like kicking the top off of an anthill.” Mr. Thomas said.
But he was determined to keep talking about what Jesus talked about. Things like a disciple needs to be hospitable, welcoming to everyone.
You know what happened. A meeting was called because people were upset. Mr. Thomas reported that “They more or less said, ‘Those are nice, but we don’t have to live by them.’”2
In a sad way, it is odd what upsets people and what doesn’t. Perhaps Mr. Thomas would have been better off and would have still had a job if he had stuck to simple, easy to understand stuff, like today’s Old Testament where the LORD speaks to Abraham and doesn’t ask him to be hospitable but to take his son, his only son, whom he loves, up to a mountaintop and kill him.
Now those are words to live by!
Abraham heard a lot from God and nothing that God had ever asked of him was as easy as offering a drink of cold water to a thirsty young basketball player.
The first time Abraham ever hears from the LORD it is with the radical request: “Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.”3
On the bases of those words alone Abraham leaves everything and follows. This led the late Dr. Lewis Smedes to observe that if Abraham “were his neighbor and he said, ‘God came to me last night and told me to go to the Los Angeles airport and that he would tell me which airline to go on and what destination to go to, and I’m never coming back.’ I would say to him, ‘Either you’re crazy, or God is doing something very peculiar.’”4
God’s relationship with Abraham was peculiar, in fact, it is almost inscrutable.
One commentator called God’s demand “completely incomprehensible: the child, given by God after long delay, the only link that can lead to the promised greatness of Abraham’s seed is to be given back to God in sacrifice. Abraham had cut himself off from his whole past; now he must give up his whole future.”5
This he does without a word. Nothing is said to his son nor his servants as they set off on their journey. What does one say? What can one say when one is about to sacrifice one’s whole past, present, and future.
It is said that the servants had to be jettisoned because had they been there they surely would have staid Abraham’s hand. So what we are left with is a father and son journeying on in silence.
It has also been said that “Abraham’s attentive love for the child [is shown] in the division of the burdens. He himself carries the dangerous objects with which the boy could hurt himself, the touch and the knife. The words ‘they went both of them together’ let’s one suspect that the boy may have broken the oppressive silence only after awhile.” 5
Isaac words shatter the silence and must have broken his father’s heart. “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?’”7
Abraham does not tell Isaac all he wants to know because Abraham himself does not know. He does not know at this moment if Isaac is God’s act of provision. He does not know that God will provide a rescue for Isaac. It could go either way. Abraham does not know but he trusts unreservedly.
What he says has been translated for us as “God will provide” but in the original Hebrew it is really “God will see.”9
God watches along with the rest of us as the pace of the narrative slows.
The details are described with frightful accuracy. Abraham builds an altar by gathering rocks and stones. He places wood on it. He binds his son, his beloved boy. His hand is stretched forth and a knife is raised. The world holds it breath. A voice breaks the silence. It is a voice that Abraham knows all too well.
“Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”9
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.
Whew! And we thought being nice to someone different from US was tough. We thought that giving a cup of water to a stranger was a sacrifice. We might say with some people, “This is a nice story but we don’t have to live by it.”
Biblical scholar, Dr. Walter Bruggemann reminds us:
The problems are especially acute for those who seek a “reasonableness” to their God. Faithful people will be tempted to want only half of it. Most . . . will want a God who provides, not a God who tests. God tests to identify his people, to discern who is serious about faith and to know whose lives he will be fully God.10
Some Christians suffer from what one writer called a “Disney Princess Theology” in which they are the hero of every story. Today they would have been Abraham not Isaac. Today they would have been the giver of the cup of water rather than the one who is thirsty. We would have welcomed the prophets rather than being the ones who send them away.
And if the current times have taught us anything it is that our view of ourselves is not true.
Some rebelled at having to wear face masks in public because it infringed on their individual freedom.
Some rebelled at the crazy notion that something as simple as social distancing was an answer because nobody had the right to tell them they couldn’t snuggle up to some stranger at the corner saloon.
Some rebelled against staying at home when we wanted to go out and be with friends not so much risking their lives but the lives of their parents and grandparents.
Even some parents and grandparents rebelled by saying, “I’ve lived a good, long life if it’s my time it’s my time.”
Americans don’t sacrifice well.
What we can learn from today’s scriptures and today’s crises is that it is necessary to be a follower of God. God sees, God provides, and God will see us through but only if we are willing to sacrifice and care for each other.
In this moment, especially in this moment, God is calling us to test the limits of our boundaries and throw open the doors of our hearts to the will of God that is often inscrutable but never-the-less divine.
__________
1. Saint Matthew 10:42. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
2/ Nicholas Casey, “The Walls of the Church Couldn’t Keep the Trump Era Out,” The New York Times, June 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/politics/evangelical-church-trump-alabama.html?referringSource=highlightShare.
4. Genesis 12:1-3. (NIV) [NIV= The New Revised Standard Version]
5. Bill D. Moyers, Genesis: a Living Conversation (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2002). p. 160.
6. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: a Commentary (London: SCM, 1991), p. 234.
7. Genesis 22:7. (NRSV)
8. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2010), p. 188.
9. Genesis 22:11-13. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]
10. Brueggemann, op. cit., p. 192-193.
No comments:
Post a Comment