The Voice of God

February 25, 2024
MCCNY

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. 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?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ (And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’)

Greetings and blessing from the Council of Elders. One last time.

There’s a passage twice in Jeremiah, about a dozen chapters apart, where God is upset with the people of Israel for various things, including burning their children and sacrificing their children, and twice God says in that book, each time, God says, “I’m disgusted with you for burning and sacrificing your children. I never asked for that nonsense, I didn’t so much as ever think it.”

So. You know. There’s a chapter in Genesis, we just read a bunch of it. God not only did think it, and also commanded it, but also gave some fairly specific instructions about when and where in the land of Moriah. God even clarified which child, not just any old child, but “the one you love.” Here the child is named, Isaac, but in the Qur’an the child is not named; Muslims largely understand this to be Ishmael. Although at an earlier point in his life Abraham took pains to argue with God for the lives of the men of Sodom, even to save the rapers and hospitality-breakers along with any righteous that didn’t seem to exist, now Abraham is ready to kill his son on God’s say-so without so much an Iowan “Are you sure?”

Imagine what this did to Abraham. He carries his secret for three days from his son and his servants, and then he keeps it for another whatever number of days to walk that remaining “afar off” after leaving behind the servants. Those last days, while Abraham carried the burden of his secret, Isaac carried the wood for his own murder; maybe a Buddhist koan or a mystic could ask, Which was heavier?

Imagine what this did to Isaac. At some point he clues in and notices there is no animal for the sacrifice; at what point did he suspect what his role would be? Imagine what it would be like to watch your father build an altar and lay a fire, imagine your father tying you, imagine him laying you on the firewood. Imagine your father reaching out and taking up a knife – only then hearing God say, “Hold up; wait. No.”

I wonder what that did to Abraham’s relationship with God. I wonder what that did to Isaac’s relationship to God. To his relationship with Abraham. Later in Genesis 31, God is called the God of Abraham and the PAHhahd, the *terror of Isaac. Maybe that’s about awe and respect and reverence; maybe not. Maybe it’s pure fear.

Heading up the mountain twice (you can look there if you want in the bulletin), twice it says that Abraham and Isaac the two of them walked on together; but coming down the mountain, and you can’t see it because we stopped at verse 12 but coming down from the mountain Abraham comes down alone, and he rejoins his servants alone. Abraham and Isaac do not ever speak again or interact; the next time they are both of them together, Isaac is burying his father. I wonder if this broke them. How do you say “Sorry, Son” after this? How do you say, “I love you, Son”? What could you ever talk about again as a father to the child you almost killed? Homework? How do you ever again feel safe as a child with that parent?

But I can’t help but wonder, too, about stories and the nature of storytelling. I wonder if there’s a version of this story as a story where Isaac never comes down the mountain. Where the God of Genesis 22 who does think about killing kids and commands it does not intervene. Where Abraham’s obedience to that God brought him down the mountain alone, and left him utterly alone. His wife is silent and even absent from this chapter though she fills the chapter before it, fills it, with laughter and fecundity and pride and envy. This chapter is devoid of her, and in the first two verses of the next chapter she is dead. What did this trip up the mountain do to this family? What did this man’s obedience to this God do to him and his family? It may have destroyed them.

Do you know that there are two names for God in this chapter? The first, Elohim, is the name used for God at the beginning, through the narrative up the mountain. Elohim puts Abraham to the test, Elohim gives the order and the instructions. This is God’s name in Genesis 1, when God breaths and forms and speaks and makes and divides. Midstory on the mountain, at the climax of geography and the climax of time, God’s second name is introduced. It is haShem, the tetragram YHWH, the unpronounceable name is used at the moment of intervention and then after. The one who stops Abraham and spares Isaac is the name of the God of Genesis 2 and 3, that God who plants a garden and walks with the human and creates relationship and community and engages in the drama of living.

Scholars say things about the Elohist and Yahwist writing and what they mean historically and theologically, and they provide some coherent organizing principles for these names for God and God’s behavior toward people and our relationship to those names and that God. And it’s been a long, cold minute since I studied that stuff, but. There are two names used for God in this chapter, and one asks Abraham to kill his son, to give up his future and destroy his legacy, to murder the son he loves. And the other says “Hold up; wait. No.” At least in this version of the telling. And it happens that the name of God in Jeremiah, when God says You disgust me! I never asked for this! I never even thought it!? that God that denies wanting or thinking of it in Jeremiah has the same name as the God who stopped it now in Genesis. That’s worth knowing.

The thing is, I think we still, lots of us even here, some of us against our better judgement, perhaps carefully and thoughtfully, but maybe some of us a bit mindlessly, I think we still believe on some level that Abraham is doing the right thing, the righteous thing, the better, higher, whatever thing by obeying God, even to the point of killing his son. That sacrificing a beloved son is a worthy and wonderful, a selfless and loving thing, even that it is redemptive. Even that it is salvific.

And we are people who would not kill our child. My God, we are the child. We have been the child. We have been Isaac, or Ishmael, the one terrorized or abandoned in the name of God, by the voice of God. We are righteous people, I think, and we are actually uniquely inclined in fact to *invert tests of righteousness: to show our love to others by rejecting a God who asks us to harm them.

But our ideals, or our organizing principles, or the rules that we set don’t always allow us to fully engage with one another’s humanity.

Both of these are true:

I believe that we are a people who are inclined to turn tests of divine obedience on their head, and to show love for people by disobeying a God who asks us to do harm.

I believe that we are, broadly, a people who understand salvation on some level to be directly tied to a father demonstrating love and righteousness by killing his precious, beloved son.

This is a conundrum. And its tension is the space in which we always live. A Buddhist koan or maybe a mystic could ask, “How much does love weigh?” Or “Which breaks more glass, rightness or wrongness?”

Keeping families together is a good thing, and more resources should be used to support them. And there are pastors who tell women to return to their abuser because they prioritize family cohesion and her place in it; they have literally said she must be like Job and Jesus, who suffered willingly for God’s will. Our bodies are perfect, perfectly made, our skin, our disabilities, our fat bodies are perfect, our genitals just as they are – bodies are not gender! And trans people are increasingly denied access to medicine and treatments and our people are dying because they cannot see in the mirror what they know in themselves. There are political and historical truths about Gaza and the fight there for land. Capitalism at core, extraction, economics. And the hatred of these people and genocide and slander crosses their religious and national differences.

There’s is rightness that is certain, that is worth sacrificing for and holding to even when it is difficult. And it isn’t possible to apply truths or certainties to our lives without impacting our siblings, our children, each other.

Even those of us who want answers that are fresh and subversive answers, we still often want them to be truisms that we can hold on to and use again. I do. Complexity is draining, it’s exhausting. And it is unavoidable. There’s a comic drawing by David Hayward where a Jesus-looking person is facing a bunch of modern-looking people holding Holy Bibles, and the caption says, You use scripture to determine what love means, and I use love to determine what scripture means – and it almost got me. I almost thought that was the thing I could hang my hat on. But whenever Jesus would say something so perfectly true, like “Love your neighbor,” people would respond, “Define neighbor.” And it’s a messed up question, but it’s fair. I can say that I use only love to understand scripture, but that’s still just my definition of what love is or how it acts. Discipline and accountability can be love. Tough love has the word love in it. Abraham’s test on the mountain is a testament to how slippery it can be to define love.

There is a goodness or righteousness that surpasses my personal comfort, that is worth more than my safety or even my life. That is for me the best and most compelling understanding of why Jesus was executed: knowing that he would be punished, he still would not stop drawing attention to injustice, he wouldn’t stop mobilizing people to speak and act for there to be enough food and wealth and access to health and fair judges. On that level of obedience to something huge and enduring, Abraham’s obedience is a pure and selfless, an incredible act of righteousness.

But I think it’s not a thing to get too comfortable with or confident about. There’s a tension, a conundrum, in understanding the importance of Abraham’s and our obedience to a higher, better, more lasting sense of good on the one hand, and the danger of losing touch with Isaac’s (or Ishmael’s) humanity, his personhood. His vulnerability and terror.

I think that’s what Amos and the others mean when he says feasts and sacrifices aren’t effective or any good at all without caring for people who need care and treating people fairly who can’t buy fair treatment. It’s at the heart of Jesus saying the law wasn’t made for its own sake but to help people. And it is the at the heart of Levitical law that reads “Love your neighbor as yourself; I am God.”

There is a Buddhist story about rightness and wrongness: When Bankei held his seclusion-weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case. Later the pupil was caught stealing again, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition demanding the dismissal of the thief, or they would leave altogether in one body. Bankei called everyone together and said “You are wise brothers, you know what is right and what is not right. Another school will take you in gladly, but this brother does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if the rest of you leave.”

There are good rules, pure ideals, there is correct practice. But their full value is intrinsically connected to the lives and realities of the people they affect. This story, this paragon of Abraham’s righteousness, may have destroyed him and his family, and I think we need to hold that hand in hand with our praise for Abraham’s staggering obedience. Isaac, or Ishmael, cannot be a simple foil to Abraham’s test, cannot be just a prop that represents the difficulty of his choice. That child has to remain human to us, not just parable or collateral, but flesh and blood, living beings. Walking together, engaged in the drama of living.

I know we work on this, and it’s ongoing, that we’re good people with good hearts, mucking through. I know we need rest, and that so much is hard and getting harder. I know that, if we go to the bible, we so often go to it needing to find answers instead of more questions, more koans, more complexity. And, as we move together through Lent, as we reflect and peel away the barriers that interfere with our tie to what is lasting, our tie to what is truly good, I hope for us that in our search for God’s voice, in our search for God’s name, we will not disconnect from one other’s.

Peace.