Kill HIm! God will Provide

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 26, 2011; Proper 8, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Genesis 22:1-14) – 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."

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I want to start with a bad joke.  It’s supposed to be a true story.  Back in the days when we always used the older translations, a young priest was assigned to work for a Rector whom he found difficult and stifling.  When the younger cleric finally found a new call to another congregation, with relief he chose a text from today’s scripture in Genesis as his farewell word for his final sermon.  “You stay here with the ass, and I will go yonder to worship.”

Abraham.  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.

I do not have the faith of Abraham.  I do not believe that I would have done what Abraham heard God tell him to do. 

I’ve said before that I do not believe in a god who would commit atrocities.  When I hear Christians talk of end times or of judgment, and seem to be at ease proclaiming a god who they say will destroy everyone who doesn’t believe like they do, or a god who will condemn to eternal damnation anyone who isn’t a Christian, I am appalled.  Why would anyone worship such a monster?  I told one pastor who tried to explain his god’s genocidal ways to me, that if he is right, if god really is that way, just count me as part of the revolution.  That god is not worthy of worship.

If I heard what Abraham heard, I think I could only refuse, rebel. 

Yet Abraham trusted.

I have a hard time getting my mind and heart around this story.  If I look at Abraham and his actions, just looking at his words and acts, he looks like a fanatic to me – a religious fanatic.  He looks like the kind that kill people in the name of God, like James Jones or Osama bin Laden, or maybe Pope Urban II who initiated the Crusades, or those Christians who presided over the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials.  It looks like fanaticism to me for someone to be willing to kill a child at the behest of a divine message.  That’s a form of terrorism to me.

But when you think about Abraham’s story, about who Isaac is, this divine command is about so much more than just killing a child.  Isaac is Abraham’s hope.  You remember the story.  God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations with descendents like the stars or like the grains of sand on the seashore.  But Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren into her ninth decade.  When God’s messenger told them Sarah would conceive a child, Sarah laughed at the absurdity of it.  And the child was named Isaac, a pun on the word “laughter.” 

Isaac is the miracle child.  The miracle God had provided Abraham and Sarah in their old age.  He was their promise, their hope.  They would indeed have descendants.  The old promise would be fulfilled.  Through Isaac there would be offspring and a multitude of nations too numerous to count.  For Abraham, Isaac was the future; the fulfillment of promise; the meaning of his long earthly pilgrimage.  Isaac meant everything to him.  Isaac embodied all of the hope in the world for him.  Everything Abraham had was wrapped up in Isaac.

“Kill him,” God said.  Every time I read it, I am horrified.  Appalled.  You’ve heard enough of my sermons to know that I believe that God is love.  I don’t have a category for the kind of command that God gives Abraham.  It shatters all of my categories, my paradigms.  In this story, I find myself stuck.  God doesn’t seem to be who I think God is. 

In this story I see a dark side that I am so cleanly protected from.  I hear about some of these things.  About children sold into slavery and prostitution, about cruelties and evils.  These are terrible words. 

Abraham faces these terrible words, these dark words, “Kill him.”  And unlike me, Abraham obeys.  “God will provide,” he says.  “God will provide,” he says to himself with sad and desperate breath, under hollowed eyes and clinched teeth and rattling fear.  “Father,” asks the innocent, “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”  “God will provide.  God will provide.”  I wonder.  Was there a fanatical look in his eyes?

The great preacher David Buttrick tells of a tribe in the Southwest U.S. that some say was still practicing human sacrifice into the 1950’s.  When a prosecutor finally investigated, he charged them, “What kind of people are you to practice human sacrifice?”  A tribal leader replied, “You do not take God seriously.”  And maybe we don’t. [i]

Abraham was bent on doing God’s will even if it meant the destruction of his future, the death of the miracle, the end of the promise, the destruction of meaning, the killing of the embodiment of all his hopes in the world.  Abraham was obedient. 

As he grasps the knife, raises his hand, his attention catches.  Over there.  In the bush.  There is a ram, a sacrificial animal, its horns tangled in the branches.  “God will provide!  God will provide!”

Maybe then something shifted in Abraham.  He knew blind obedience.  The kind of obedience that narrows the eyes and justifies even the unjustifiable.  But as he prepared to destroy all of the hope that he had in the world, God gave him something unimaginable.  God provided.  Abraham is freed for faith; freed to trust.  Freed from loving God’s gifts in order to love the Giver.

David Buttrick puts it this way:  On a high stone hill, God set Abraham free, free for faith. Blind obedience was transformed into faith.  Oh, how easy it is to pin all our hopes on a means of grace, and forget God, the giver.  Subtly we turn God's gifts into idols.  God has given us the scriptures, but see how we flank the open page with candles and frame dogma to guarantee infallibility:  "Everything we've got is wrapped up in you, Bible!"  Or perhaps, God draws us into faith through a masculine church; before you know it we're protecting the pronouns and two-legged tailored vestments:  "Everything we got's wrapped up in you," sung by a bass-voiced choir.  Back in the sixties, a liberal Catholic journal announced gleefully, "God can get along without the Latin Mass."  To which a reader replied: "Maybe God can, but we can't."  Is there any idolatry like religious idolatry?  No wonder God speaks and shatters our souls: "Kill it off!"  God who takes away all our false loves. [ii]

The Buddhists have a koan:  “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.”  Of its essence, a koan is mysterious, ineffable.  It is foolish to try to explain.  But I am foolish.  I’ll try to explain.  Whatever your conception is of the Buddha, it is wrong.  Kill the image.  Keep practicing.  If you believe you have a correct understanding and belief – enlightenment – throw it out, and keep practicing.  It’s like being humble.  The instant you think you are, you aren’t.

Listening again to David Buttrick:  We are free to trust God, for God will provide.  Oh, we still have our Bible, our church, our liturgies, but, somehow, they are different now:  the gilded sheen has rubbed off.  We can love our churches, without having to hold on for dear life, particularly in an age when God may be sweeping away our denominations.  And, yes, we can love the scriptures, without having to defend each sacred page, especially now when authority fights are building.  We can trust the self-giving God to give us all we'll ever need: "God will provide!”…

Now then, here are pictures to put up in your mind.  A stone hill, a pile of brush, empty-circle eyes, and a knife blade high.  "Kill him off," cracks the voice of God.  But, here's another picture:  A wood cross on a rock hill, and a lamb nailed to the crossbar, “God will provide." Keep both pictures in your mind.  "You God, you take away all our loves, but you give yourself !"  Trust God, let go.  Let go, trust God. [iii]

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[i] from Buttrick’s sermon, sent to me by Dennis Campbell.  It is published in Buttrick’s book, Homiletic Moves and Structures, p. 357f.

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Ibid

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