The Lord Will Provide

3^rd Sunday After Pentecost

Hebrews 11:8, 11, 17, 19

Genesis 22:1-14

Has anyone ever forgotten to pick up their kids?  Oliver and Remy go to the after-school program on Mondays and Wednesdays.  They’re usually ok with it as long as they just have to go two days a week.  And as long as we promise to pick them up as early as we can.

Steph often picks them up after she leaves the Middle School.  But one day this past year I was in my office working, and she called to say that she had meetings.  Could I get away now to go get the boys?  Sure, I said.

 

She called back an hour later to say that she was on her way home.  “Did you get the boys?”  Silence.  “You didn’t get the boys, did you?”  When I got there it was well past the after-school pick up deadline.  And there the boys sat, long-faced, beside a supervisor that wasn’t thrilled to be kept waiting for an irresponsible parent. 

If you’re a parent, you probably remember a time or two when you disappointed your kids or failed to meet their expectations.  Forgetting to pick up my kids didn’t put their lives in any serious danger.  But it does remind us that woven into family life is a kind of promise-making and promise-keeping.  No, I didn’t sign any contract promising my kids I’d always be on time.  But part of our family life is an unspoken promise that they can depend on us for their basic needs.

All of life has the structure of promises made and kept.  Often these promises are never explicitly stated.  They don’t become part of any contract.  But they form the basic assumptions that both sides rely on.  In this way promises of loyalty and respect are the fabric of marriages, friendships, work relationships, neighborhoods and larger communities.

Of course promises are broken all the time, and painful damages can result.  That’s why we often feel aggrieved or upset with others.  There was some kind of promise in place to treat one another in a particular way.  And if the promise is not honored, our trust is broken.  If this painful experience of broken promises happens often enough, we grow anxious, skeptical, despairing, and afraid.

This dynamic of promise-making and promise-keeping is also an important part of the way God relates to us.  One of Scripture’s earliest and most fundamental pictures of God is as the one who makes promises to us.  Simply by creating us God promises to care for us by setting us in an environment where we can flourish and grow.  But our faith teaches us that God promises more than that. 

God promises to rescue us when we get into trouble.  God promises to illumine our path when we get lost.  God promises to untangle the knots of distorted relationships that bind us.  God promises to forgive us our sins and not count them against us.  God promises to dwell with us like a devoted friend in the worst situations.  God promises us energy when we’re tired and can’t carry on.  God promises to shine upon us, bringing the clarity of meaning and purpose to our often confusing lives.  And God promises that even death itself has no power to separate us from the resurrection life that God has freely shared with us. 

But just like any other promises, God’s promises can come under threat.  They can begin to look unreliable and untrustworthy.  During the course of life, evidence mounts against them.  Doubts begin to take root.  And a voice comes to birth in our lives: Can the one making promises be trusted?

Most of you have had life experiences that threaten the reliability of God’s promises.  Almost any painful, shattering event in life will do it.  A betrayal by a spouse.  The loss of a child.  Ongoing suffering from a chronic disease or cancer.  The frustration of unending financial stress.  Prayers that go unanswered.  The nagging feeling that your life or family or marriage or career never quite panned out the way you wanted it to.  A persistent depression that robs you of energy and passion.  All these experiences cast a shadow over the reliability of God’s promises to us.

Our story today from Genesis 22 asks us to consider whether we will trust the promises God has made to us even when they come under threat.

In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham to be the head of a new people.  God promises to bless Abraham and all the world through Abraham’s descendants.  This promise began to look more and more unlikely the older Abraham and Sarah grew.  But finally, God opened the barren womb of Sarah when she was 90 and Abraham was 100.  If you roll your eyes at commercials with a middle-aged couple holding hands, sitting in two bathtubs overlooking a valley, apparently whisked back to the passion they had as teenagers by the wonder of some drug like Cialis – well, then you’ll really have difficulty with this one.

But God waits long past time for keeping faith with the promise - precisely to test the faith of Abraham and Sarah.  God’s plan was so strange, God’s promise-keeping so belated, that their response was unbelieving laughter.  And in the face of their laughter, God blessed them with a child named Isaac.  After years and years of agonized waiting and worrying, God was faithful to the promise to bless the world through Abraham’s offspring.  It would be Isaac who carries the blessing of Abraham to the rest of the world.

22:1-2  The Test

Right up front, we’re given a clue for how to read this story.  God was “testing” Abraham.  What happens in this story is terrifying and difficult to imagine.  But it should not be read as a story about life unhinged into complete and utter chaos.  This is a test.  The same God who called to Abraham to bless him is now testing Abraham’s faithfulness.

What God is looking for is Abraham’s availability. “Abraham!” God calls.  And Abraham’s response – “Here I am” - shows his availability, his openness, his readiness to hear and obey God’s call.  When God needs to get your attention, are you available?  Do you respond to God in a way that marks your availability – “Here I am!”

The “test” is a test so hard that we have to read it again just to make sure we’re hearing it correctly.  Yes, it is what you think you heard.  God asks Abraham to tie his son up like an animal, kill him, and burn him on an altar as a sacrifice.   This request is beyond what we can even bear to think about.  If God asked for one of my children, I would abandon God, not my children.  I cannot fathom Abraham’s confusion – the God who delivered Isaac as a long-awaited gift now demands the life of the child back.  “Take your son, your only son, whom you love . . . “

Let us just acknowledge together that this is a monstrous story.  It runs afoul of everything that resembles goodness.  It violates our sense of decency and compassion.  If we read the story flatfootedly, we would have no choice but to call this God a monster.  Any god who condones, let alone requires, the death of a child – for this we have no categories but the monstrous and demonic.

In the ordinary world we live in, we don’t praise those who act on voices to harm their children.  We arrest them, medicate them, and house them in places built for dangerously deluded people.

22:3-5  The Journey

Though Abraham’s trust in God’s good promises is being fiercely tested, Abraham’s faith is sure.  We can only imagine his sleepless, agonizing night.  There is no mention here of his wife Sarah, who waited her whole life for the birth of this promised boy.  Did she know what Abraham heard and where he was going?  But even in the face of all the unknown, he arises early the next morning, loads his donkey with firewood, and sets off toward Moriah with his two servants and his son Isaac.

What that journey was like for the first two days we do not know.  In that blank space we’re left to imagine the terror and sadness in Abraham’s chest.  On the third day of the journey, Abraham looked up and saw the mountain in the distance.  For two days he had been walking, hoping to walk forever, hoping to never, ever arrive at the horrible mount of sacrifice.  But his fears materialized when the mountain first came into focus on day three.  Here was one more opportunity to shrink, to turn back, to withhold his beloved son from God.

22:6-9  The father and his son.

The final leg of the journey to Moriah is a path only for this father and his beloved son.  No one else can go there.  This is not a place for anyone else to be.  So they walk in silence.  A silence only broken by the son’s question, “Father, we have fire and wood but no animal for the sacrifice.  Where is the lamb we will offer to God?”  Young Isaac has no idea where they are going.  But he loves and trusts his father. 

Abraham’s response is brief: “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.”  Abraham keeps faith with God’s promise to bless him and his descendants.  In this terrible test, Abraham is proving to be God’s faithful covenant partner.  And just as he did not flinch when he first saw the mountain in the distance, he does not flinch at the end.  He builds an altar, binds his son, and places him on the altar.

In this moment, God’s original promise comes under threat.  If Isaac dies, there is no way that God can keep faith with the promise to create a new people through Abraham’s offspring.  At this moment, Abraham enters the darkness and confusion that overtakes all of us sometimes.  In this terrible situation, it is not at all clear that God’s promises will hold.  It is not at all clear that God can be trusted.

22:10-14  The Lord Provides

When Abraham finally takes up the knife to slay his beloved son, an angel of God calls from heaven not once, but twice, “Abraham! Abraham!”  This is a clue to the reader.  When God first tested Abraham, he called his name once.  But now that the test is complete, God calls his name twice.  In this way the story suggests that God never desired the death of Isaac.  What God wants is Abraham’s faithfulness.  And yet again, Abraham responds in openness and trust, “Here I am.”

Abraham has passed the test because he has not withheld anything from God.  Not even his beloved son.  And Abraham named that place, “The Lord Will Provide.”

Let me briefly mention three areas for our reflection:

First, this story invites us to reflect on Scripture itself.

Why does sacred Scripture – given to us for encouragement and guidance - contain such unnerving and terrifying stories?

If any of us came here today assuming that  Scripture is a polite guide to manners, or a collection of common sense wisdom, that gentle view is challenged by this story.  The story troubles us because of its visceral, pulsing horror.  It casts us into a posture of confusion and uncertainty before finally, at the very end, allowing us to recover some semblance of trust in the God who will provide. 

The practice of sacrificing a child to appease the gods was common in ancient culture and even in the Old Testament.  This reminds us that Scripture is not a collection of timeless wisdom that skirts above the messiness of history.  Rather, it is the confession of people who were keeping faith with God in a specific culture, with all its blindspots and prejudices.  But even so, the story is told in a way that opens to us Israel’s ancient faith for our benefit.

Scripture is a gift to guide us out into the deep waters, where the biggest questions can be asked.  That’s why many of us keep faith with others in congregational life.  There aren’t many places in our culture where we’re invited to descend down past the pettiness and trivia of life into the guts of what really matters most.

Second, this story helps us see that all of life is a kind of test. 

The test is whether we will withhold anything from God.  We distance ourselves from the power of the story by saying to ourselves, “Well, it’s a good thing that God would never ask me to sacrifice a child.”  And yet the story immediately reclaims its grip on us when we realize that it has raised the question of our own faithfulness to God.

The gospels present Jesus to us as the one with the authority to ask for everything we have.  While he does not ask for a child sacrifice, he does say, “Whoever does not hate his father and mother, brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple.”  Perhaps this story will lead you into a kind of praying where you finally offer to God - for the first time - all you have.  Your private dreams, your secret fears, your hidden shame, your most valued possessions, those things so precious to you that you assume that life without them wouldn’t be worth living.  When we put these things on the altar and offer them to God, we lose them, of course; but we get our lives back. 

Finally, in Jesus Christ, God does provide. 

Christians have from the very beginning read this story about Abraham, Isaac, and the ram as a story pointing us to the reality of Jesus Christ.  So perhaps our reading of this story today can direct you to a deeper understanding and a more heart-felt gratitude for how God has provided for us in Jesus Christ. 

In Jesus we finally see with clarity that far from being an unknowable monster, God is the one who loses everything to be with us in our pain, confusion, and death.  In Jesus we finally see that a life of perfect availability to God is the highest and most satisfying life.  By giving us Jesus Christ, God creates the conditions for faithfulness and trust.  “Here I am,” we can now say.