4th Sunday after Pentecost
June 28, 2020
Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13
This passage from Genesis is what I wrote my very first
sermon on, the summer after my first year of seminary. I hadn’t even had a
class on preaching yet. The few times I had spoken from a pulpit to give the
Sunday message, it was about my testimony, my witness, and my call story to
Nicaragua. It was sharing what God was doing through me and inviting the
congregation to join me. I suppose it was only natural that at my first church
internship, I compared this story of Abraham and Isaac with my call story to
serve God in Nicaragua. My title was something like, When God’s Call Doesn’t
Make Sense. I remember I picked the hymn, “Trust and Obey,” to sing. “Trust and
obey, for there's no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”[1]
Rather than focus on the beginning part, though, on the call, this time I’d
like to focus on the end and what happens as a response to the call. However,
let’s review a little before we get there.
You may remember from two weeks ago about the three
strangers visiting Abraham and telling him that Sarah was going to become
pregnant and have a son. We’re not told Abraham’s response, but we know that
Sarah laughed. She’d been infertile for so many years and decades, she didn’t
dare believe it. When you struggle with infertility, after a while, you don’t
dare get your hopes up that this next time might work. It’s too painful. So
Sarah laughed, and yet it did happen. At 90 years old she gets pregnant and
Isaac is born.
We don’t know exactly how old Isaac is in today’s story.
The narrator just tells us that it’s “some time later.”[2]
Yet Isaac is walking and talking and obviously aware of what’s going on. He
knows they’re going to make a burnt offering to the Lord and he knows that
they’re missing one of the key ingredients: the lamb. Isaac asks his dad where
the lamb is, and his dad says, “God will provide the lamb.” Then, after they’ve
set up the altar, Abraham binds Isaac and places
him on the altar. Isaac, who is Abraham’s promised heir. Isaac, who Abraham
and Sarah waited SO LONG for. Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s only son, only child,
whom they love. How in the world can this direction from God jive with the
promise from God that Abraham would become a great nation through Isaac?! It does not seem to make sense. This call from God seems
to negate God’s earlier promise. And yet Abraham is ready to follow through.
Lest we think Abraham’s faith is a blind faith, though,
let’s do a quick review. At times Abraham’s faith has been rock solid. When God
first calls him to leave his home and go to a place God will tell him later,
Abraham goes. Another time, Abraham believes what God says and the narrator
says it’s “credited to Abraham as righteousness.” Abraham isn’t some super
saint, though. Other times his faith has been shaky. When traveling through
Egypt, he tries to pass Sarah off as his sister in order to keep her safe, not
trusting that God would keep her safe. Then there’s the time when he and Sarah
conspired for his promised heir to come through Sarah’s maid Hagar, when they
tried to circumvent God’s plan and make it happen their own way because God was
taking too long. Abraham has learned the hard way that God can be trusted and
that God will keep his promises in his own way. So, God says take your son,
Isaac, the one whom I promised you and gave you and said would be your heir,
and go offer him as a sacrifice, Abraham
does it. He’s willing to trust God, even
though this seems to contradict other things God has said and done and promised.
We are told that this is a test, meaning that we, as
readers, know that God has no intention of going through with it. Abraham
doesn’t know that. He may or may not guess it, but he can’t be sure of God’s
intentions ahead of time any more than we can. “God asks Abraham to demonstrate
his faith by trusting God with his hopes, his future, his deepest longings, his
only son whom he loves,”[3]
basically everything Abraham has and values. It’s been important to Abraham for
him to have an heir, and now God’s saying to trust him with the heir, too. The
angel stops Abraham from killing his son, because that wasn’t what God wanted.
What God wanted was for “Abraham to face his own conflicted and divided
loyalties.”[4]
Did Abraham trust God completely? Not blindly, because Abraham knows what God
is capable of and knows that God is faithful. But trusts him completely,
knowing that God will provide. Abraham
passes the test. Would you? Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in spite of
God’s promise for Isaac to be his heir. God’s instructions for this burnt
offering didn’t make sense in light of one of God’s previous promises. How do
you still believe the promise AND follow this new instruction? How do you trust
both promises, when they seem to conflict?
One
commentary I read said that “Abraham now knows, in the profoundest of ways,
that life with God is a gift, and God’s blessing is freely bestowed. He need
not do anything – God will provide – generously, bountifully, wondrously. All
he has to do is look up to see that God has been there all along, guiding his
steps, directing his paths, and making a future for him.”[5]
When we know and trust in God’s provision, we can look back and see how God has
been guiding and providing all along. And because we can look back and see
that, we can trust the future with God, too. In this story, God proves that God can be
trusted. In fact, God demonstrates this time and again throughout history. Moreover,
while God spares Abraham’s son, God gives his own son to up to death. This is also
an act of provision on God’s part, a provision that would ultimately fulfill
what God started in Abraham, which is the restoration of blessing to the
nations and to the world. “Because Christ died, our relationship with God has
forever been changed. Whatever sin, whatever guilt, whatever brokenness we
carry, Christ has dealt with it and abolished it in the cross. This story
invites us then, to a posture of fear and awe as well as profound gratitude for
God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises and the redemption we have through
him.”[6]
Sometimes
we are caught between two promises from God that seem to conflict. Sometimes,
we find ourselves trudging up that mountain, listening to God and obeying what
God said, and wondering how in the world God is going to resolve all this. We
pray and tell God, “God, you said this, but you also said this. God, I don’t
see how those two reconcile. I trust you. I trust you’ve got a plan. Right now,
it doesn’t make sense. Yet I trust that one day I will be able to see it.” This
in-between time is hard. We’ve left the old normal of before COVID-19, but we
haven’t yet gotten to the new normal of after
the pandemic. We’re still living in the middle. We’ve left the old normal of
being “colorblind” to race, what I was taught growing up in the 1980s, but we
haven’t yet gotten to the point of all figuring out and learning the best
language to move forward that respects all people and shows our belief that all
people are equally worthy of belonging and love. We’re still in the in-between
and it’s hard and painful. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a philosopher,
paleontologist, and Jesuit priest. I’m going to end with my favorite quote from
him. He said, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally
impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip
the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made
by passing through some stages of instability – and that it may take a very
long time. Above all, trust in the slow work of God, our loving vine-dresser.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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