Genesis 22: 1-18
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Ordinary Time
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”
These are the opening lines to Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery. Published in 1948 in The New Yorker, the story opens as the three hundred families in an unnamed village gather for the annual lottery. For reasons no one can quite remember and, according to customs they’re not so sure they’re still getting right, each family takes their turn drawing a slip of paper from a big black box. This year, it is the Hutchinson clan that draws the slip with the black mark on it. Each of the five members of their family then draws again, even little Davey, who’s not quite old enough to manage his slip of paper by himself.
This time, it’s Mrs. Hutchinson who draws the black mark. Against her protests, the town gathers to do what they’ve done every summer for as long as anyone can remember – as the stones pelt down on her body, she becomes the sacrificial lamb for this small fictional town.
I remember reading The Lottery as a kid and being pretty creeped out by it. Apparently, when it was first released in The New Yorker, it made people more than a little freaked out. It angered them. Shirley Jackson received hundreds of phone calls and letters that summer. Some people cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine. Others suggested that someone with a mind as dark as Ms. Jackson had no business writing. And still others wanted to know where they could find this small town because they wanted to go watch a stoning.
What is it about this story that hit a little too close to home in 1948? A generation that had sacrificed its young men and women to the gods of war was finally starting to settle into their homes in the suburbs. And now a new specter was looming – Communism abroad threatened the American way of life. A senator named Joe McCarthy took his seat in 1948, ushering in a time when many of this nation’s leaders were sacrificed to the gods of fear. Maybe it wasn’t such a great time to publish a story about a human sacrifice.
Of course, when would it be a great time to write about human sacrifice?
I’m not sure. After all, it always seems to hit a little too close to home. We read stories like The Lottery or the passage from Genesis this morning with a morbid fascination. We flip through our Bible’s thin pages slowly, as if driving by a horrible car accident on the side of the road. We know we shouldn’t linger to read and re-read these horrible tales…but, somehow, we can’t look away.
Today’s text from Genesis has various names. Jews have traditionally called it the Akedah – the binding of Isaac. Christians have traditionally favored “the sacrifice of Isaac” – presumably to help highlight a belief that this story foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice. Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has called it a “text of terror” and I’d say that’s about right. Unless you have a heart of stone, unless you’ve never loved someone, unless you’ve never looked into a child’s trusting eyes….there’s no way to read this text without squirming when you think of a father binding his son on an altar and holding a knife to his throat.
The author of Genesis is strangely silent about how this all worked, by the way. We don’t really know how old Isaac is in this story, but if he’s old enough to carry the wood for his own funeral pyre, I’d guess he’d be old enough to put up a fight when his dear father tried to kill him. But the author of Genesis doesn’t go into this, leaving me alone with my imagination running wild trying to envision this scene. I have to be honest, I can’t think about it for long or I start to get a really terrible feeling in my stomach.
The Bible is not for the faint of heart.
Nobody really thinks Abraham deserves a father of the year award, right? I mean, how ironic is it that we teach our kids to sing songs about how Father Abraham did this and that…and then it turns out he’s a child abuser? Because that’s what we’d call him today, right? If he came home to Sarah today in their split-level ranch and said, “Oh, guess what happened to us today, honey?” we’d expect her to run screaming. Or at least call Child Protective Services, right? This kind of behavior is simply not okay on any level according to our cultural or religious norms.
It’s great if you love God. It’s great if you want to make sacrifices for God. It’s great if you talk to God every day and listen to what the Spirit leads you to do. It’s great up until the point where God tells you to kill your kid – and then it’ll land you in a mental institution.
But as Gabe Frommer always warns us in the lectionary class, it does us no good to impose our cultural norms on people who lived almost two thousand years ago and a world away.
So, as uncomfortable as it may be to put ourselves in the shoes of a man who was willing to murder his own son, let’s try to see where Abraham was coming from.
In his world, human sacrifice was fairly common. He lived in a world with many gods, many religions….and pretty much all of these gods occasionally required human sacrifice. He also lived in a world where children were expendable – many of them dying before they were a year old, and certainly lots of them dying before they grew up. After all, Abraham once had two sons, but essentially sent the other, Ishmael, away to die because he was sick of having him around.
Did parents love their children? I’m sure they did, yes. But I also know they didn’t take 10,000 photographs of them before their first birthdays, Tweet about them 25 times a day, and plan their entire lives around their nap schedules. Not that I’ve ever done any of these things. It was a different time and place.
So when Abraham thinks he hears God saying, “Hey, I need you to sacrifice your son to me,” I feel pretty certain this was a surprise to Abraham. I’m sure he was initially shocked that he was being asked to do this. But I also know it wasn’t the same kind of shock it would if I thought God was saying the same thing to me. Human sacrifice wasn’t unheard of – it was just something you kind of hoped you’d never have to be directly involved in.
I’ve been thinking a lot about child sacrifice this week. Wondering, is there anything anyone could ever do to convince me to sacrifice my child? The short answer, of course, is no. No way.
But then I look around at our world and I see children being sacrificed every day.
The mother who sacrifices her unborn child to the meth gods because she can’t get away from her own addiction long enough to give her child the gift of a healthy start.
The father who sacrifices his son to the gods of masculinity when he tells him he’ll never find a girlfriend of make friends in high school unless he stops playing the flute and joins the football team.
The parent who makes a snide comment about her daughter right in front of her – sacrificing her child to the gods of humor just to get a quick laugh from a friend.
A generation of parents who have willingly sacrificed their children to the gods of patriotism – sending their children overseas to die in lands they will never visit for a cause many of us don’t understand.
And, of course, it’s not just parents sacrificing their children. It’s the Church, too.
You may have heard about Elevation Church in North Carolina. They made news this past Easter when 12-year-old Jackson Helms was removed from their worship service.
Jackson and his mom, Kelly, wanted to worship that morning. But when Jackson, who has cerebral palsy, made some noises during the opening of worship, they were quickly escorted out of the main auditorium and into an overflow area where they wouldn’t disrupt other worshippers. When Kelly contacted the pastor later that week to say that she wanted to start a ministry for families of children with special needs, she was shut down. The pastor told her that Elevation Church focuses on worship, not ministry.
A child of God, sacrificed by a church that values its praise band, multi million dollar sound system, and cool coffee bar more than it values the many gifts this family could bring.
And, of course, we’ve got generations and generations of children who have been sacrificed by the Church in the name of the Bible because their God-given sexuality wasn’t good enough for the Church. Christians who have worshiped the Bible more than they want to listen to God have excluded and harmed our LGBT youth – telling them they’re dirty, worthless, flawed, and going to hell.
You may have caught the name of Rev. Amy DeLong in the news this past week. An ordained United Methodist Minister, Rev. DeLong was on trial by her denomination on charges of being a lesbian and performing same-sex unions. No stranger to what it feels like to be bound and held at knifepoint by a church she loves, Amy has this to say about what it feels like to be a lesbian in the Church:
“On a daily basis, the only place my partner and I are treated unfairly, the only place we are seen as less than equal, the only place we are called names, the only place we are forced to lie about our love for each other, the only place we fear for our safety and feel crushingly vulnerable is in the church. The only people who have been mean to us simply because we are gay are Christians and more specifically Christians who call themselves United Methodists.”
Children of God, sacrificed by the Church in the name of the Bible.
So let’s not kid ourselves when we look down at Abraham as an abusive father who holds no relevance for our own lives. Because given the right circumstances – the right set of cultural norms – the right “people of God” surrounding us and telling us we’re doing what God wants us to do….given all those things, any of us could end up sacrificing a loved one in some very real ways.
That’s not a pretty reality. No wonder Phyllis Trible calls this a “text of terror.”
Ever terror-ful texts have their good news, though, and this one is no different. On the surface level, the good news is this, of course – Isaac doesn’t die! At the last moment, God provides an alternative and the child walks away whole.
On a deeper level, I think the good news found in the binding of Isaac is this: God is not bound by religion.
Whatever your religious norms, your cultural norms are telling you, God is not bound by those things. We worship a Stillspeaking God. A God that moves beyond the religious norms of the day. A God that refuses to be bound up by the way we expect our deity to behave.
When all the other gods of the world are saying one thing, we can look to our God to provide an alternative.
When other churches are telling us we need to hurt others in the name of God, we can count on Him to send an angel whispering – or maybe shouting! – an alternative plan.
When the “churchy” thing to do feels wrong, we can look to our God to send guides to sit alongside us and think through the implications of our actions – and save us from ourselves and our religion.
Our God will not be bound. Not by cultural norms. And, most certainly, not by the Church. Not ever.
This God who moves beyond boundaries – can’t be claimed by one religion – and refuses to be bound….this God lives and moves and breathes and loves and creates eternally.
