The Big Ask

Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 10:40-42

It’s one of the most troubling stories in scripture, isn’t it?

This story in which God tells Abraham to do just about the most difficult, awful thing you can ask someone to do: to offer up his beloved son Isaac as a ritual sacrifice.

It’s a story that seems to work out in the end – Isaac doesn’t die; Abraham doesn’t do the most terrible thing – but still…

It’s inexcusable.

To ask a father to kill and sacrifice his own son; to ask a faithful man to cut off his hope for any future, to burn up the one gift from God he had waited for for so many years?

Inexcusable.

And maybe that’s one of the things we’re supposed to learn from the story: That in the context in which this story was first told, it was not beyond imagination that one might sacrifice a child to the gods, and that the punch line of this story is that this God, our God, says “STOP!”?

It’s possible that this story was first told in order to object to, to stop, a culture of child-sacrifice.

I truly believe that God would never expect – or accept – the killing of a child as an act of worship. But maybe we still need to read this story, and not dismiss it as outdated or irrelevant, but hear it and feel the bitter wrenching of our own hearts; feel the anger, the uncertainty and pain. Maybe we still need to ask ourselves what we’d do – what you, personally, and I would do –if God said that to you, or me.

Because God has a habit of asking for the impossible: asking stuttering, marginally competent people for smooth speechmaking and decisive leadership in crisis; demanding impossible births from women too young or too old; demanding endurance and eloquence from people who really, truly, cannot do these things; telling us to lose our lives for Jesus. And yes, this kind of impossible ask is coming to us: to you and me, personally.

In this time and place so far removed from the pages of the Bible, for the most part you and I are protected by a culture that has accepted some version of the Christian faith as the default for nearly a thousand years from the enormous individual demands and sacrifices that come with relationship with God. And more recently our world has begun to regard any kind of high commitment to religion as out-of-place, dangerous, or silly.

Still, if you read the Bible seriously, it’s impossible to miss that what God asks of us is, well, everything.

What God asks is not niceness, not tolerance or piety, not to feed a few hungry, visit a few sick, give to God’s work the time and treasure we can easily afford. 

That’s good, yes. God welcomes that.

But more than that, we are to regard all we have as God's, not our own, including our hearts and our lives; all of this meant first and foremost, for what God wants to do with it, not what I want.

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that the little things - a cup of cold water, a simple attitude of welcome - matter as much as great sacrifices. That’s true when we offer them not just because someone needs them, or it’s convenient, but because they are God’s, not ours to give.

Jesus also insists that God does not stop with the little things. Over and over, he tells us that it is our lives we must give, our whole selves, everything we have: because these are God’s.

So what in your life – possessions, people, life, feelings, time – do you really, deeply believe belongs to God more than to you?
What do I by my actions, by my unconscious habits, treat as mine, and not God’s?

I have learned that those things that I hesitate to give, that I try to manage so that I will have enough: those are the things I’m treating as mine.
The things that I don’t worry about having enough of: that I can give without hesitation, even when it’s painful; that you can give even when you actually won’t have enough for yourself, those are the things we unconsciously, truly, see as God’s.

Personally, I’m better at seeing money as God’s than, say, time. I often worry that I will not have enough time – that if I don’t manage it, control it, I won’t be able to do my job, or to take reasonable care of myself. And it turns out that I hoard time; I hesitate to give it away.

But somehow – watching the generosity of others, receiving generosity myself – I’ve found that I can hold money lightly. There are times when giving and spending is painful, when I’m scraping the bottom of my checkbook or credit card, but it still doesn’t frighten me with the loss of control.

Maybe for you it’s the opposite. Maybe time flows freely for you and money needs control. Or your gift for cooking or art has somehow become a thing you don’t have enough of, that you hoard, manage, need to control, while your musical talent or physical strength is easy to share.

It’s not just the obvious resources like money and time that matter in this way. It’s our hearts, our way of occupying space, our hard-won skills, natural talents, and daily work.

Ask yourself: are you an excellent surgeon, teacher, manager, parent, because God needs an excellent parent, salesperson, architect, or attorney where you are? Or because you need to be good at this job? Or your boss, client, or family need that?

Even our emotional lives belong to God, before they belong to us. In fact, I suspect that many of us learn to know that we don’t belong to ourselves from our families, our loves. Perhapsh you have looked at your child, your parent, your spouse, and realized your heart belongs to them, to break or strengthen, without your having any control over it; or that your family’s call on your talents and worldly goods often comes before your own needs and wants.

When we learn these things in our families, we practice what we need to hold God’s gifts lightly.

While I find I can hold many of the deep loves of my heart lightly, in God’s hands, keeping relationships with family and friends open to whatever comes; I will confess that I’m territorial about my home. I actually worry sometimes as if there’s not enough of my living room to go around.  (Yes, you should laugh at that.)

Maybe your home is naturally open, and your friendships held tightly; or your golf game carefully managed and your office free and light. And yet all these things belong to God. I just forget, and treat some of God’s gifts as if they belong only to me.

A friend reminded me this week, as I wrestled with this, that acting as though our gifts, work, homes, emotions, belong to us isn’t necessarily selfish. Many times, we want to manage these things to help others, and our only mistake is in thinking that these resources are ours to control, and that God isn’t going to ask for them – now! – when I had other plans.

This story we started with today, this story of God asking the impossible of Abraham, God asking for Abraham’s everything, is a heart-wrenching and disturbing story to hear, but I think one of the reasons we read it is not just to remember that God may one day ask our lives from us, but that God already has;

that sometimes this ask will be heart-wrenching, impossible, stunning, and still our only possible answer, in faith, is “yes.”

Next week, in our tour of the prayer book, we’ll pray the words of a prayer that stretches back into our first English language Eucharists:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.

Those are some of my favorite words in this prayer book, because they ring with the truth that all that I am, and all that we have, is God’s, and we pray an abridged version of them today.

We offer God, as Abraham ultimately did, a living sacrifice, not a death, because God does not ask our lives of us once, but every day.

And in the end, that big ask is no ask at all, no question,

because all we have, and all we are, belongs to God.