This morning’s Genesis story – the story of Abraham hearing God and taking Isaac up a mountain for a sacrifice – is a horror story to me.
I cannot read it – can’t hear God suggest to Abraham that he offer his son as a burnt offering – without at least a little nausea.
I mean, I can’t even make myself watch tv comedies in which someone’s misunderstandings get a family member or friend in funny but real trouble; I’m a basket case if I let myself actively imagine how this story would play out with real people.
But here we are.
This story is right here in the Bible.
Somewhere in the ancestry of our faith, enough people found this story an important revelation about God and us that we decided to keep telling it as part of our holy history.
It might have once made perfect sense in the cultural language it was first written in – a culture long-vanished and very foreign to our own.
Generations since then have wrestled with it, trying to find that holiness.
We read it in church now and call it “The Word of the Lord”.
I can’t ignore it.
We can’t ignore it.
And so – like the generations before us – I keep wrestling with it.
We have to wrestle with it.
And – when I step back just a little bit – I’m glad we do.
I think we genuinely need to wrestle with the terrible texts. The stories that incorporate horror into our holy history, and also the uncomfortable ones where the tragedy might not be vivid, but where what happens in the story doesn’t feel “right” for our image of God. Not right for the God we long to love.
(Like the story we heard last week, in which Jesus talks about coming to slash the ties between us and our closest family members.)
I think we have to wrestle with the horrible stories – maybe even need to have them in our holy history – because our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us takes in all of the horror of our own existence. God’s relationship with us does not stop at the edges of the horror stories of our world. God takes us complete with the human history of atomic bombs and still-multiplying forms of slavery. We take God complete with the histories of religious wars and persecutions, with stories of a world-destroying flood and a brutal Roman execution.
All these things that break us, destroy us – God takes them with us, because God takes us whole. God enters into relationship with all of us; the nasty bits as well as the beautiful. And we – if we want a relationship with God that fills all the empty, raw, infected wounds and cracks in our souls and hearts and bodies – we take God whole, too. The tragic with the miraculous, the agonizing with the ecstatic joy.
The personal, direct relationship with God that God establishes with Abraham, the whole-heart, whole-life relationship that Jesus invites us into – these don’t make the world around us nice. Can’t make all our choices good.
And the unconditional love of God doesn’t after all make God “nice”, or even easy to understand.
We wrestle with the tragedies and horrors and discomforts and shocks in our holy history with God because – in the end – we want to be able to find God holding on to us when tragedies and horrors and discomfort and shock in our own lives try to separate us from God.
Because a God who is only ever “nice” to everybody isn’t much use to a heart filled with rage at the abuse of a child. It’s hard to imagine a “nice” God understanding my grief and bitterness when I recognize how I’ve been rotten to someone else. [or want to be rotten to others.]
A God who is only ever distantly good is hard to trust when the world around me seems to consist of one bad thing; one evil after another. Of wrongs that add up and add up but never make a “right”.
I don’t want to think of God as a source of horror. But I can’t ignore these stories; and I can’t ignore the horrors of the world (as much as I’d like to), and I can’t keep God boxed in to “nice”.
So I stay here and wrestle with the mess.
I think that may be why Abraham – and probably Isaac – and certainly, on record, Abraham’s grandson Jacob – wrestled persistently with God.
And like Jacob – who after wrestling all night would not let God go without a blessing – I’m going to try to refuse to let this story go until it blesses me. Us.
I don’t need to be satisfied with someone else’s explanation that this story – of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son; sacrifice all the evidence of God’s promises – tells us that obedience to God is a virtue that gets rewarded. I can go ahead and yell at the text in my hand that it’s unconscionable to “test” someone by demanding child sacrifice. I can mutter a lot of unprintable words (and trust me, I did this week) and shout that it would have to be more faithful to refuse to kill, more faithful to challenge God, than to pack up the wood and the knife for a burnt offering of any human being.
I can complain to all my colleagues, and to you, that this is a dangerous story. I will keep on insisting that – in its literal form – this is a terrible example of obeying God and you should absolutely, positively, not try this at home and if you ever think you might be hearing the voice of God telling you to sacrifice any person, just don’t.
But I can’t walk away from this story.
I can’t cut it out of the story of God, or of my own relationship with God.
I can’t let it go until it blesses me.
That blessing might not be a satisfying “answer” to why God would do such a thing.
Instead, that blessing might turn out to be grief.
Grief that this story unleashes, which allows me to mourn the horrors of our own lives, of the daily news. A blessing to stop suppressing – to release – the powerful but inconvenient griefs at the cruelties of the world that I mostly try to ignore.
That blessing might be an expansion of my expectations of God – might be that I’m feeling God’s resistance to being kept in a box of gentleness and distant benevolence in our lives, my life – and learning to expect that it might be good for God to shock me, disturb us, challenge our definition of “good”.
The blessing might just be the wondering I’ve been doing all week. The way I’ve been trying out “explanations” and being unsatisfied with the answers. Like the way speculating about whether Isaac was actually a consenting participant in this drama made me wonder about what I might be capable of in my own relationship with God, even though it didn’t make me any happier with the actual biblical story.
It might even be a blessing that this story is so horrifying – a blessing that child sacrifice is not, and never has been, an approvable practice of our faith – though there are times and places where humans did think it was right and faithful. Maybe even everyone else around Abraham, in his time.
I don’t know yet, for sure, where we’ll – where I’ll – find the blessing. So I’m not done wrestling with this story. And maybe you aren’t, either.
Maybe this story blessed you, long ago. Maybe you wrestled it to peace; maybe it blessed you and you still feel the horror anyway.
But maybe it hasn’t.
And if it hasn’t, well…. you don’t need to be satisfied with whatever I suggest to you about this story today. You can mutter unprintable words – that’s a genuine faithful response to quite a lot in the Bible, actually. You can argue with God, and with tradition. You can argue with me about it, or complain.
But don’t let it go.
Don’t let it go without wrestling. Without demanding a blessing.
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