Abraham Was Right

Abraham Was Right

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 2, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 22:1-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have to be honest here. I hate this story. Most everyone I know hates this story. It’s a terrible story. This story has it that God told Abraham to go to a specific place that God would show him and there kill his son Isaac as a human sacrifice to God. That’s bad enough, but then Abraham sets out to do it. Isaac is the son through whom Abraham was to become the father of great nations. In this story Isaac is still a child. If he died there would be no way that God’s promise to Abraham could be accomplished. Nonetheless, Abraham sets off to obey what he takes to be a divine command to kill his son as a sacrifice to God. In the process he lies to Isaac, he lies to Isaac’s mother Sarah, he lies to his servants. Just as he is about to slay his son and burn the boy’s body as a sacrifice to God, God intervenes, tells him not to do it, and provides a ram that Abraham sacrifices to God in Isaac’s place.

Everyone I know hates this story. For me the most powerful reason I hate it is that the notion of a father killing his son is abhorrent. Repulsive. Appalling. I have a son. Many of you have sons, though it’s the same if we’re talking about a daughter rather than a son. To think that it’s what God wants from Abraham or anyone else just makes it worse. To me and to a lot of people God in this story is a monster. I can’t, and don’t, believe that God would ever order anyone to kill anyone, let alone kill your own child. I and a lot of people hate this story because it says God did something that the God we know, love, and seek to serve would never do. This story confounds our core beliefs about who God is.

Now, people try to make this story less horrible in a couple of ways. They say it never really happened. Or they dismiss it because their God would not do what God does in the story. They try to minimize the horror of the story by saying that Abraham would never really have done it. This story so sickens us that we try to explain it away, and if we can’t do that we just ignore it. That’s what I do with it most of the time, ignore it.

We hate this story, but here’s the thing. As much as we hate it, this awful story speaks a powerful truth about faith. The great Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about the truth that this story speaks. It’s called Fear and Trembling, and in that book Kierkegaard insists over and over again that Abraham was justified in his intention to kill Isaac and that Abraham must be justified if faith is truly to be faith. Now, I suspect that you reject that assertion as much as I did when I first heard it years ago; but I don’t reject it anymore. I have come around to thinking that Kierkegaard is right. At least within the confines of this story Abraham was fully justified in his intention to kill Isaac and would have been fully justified had he actually done it. And I assume that that conclusion needs a lot of explaining. So here goes.

To understand Kierkegaard’s assertion that Abraham was and must be justified in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac I turn to one of Kierkegaard’s great intellectual descendants, to Paul Tillich, unarguably the greatest Christian theologian of the twentieth century. And I look to Tillich’s teaching on what we mean by the concepts God and faith. Tillich taught that to have faith is to have an “ultimate concern.” He said that that which is our ultimate concern is our god. Tillich taught that whatever is the most important thing to us, that thing is our god. He also taught that anything that we make our ultimate concern, that we make the most important thing to us, that isn’t truly ultimate, that isn’t truly God, is an idol, a false god.

So how does this understanding of what we mean when we say God help us get meaning out of this terrible story about Abraham going off to kill his son as a sacrifice to God? We have to start by not arguing with the story. We have to take what it says as the truth of the story, or the truth in the story. I know that God never ordered anyone to kill anyone, but I have to set that conviction aside when I seek to get meaning out of this story. In the story God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. So we accept that God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. We accept that for purposes of the story only Abraham was doing what God wanted him to do.

Now, Abraham could have overruled God and refused to do it. He could have said “No, God, my son is more important to me than you are, and I just won’t do it.” To return to Tillich’s terminology, if Abraham had said that, he would have been saying that God is not his ultimate concern. He’d have been saying that there was something more important to him than God. I’m sure that that’s what I would have said if I thought God had told me to sacrifice my son or my daughter. I just wouldn’t do it, but if the reason I wouldn’t do it were that I valued my child more than I valued God I would be guilty of idolatry. I would have made my child more ultimate, more important, for me than God, and that is the sin of idolatry.

That’s why Abraham was right to be willing to slay his son as a sacrifice to God. He was willing to do it because God truly was his god. God was more important to him than anything else. God was his ultimate concern. If your ultimate concern tells you to do something you do it. Otherwise your concern isn’t truly ultimate. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac because God really was God for him. Nothing else was.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think God ever told Abraham to kill Isaac. This is story not biography or history that we’re dealing with here. But there is a powerful lesson in this story, and a powerful question as well. The question this story poses to every one of us is: Who or what is our ultimate concern? Who or what is the most important thing in our lives? In other words, or what is our god? Is it the one true God? Or is it something else? That is a question each of us has to answer for ourselves, and if you’re like me you might well have to ask forgiveness for how you answer the question.

That’s the question. I think the lesson is this: Faith makes great demands on us. It’s not going to demand that we kill anyone, but it makes great demands on us nonetheless. It demands that we put God’s ways ahead of the world’s ways. It demands that we we consider what God wants in every decision we make. It demands that when we are faced with a choice between what the world wants and what God wants we choose what God wants even if it costs a good deal to make that choice. Our faith demands that we all be more loving, caring, and compassionate toward all people than most of us are most of the time, myself included.

Folks, it can be so easy to make our Christian faith easy, undemanding, unchallenging. We do it all the time, and I include myself in the “we.” We say God loves us and pretty much leave it at that. But that is superficial faith. It gives us what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. When we take God seriously God makes demands on us, and how can we not take God seriously? I don’t know what specific demands God is making on you today, but I know that God is making them. Abraham heard God’s command and was prepared to carry it out. Are you prepared to carry out God’s demands on you? Am I prepared to carry out God’s demands on me? Are we prepared to carry out God’s demands on us? Big questions with tough answers. May we answer those questions well. Amen.