Freer and Closer
A Homily on Genesis 22:1-14
by Griff Martin
For the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Sixteenth Sunday of Online Worship)
June 28, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
She was a saint. And one of the funniest women I have ever met. The first time we had breakfast she said to me, “I would have loved to have you to my home for breakfast… I make a mean breakfast but can you imagine what the neighbors would say when they saw you leaving my house after breakfast? Well, the rumors would fly with them thinking you had stayed the night.” I sat there a bit stunned and she continued, "Oh I know what you are thinking with me being 87 and you being thirty-something but trust me, people would talk.”
And from that minute on, I was in love. Despite that story, she was a very prim and proper woman, she was as southern as it got and as progressive as it got. She studied music at Juilliard and served at the request of the Governor for several decades. She was the matriarch of Baton Rouge.
And she was my favorite person to have in a Bible study because she put up with zero nonsense and she had a brilliant take on Scripture. For instance, the text we are studying this morning, Edith was in attendance the night we tackled this text in Baton Rouge. She let me know from the moment she walked in, “Preacher, I don’t like this one and I am going to say it.” And then she sat down and gave me a devilish grin, almost like a dare.
When we had finished the formalities of introduction, prayer requests and such I got down to the Bible study and asked everyone who had Bibles to turn to Genesis 22 and then I read the passage aloud. Edith’s hand went up the minute I was done, “Pastor, excuse me, but what you just read I don’t believe it's part of Scripture?” I looked at her confused, “No, I know you might not like it, but this is the 22nd chapter of Genesis.” Nope, she said, and then she handed me her Bible and she was right, her Bible did not have Genesis 22. In fact, her Bible was largely missing Genesis 21, 22 and 23. And then I notice that she had just ripped the page right out.
And she smiled and announced to the room, “I don’t think this part fits the God I know, so I took it out and encourage you all to do the same.”
Now I am not encouraging a Dead Poet’s Society ripping of Scripture this morning… although I do believe one of the best and most formative experiences you could do is to think through if you could rip out some of the Bible, what would you want rip out…. And then instead of ripping it out, spend some time studying and working with those texts, wrestling until you find life in them (I would love to partner with you here, learning to read the Bible truer is one of my favorite journeys).
I know this text this morning is tough -- I struggled with not going a different direction -- I actually even wrote in an early worship planning document, "I am giving myself a 40th birthday gift and not preaching this text."
And then the text would not leave me alone. Someone suggested it for a Sunday school lesson on Difficult Passages. I was reading a book of theology by Mirabai Starr and there is a whole chapter on this story, a chapter of theology about God on this story written by a mother who lost her 14-year-old.
So I stuck with it… and I hope you will stick with it, as well. I want us to take a paradoxical approach to this text… To learn to take it way less seriously, but also to hold it tighter…
Let’s start with holding it less tightly… There are problems with this text, the main one being the very character of God. I firmly believe that God is good and loving and I approach the text with that in mind and I hold that tightly -- God is good and loving and I am not letting that go. And in this text, God does not come across good and loving on the initial read… Either God comes across as a God who is willing to demand a blood sacrifice of a firstborn or a God who plays games and tests people's faiths by making them think God is demanding a blood sacrifice of their firstborn. Either way, that is not a God I want anything to do with.
Which means I have some work to do… How do I hold this text and hold to a God who is good and loving? Culture has really helped here. Study of the time and place this text occurred is very important and religion had a very big role to play back then; and when you start seeing the various religions, you see some common themes emerge, many that are extremely disturbing. In particular, that the sacrifice of the firstborn was a common religious practice among the gods. It was commonplace for a god to demand that you kill your first-born child. That was actually anticipated and seen as a normal occurrence and act of worship.
Which could very easily mean that Abraham anticipates and expects that God is going to ask the very same of him because he believes that was the very nature of the Gods and what was expected in terms of worship. Abraham is anticipating that God is going to ask him to do this because that is what the gods did; in fact, not only is he anticipating it but, as a man who is known as religious and anointed by the divine, he feels a bit odd that he has not yet had the chance to prove his faith in front of his peers.
Meaning what he thinks is God’s voice is not actually God’s voice.
History and theology is full of people who have misheard the voice of God and, in doing so, have caused horrible chapters in our history. Even more tragic is that our history is full of leaders who have heard the voice of God and in hearing that have heard a voice that helped them to hold all power and control and then their followers did not question the voice of God the leader heard, resulting in systems that are unfair and unjust.
To hold this text more freely is to hold onto our foundation that God is love and a God who is love never would ask someone to sacrifice another human being, a truth about God reveled at the end of this story and probably one of the reasons we still have it… to make us aware that our God never asks for the sacrifice of any living person.
To hold this text more freely means that one of the most important lessons in your life is learning to hear that true voice of God… And that voice is always going to be the voice of Love, which is not to be confused with 'that voice is always going to be loving,' because sometimes that voice is going to be a strong call for justice and to clean up our acts.
Which means that if you find any text that does not add up to a hermeneutic of love, which means seeing Scripture through love, then you better dig in; you better be willing to fight because that text is either a text that we need to dig to understand better, which is where I fall on this text, or is a text we better speak out against.
And if speaking against Scripture scares you, well, may I suggest you read these two texts: Deuteronomy 22:28-29 where a man is required to marry a woman he rapes if he gets caught in the act… or Colossians 3:22 where slaves are commanded to obey their masters… we better be fighting and speaking against those texts and if you are not, well, I am not the pastor for you.
The true voice of God fights against those texts; the true voice of God is and always will be love. Period.
Learn to hear the voice of God, the true voice of God, make that voice such a constant in your life that it becomes the very tuning fork of your soul, it is the constant by which you measure any and all other voices.
To hold this text more freely… And paradoxically to hold this text more tightly.
There is another element of this text that is harder for me and that is the role of Abraham. In particular, Abraham’s reply to God, because in his reply there is an element of faith that scares me to death but is very real.
Now it is important to know that learning to hear God has to be the first lesson we hear in this text because if Abraham had done that better I think the story looks different. It’s a story of Abraham wrestling with the concept that our God is not like the other gods and how do we make sense of that.
However, there is something about Abraham we have to admire and it’s this Hebrew word, hineni, which translates, “Here I am…”
Judaism has titled this story the binding of Isaac with this title, Akedah, which epitomizes “the power of the unconditional surrender to the God of love.” And although they wrestle with God and God’s command in this text, a spiritual discipline we could relearn from our siblings -- the art of wrestling with God, but even in that wrestling they remain in awe of Abraham’s response, henna, here I am…
It is repeated often in the story, here I am. God’s initial call, the first verse God says, “Abraham,” and Abraham replies, Here I am… It’s how Abraham replies to Isaac when he calls to him in the midst of the story, “Father,” and Abraham replies, “Here I am…” And then before Abraham commits the horrid sacrifice that very much might have ended our faith, God calls out, "Abraham, Abraham," and Abraham replies, “Here I am.”
Abraham gives an eternal yes to God, an eternal yes to the eternal now.
What would it mean to live a life where you have already said yes, here I am to the true voice of God? What is it that stands in the way of your yes to God, because that is part of your spiritual work… The thing that stands in between you and God is your way to learn to love God deeper, to get to the place of being an eternal yes, here I am…
To hold this text freer and tighter… To learn to hear the very voice of God, the voice of goodness and love, and then to learn to be the eternal yes to God, yes to love and goodness…
Because that is exactly what God needs right now, God needs persons who know the voice of Love so intimately and that are ready to reply yes, here I am…
Because there is really scary, big work that must be done in our world today, right now. We are on the cusp of everything.
There is so much work to do and God has such beautiful things God wants born these days… Can you hear the voice, can you hear the true call, and will you be willing to say Here I am?
*artwork: "Abraham and Issac" by Alissa Kim Tjen
*artwork: "Abraham and Issac" by Alissa Kim Tjen
0 comments:
Post a Comment