Sermon title: The God who trusts.
I want pray with this from the book of common prayer:
Hinneni, here I am;
Hinneni, here I am, with you still;
Hinneni, here I am, trusting you.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.
I think no matter how many times we read that story, it continues to trouble us.
Even if there is a substitute ram in the end, there remain very troubling questions that gnaw at our
brains- – –
What kind of God would ask a father to sacrifice his child?
And why on earth does Abraham agree to do it?
We should ask these questions, and we should be troubled.
My hope is that we stay with the trouble long enough for God to speak something in our hearts today.
The story sticks in our brains because it’s just really good storytelling.
There is drama – and the Bible is full of it.
Just in the book of Genesis, we see family strife; jealousy, scheming, lying, domestic abuse, and wars
between nations.
Yet woven through these human dramas is this golden thread of God acting with humans.
In a way, the drama comes from the tension between what already is and what God promises could
be.
In Abraham and Sarah’s case it is the promise of a child and land given by God through covenant and
blessing.
Yet, blessing does not view God as a divine vending machine where good behaviour is rewarded with
heavenly gifts.
In fact, in most instances there is anything BUT good behaviour.
Rather, blessing is a means for God to transform his human partners.
Over and over, God’s human partners make dodgy choices that jeopardise the whole thing.
Throughout the story we are kept in suspense and wonder – – –
Will the family stay together and survive this crisis?
Will they make it to the land and flourish there?
Will and can they trust God’s promise?
Which in turn begs the question
Will God ever be able to trust humans as faithful partners in his business of blessing his
creation?
Abraham’s story begins with God calling him to ‘Go from your country into the land I will show you’
What follows is a story riddled with relationship strife- domestic and international, as well as blessing
and promises.
Twice, he lies about his wife being his sister to save his own skin from powerful suitors- to the detriment of others.
Twice, he bravely bails out his nephew Lot who makes poor choices, sometimes out of self-servicing reasons.
Twice, tensions erupt between Abraham and Sarah about what to do with their Egyptian slave Hagar and her son with Abraham, Ishmael, that they drive both of them out into the desert to die.
Twice, he contends with foreign rulers for diminishing resources – Egypt’s Pharoah during a famine and then a Canaanite King, Abimelech, for water.
Twice, we hear that Abraham/Sarah laugh at God’s promise that they will bear a son at their old age.
So much for the father of faith Paul and James write out about in the New Testament.
Abraham’s story strangely feels both distant and close to us.
In many senses, it is a very ‘worldly’ story whose characters have ‘worldly’ concerns.
There’s pressure of having children, getting a foot in real estate, protecting property from outsiders; and providing for the family.
All this amidst an ecological crisis and warring countries for increasingly limited resources.
We recognise this story in us and around us and represents an honest view of life that reveals human frailty, prejudice, and greed, but also hope, compassion, and grace.
By the time we read Genesis 22, Abraham is a seasoned sojourner and battered family man- facing an impossible and horrific dilemma.
At the beginning of the chapter, the narrator tells us that ‘after all these things, God tested Abraham’
The test was to offer his only beloved son Isaac as a burnt offering – a sacrifice.
The people of ancient near east in Abraham’s time got this. It was common practice to sacrifice something valuable, including children, to get close to the ‘divine’ or divine blessing.
We moderns spurn at this, but we are really not that different – we still believe in sacrifice.
We all have limited time and resources and realise there is such a thing as opportunity cost.
Most of us know that sometimes we have to sacrifice something to get closer to another thing.
And if we are really honest with ourselves, even if we are not the ones holding the knife above our children’s heads, we continue as a society to sacrifice the next generation on the altar of our modern gods of war, convenience, and technological domination over nature and neighbour.
Les Murray puts it this way in the last lines of his poem ‘Church’
The true god gives his flesh and blood Idols demand it of you.
Whenever sacrifice is involved it’s a good idea to ask who is exercising power, and who is benefitting from the sacrifice.
Idols use power and demand sacrifice to benefit themselves.
God providing a ram in this story offers a counter to idol worship.
The Christian hope is that God in Christ exercised power by giving it up for the benefit of all creation, especially for the powerless.
I don’t think this means God does not demand anything from us.
Jesus says- ‘Anyone who would follow me must deny himself and take up his cross daily’
He just does it in a surprising way:
At the end of the sacrifice scene- God ‘sees’ and learns something new about Abraham.
‘Now I know that you fear God’
Indeed, so central is this theme of ‘seeing’ that the mountain is named ‘The mount of seeing’. (Translated provide, but Hebrew root is ‘to see’)
God tests, God sees, God knows, God learns.
It’s a strange thing to say that God, whom we acknowledge as all powerful and all-knowing, also learns.
God in story is the transcendent God revealed in limited form, who acts within the limits of human experience and language.
It’s as if the character of God acting within the story gives us a taster of what incarnation will look like in Jesus who would ‘grow in favour with God and man’.
I think these two quotes capture it well for me:
‘The God who, according to Jewish tradition, has written the story is like the author vis-à-vis the character…the God in the story itself – God has written a story about himself as a character- and that character, yes, learns. He learns because he wants to teach human beings to learn.’ (Avivah Zornberg, Genesis of Desire)
And second –
‘There is something about our humanity which has to do with discovering who we are by testing out
our identities. That acting, that pretence isn’t necessarily insincere, or hollow. It may be a way of
discovering what most matters to us.’ (Rowan Williams – Reflections on Shakespeare)
What I think matters most in this story is – trust.
Will Abraham trust God, and can God trust Abraham?
God genuinely engages in human relationship and is both at the mercy of humans but also has power over them.
We see a God who is betrayed over and over again.
But trusts over and over again.
This is Jesus in the garden – asking his closest friends to watch and pray with him in his darkest hour.
This is Jesus by a fire asking Peter three times, ‘do you love me?’
There is surprising vulnerability here, but also a strange power that ‘demands’ a new way of living from those who claim to share in Abraham’s faith.
A faith whose life flows into something bigger than themselves.
‘In your offspring shall ALL the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.’
Abraham’s life draws to a close with three final acts that are so ordinarily human.
Finding a burial ground for his wife Sarah, finding a wife for his son Isaac, and sorting out inheritance for his children including those from his concubines.
What transfigures these ordinary acts is their relationship to God’s promise and his word grounded in place.
Sarah’s burial site would become the first patch of promised land Abraham’s family would own.
Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, would be found outside the promised land, in Abraham’s old country.
Abraham would later be buried with Sarah by his two sons Ishmael and Isaac.
Here we find the future generation poised at the boundary of the promised land; re-entering it not as two rival nations, but as brothers, coming together to mourn and honour the generation before them.
It is a picture of reconciliation.
And to close with a local context.
This is a picture a St Mary’s south of town two days ago during the celebration of its opening as a heritage listed site.
My colleague, Anne, the chairperson of the St Mary’s Stolen Generation group and herself an ex resident of St Mary’s, invited me to come along.
(I met her 4 years prior through Celia when they were incorporating as a group in order to secure a portion of the land for ongoing connection.)
There was something in that celebration that felt to me like a return to a land promised long ago.
Much like the story of Abraham and the promised land, St Mary’s history is mixed and messy.
For so many lives, it was a place where Aboriginal children of mixed descent were sacrificed on the altar of Australia’s assimilation policy.
For some Aboriginal mothers, sending their child there may have been the only way to save their lives.
But perhaps like how Sarah’s tomb in the promised land became a place where two brothers could remember and mourn the stories of their ancestors, so too can the stolen generation remember theirs in its rightful place.
As one of the ex-residents said on Friday,
‘We are moving forward, with this site, to set up a memorial to honour and remember our mothers and our families and communities, that have had a child and children removed and placed at St Mary’s. This removal has had a lasting devastation and impact on us and is felt today. There are a lot of people that have not been able to come up and talk today…. we are getting a lot older, and we expect that our younger people will step up and continue to keep this place going for us.’
May we have the faith to ‘keep this place going for us’ wherever that might be.
