SunJun262011
Scripture: GENESIS 22:1-14
Of all biblical stories, that one is the hardest of all for me to read. There’s no getting around it: what’s asked of Abraham is unthinkably cruel. Imagine God telling you you had to sacrifice your own child to show your devotion to God. Like many of you, I try to imagine being in Abraham’s position with my own children. And when I try to picture tying Alex or Taylor down and putting a knife to their throat, I am so sickened, so repulsed, so furious that I simply can’t go there. If you were in a church for the first time today and you heard this story, you would, almost certainly, never come back. I’ll find another God, a kinder, gentler God, thank you very much. Because this one is psychotic.
Sara Maitland has written a short story in which she imagines what the aftermath of this episode must be like for Sarah, who is married to Abraham and the mother of Isaac. “It is hard to make sense of sometimes,” says Maitland. “There are gaps, gaps in the story that make it impossible to understand. She does not know what happened between Abraham and Isaac in the land of Moriah [because neither one of the ever talks about it]. . .
“Abraham came back from the land of Moriah smug, contented, smooth and sleek. Isaac came back from the land of Moriah like a wild animal, bound but not tamed. For months afterwards he would wake in the night screaming and his mother, in the women’s tent, would hear her boy child sobbing and could not go to him, comfort him, hold him. There was a look in his eyes still, evasive, distant, the look of a man who uses pride to cover betrayal” (quoted in Resources for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild, p. 191).
So given all that, why in the world preach on it? Why give it the time of day? Why dignify it with any attention at all? If a God of love is at the center of all we do, then clearly the God pictured here is so far off the mark that the story is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Why not consign this evil tale to the rubbish bin of history, along with other passages of scripture that we pay no attention to, and get on with something edifying and enriching?
These are pressing questions. They are clearly my questions as well as yours. And they deserve to be addressed. But we’re going to do that this morning by taking something of a detour, first, into some other terrain. So put the issues we’ve raised on hold, and take a different journey with me for a few moments.
Imagine this: You’re driving a train down some railroad tracks one day, when you see up ahead of you five people working on the track. Your brakes have given way, and you know you’re going to hit the people on the track. Suddenly, though, you see up ahead of you a fork in the track. And off to the right, where the fork goes, you see one worker on that spur. If you take the right fork, you will kill only one person. The question is: what do you do? Do you stay on the track and kill five (let’s see a show of hands), or veer off and kill one (hands?)? The answer is pretty obvious, isn’t it: you steer to the right and kill only one person rather than five.
This is a scene described by Michael Sandel in what has become a rather famous lecture course at Harvard University. Sandel teaches a course there on justice. Some 1000 people come to his lectures, to hear him pose difficult questions about all sorts of complex moral issues—equality and inequality, free speech vs. hate speech, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, military conscription, and so much more. You can see these lectures online, and they are riveting (http://www.justiceharvard.org/).
So now, says Sandel, imagine a slight shift in the scene. Now you’re watching the same events unfold before you from a bridge above the tracks. You can see the train approach the five people on the tracks, and you know that the brakes have given way. As it happens, you’re watching this scene next to someone you don’t know, a large man who is virtually hanging over the edge of the railing. And it occurs to you that you could push him over, onto the tracks. The train would run over him and would be brought to a stop, saving the five people up ahead on the tracks. And Sandel asks: do you do it? Do you push the one over in order to save the five (hands?), or let the train kill the five (hands?)? And this time the response from those in the lecture hall is entirely different. Almost without exception, they believe it would be wrong to push the person off the bridge, even if it would save five people—a response, I suspect, that most of us would share.
Sandel then raises the same issue from an entirely different angle. This time, you’re a doctor in an emergency room and six people come in at the same time needing your care, one in dire straits who will die if not attended to immediately, the other five savable but likely to die if not attended to in the next several hours. Do you care for the one if it means the other five will die (hands?), or do you care for the five and let the most serious victim die (hands?)? Again, most people say they’d save the five.
Now switch the situation somewhat. You’re a transplant surgeon, and in one room, you have five sick people, all of them needing an organ transplant to survive—one a heart, one lungs, one a liver, one a kidney, one a pancreas. In the other room, you have a healthy man. He’s taking a nap. You could just harvest all his vital organs while he sleeps and save the five sick people. What do you do? And again, the answer is almost unanimous: you let the healthy man sleep, and certainly don’t harvest his organs.
The obvious question Sandel poses is: what’s the difference? Why, in one scenario, is it all right to choose to kill one instead of five, while in the other scenario it seems entirely wrong? He goes on to suggest some reasons for that. But here’s what I’m struck by: philosophy, says Sandel, teaches us what we already know. By placing the familiar in unfamiliar garb, it helps us to look at our lives and reflect on them and come to some clearer sense of what it is we believe and value. By taking what we know and making it strange, we are confronted with the deeper truth. “Philosophy estranges us from the familiar,” says Sandel, “not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. . . . . What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that moral and political philosophy is a story, and you don’t know where the story will lead, but what you do know is that the story is about you”
Sandel concludes the lecture by saying that there is no final resolution to any of these great issues. The best minds in history have engaged them over and over, and still there is no conclusive resolution. We can give up on them if we want. But that’s the skeptic’s way out. The very persistence of these questions means that they are unavoidable, inescapable. And the reason they’re unavoidable, he says, is that “we live some answer to these questions every day. . . . The aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason, and see where it might lead” (lecture #1, “The Moral Side of Murder”).
All of which leads us back to our story from Genesis, and gives us a suggestive way of approaching that gruesome but gripping tale. When we read that story, the issue isn’t “Did it really happen?” And it isn’t “Is this something that God might, or does, ask of us?”—sacrificing our own child as a test of our faith. Instead, remember Sandel’s words about philosophy: we know that the story is about us; we’re living some answer to it every day; and the aim of his course, and indeed of our reflections on difficult matters of faith, is to see where it might lead.
What the story does is pose an issue we face every day of our lives in vivid and stark terms. What the story does is ask us, ‘Where is your deepest allegiance? At this very moment, and in what you do this afternoon, and in the way you behave tomorrow at work, where does your ultimate loyalty lie?’ Because at every moment our lives are a testimony to what we most value. At every moment, we are witnessing to what we hold most dear. And very early in the Bible’s full and rich story, the readers, the hearers, are asked what it is they truly worship. ‘Do you trust God?’ we’re asked. ‘Do you give yourself fully and unreservedly to God? Or are the priorities of your lives really geared elsewhere? And if they’re geared elsewhere, is the object of your worship worth it?’
The real issue the story poses seems to be this: do you and I give our lives first to God, or do we give them to lesser things? The story invites us to explore honestly the priorities of our lives. It invites us to worship God above all.
So what then does it mean to put God first? One way to think about this is by analogy. The problem is something like this: in a recent letter to Dear Abby, a woman wrote wanting advice about her marriage. She said that her husband works offshore for twenty-one days and then is home for twenty-one days. She was frustrated that each time her husband arrived home, he wanted to go be with his friends. “When he comes home, I want him to myself the first weekend and don’t want to share him with his friends. . . . Am I asking too much?” The question for her was one of priorities. She thought her husband needed to put his marriage first, before his other friendships (The Plain Dealer, June 24, 2011, p. HA2). That, in a sense, is what the story of Abraham binding Isaac is saying about God: put God first.
To continue the marriage analogy, a woman said to me some time ago that the most important thing in her life was her children. And then she quickly added, “And my husband is a close second.” Now it’s not my desire to pass judgment on her priorities. That’s for her to discern. My guess is that there are circumstances in which putting the children first is exactly right. Especially in the case of an untrustworthy or betraying spouse, or one from whom a divorce is clearly inevitable, loyalty to one’s children first and foremost may be the healthiest and most responsible course.
I’m also acutely aware that, for many women, the attachment to, and the draw toward, their children is elemental and inescapably powerful. We are, all of us, after all, connected genetically to our children in a way that we’re not to a spouse or partner.
But I also have to say that Mary and I have a different take on the issue. Our children are incredibly dear to us. Neither Mary nor I can imagine life without them. We delight in them. We fear for their safety. We are fiercely protective of them. And we would do anything for them. They are the light of our lives.
Even given all that, though, we know that they simply would not exist were it not for our marriage. In some strange way, I have a feeling that the greatest gift we can give them is to treasure and protect the marriage that made their existence possible. To guard that marriage is a little like taking the oxygen on the airplane first, before offering it to someone else. It may seem counter-intuitive. But to honor the marriage first is a way, in our eyes, of giving the richest sort of gift to our children.
As much as I loved the time and attention my parents gave directly to me when I was a child, one of the happiest memories of my childhood was walking down Main St. in Bangor, Maine one day, a few steps behind my parents, and watching them take each other’s hand and walk together. It was a feeling of the greatest contentment and safety. I just felt like “All’s right with the world.”
Now I’m not saying that, for every married person with children, the marriage has to come first. I think you could probably make the case that your children should come first. My point is only that, however you come down on the terms of this analogy, we all need to try to make the case that our priorities have been thought through, and that they’re where they ought to be.
For me, and perhaps for some of you, the marriage analogy works. It reminds me that my attention and gratitude and energy need to be given first to God. Because it’s God who makes it all possible. Just as our own children wouldn’t exist without us as parents, so none of us would exist or thrive or know peace or find hope were it not for God.
Putting God first doesn’t mean giving up on everything else. Not at all. We still savor great food and watch Indians games and immerse ourselves in work and buy shirts and cars and tennis rackets and cheer at our children’s dance recitals. Worshiping God first doesn’t mean withdrawing from every earthly concern. It means, instead, seeing God in the midst of those earthly concerns. It means thanking God again and again and again for the richness and opportunity and grace of our lives. It means balancing our tendency to self-enrichment with a substantial commitment to the well-being of others.
Putting God first is a lot like putting your spouse or partner first. In a good marriage, you don’t ignore your children. You don’t give up on your friends. You don’t think only about your spouse. You don’t spend every waking—and sleeping—minute clinging to your beloved. Instead, your beloved becomes for you your cornerstone, a source of strength and generosity, the clichéd “wind beneath your wings.” I am a stronger pastor and friend and father because of Mary than I would be without her.
And I am a still stronger pastor and friend and father and spouse because of the grace and love of God. Without God I am nothing. To forget that, to go through my days as though I weren’t completely dependent on the grace of God, would be like having the finest car in the world and forgetting to fill it with gas.
All of which is a long way of saying: every day, we’re living an answer to the question that was posed to Abraham, which is, “What’s first in your life?” And what that story affirms is that our worship and our stewardship and our care for the earth and our service of others is crucial, because there really isn’t life or fulfillment without them. All the rest, as the book of Ecclesiastes says, is “vanity and a chasing after wind” (2:11). Like Abraham, the charge comes to us to put God at the center. Regular weekly worship and a substantial gift of our financial resources to the work of God at Federated and a sustained commitment to preserving the earth’s integrity and making a difference in our neighbors’ lives is all part of putting God first. And it’s the life without which there really is no life. Because no matter what, “God will provide” (Gen. 22:14). Thanks be to God.