The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Genesis 22:1-14
Last week, I asked the Bible Reflection group this question: In 500 years, how do you think people will look back on our society and our values today? Perhaps theirs will be a world where Miami and New Orleans have long been swallowed by the ocean, where places that were once tropical are now deserts, where places that were once covered in ice are now where much of humanity lives.
It might baffle their minds that even though climate change was a known phenomenon, that even though we knew that fossil fuels are what caused it, we continued to get into our gas-powered vehicles every day and drive where we needed to go.
We won’t be there in 500 years to say, “But you don’t understand! That’s just how our world was built. It would have been really difficult to make a living, to survive, without cars, without planes, without massive cargo ships to get food and stuff from one side of the planet to the other. We couldn’t just stop using fossil fuels, even if we wanted to—and many of us did want to. But our culture, our way of being, was bigger than just any one person’s values.
“You gotta cut us some slack,” we might say.
And that’s just one perspective. If the people 500 years from now talked to someone else who held a very different opinion, they might hear, “Climate change was a hoax. The earth’s environment shifts and changes over time, and that’s what was happening. Why would we change our entire economy and way of being for that?”
I say all this, because there are more than 500 years, at least five times more, separating us from the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. In our Bible Reflection group, we read all the scriptures for the upcoming Sunday and I invite them to think about those scriptures in terms of these four questions: What amazed you? What bothered you? What confused you? And what delighted you?
I think it’s safe to say that the Old Testament reading bothered the majority of the group. What kind of God would ask a father to kill his own son? What kind of father would blindly obey such a command? Why would we lift this story up as a model of faith?
Because this story is often lifted up as a model of faith, in both Christianity and Judaism. But again, there are at least 2,500 years separating us from the writing down of this story, and probably at least a few hundred more from when the story first started being told, from mouth to ear over generations.
We have some sense of how communities lived when this story first started being told— how they structured themselves, what they valued. We know that men were the head of households, which were often a small community in themselves. Because many men in that time often had multiple wives with multiple offspring. They had servants, or slaves—not like the slaves our country kept up until the mid 19th century. Some tended to the wives, as Hagar did, and some were entrusted with the business and wealth of the family—as we’ll hear about next week. While they weren’t part of the family, and they certainly had less power over their lives, they were part of the community.
But it was a deeply patriarchal society. Obedience to the husband and father, whether you were a wife, a child, or a slave, was what gave order to the community and ultimately to the society.
So it’s not a surprise that the religious people of that time would lift up obedience to God as the highest value. Here we have Abraham, the head of his own household, the one to whom God has promised a vast nation of his offspring, a man who is not required to obey anyone else in his life. I imagine that seeing Abraham set down his power and be willing to sacrifice his son, which was to sacrifice God’s promise to him, would have been powerful to the people of that time.
Imagine our boss, our bishop, our President being willing to forfeit all that gives them power, everything that may define their legacy, in order to obey God.
AND—and it’s deeply troubling for our God, who we believe to be love, to ask any parent to sacrifice their child in order to prove their fidelity.
But let me throw another wrench into this whole situation: We don’t actually know what the writers of this story wanted us to get from it, what they wanted us to learn.
One Jewish midrash, or interpretation, from the rabbi Rashi in the 11th century is that Abraham misunderstood God’s instructions. God only wants him to [quote] “offer him there as a burnt offering,” which are God’s exact words. God never mentions anything about sacrifice or killing. But Abraham jumps to the conclusion that that meant slaughtering his son, which is why the angel intervenes at the last minute. No! Stop! That’s not what God meant!
Another interpretation is more recent: that God is giving Abraham—and his wife Sarah—an opportunity to learn from their mistake. That mistake came in last week’s scripture when Abraham, at Sarah’s demand, sends Hagar off with Ishmael, his other son, into the wilderness with very little to eat or drink. He had to have known that it wasn’t enough to survive, but he and Sarah are more concerned about protecting the promise they have in Isaac than in loving and tending to Ishmael and Hagar. (By the way, why today’s scripture says “only son” twice is, well, puzzling.)
So, this interpretation says, by God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God opens the space for Abraham and Sarah to share Hagar’s harrowing experience, for them to know what it might feel like to be robbed of their future, to be separated from their family.
God never has any intention of either Ishmael or Isaac dying, and God protects them both. But the trickster God of this interpretation needs Abraham to understand that the generosity and abundance God promises to him, he needs to embody in his own life.
What if this story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac is—confoundingly—all of these things: a story of powerful obedience and a terrifying misunderstanding and a lesson learned the hard way. What if it is deeply and authentically problematic for some of us today? And what if it is deeply moving and profound for others of us today?
So maybe the biggest lesson here for us is: We can’t know what the story meant at the time it was first told or how it had changed when it was finally written down. We can’t assume that the way we read into something is the only way to read into it. We can’t automatically assign bad intention when something we hear or experience doesn’t line up with our own values.
Now I’m not saying we blindly accept whatever we read in the scriptures as good and factual. In fact, that’s exactly how reading the Bible can get destructive. If we read literally that trusting God means being willing to kill your child, if we read literally that cities should be destroyed if some of their people aren’t welcoming, if we read literally that women shouldn’t speak in church because it’ll keep the peace—well, we’re missing the point.
You’ve heard me quote Marion Grau, my theology professor, so many times: “Myth is a truth that is greater than fact.” If we read the Bible through that lens, we start to ask more helpful questions:
What does trusting God look like in my life? And what am I willing to sacrifice in order to lean into that trust?
What does a lack of welcome do to our cities?
And what does peace really mean in a community?
So let this be an invitation to read our scriptures with openness and curiosity—even the parts that make us cringe or wince. Now cringing and wincing are totally acceptable reactions to some of our scriptures, AND what I’m asking you to do is not just close the Bible when you read them. But to dig in a little. To wonder: What is the truth that is greater than the facts of this story?
Amen.
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