ABRAHAM AND SARAH: THE SACRIFICE

When you look at a picture of Jerusalem today, you are typically shown a view from the Mount of Olives and in the middle is a golden dome. It is a Muslim worship site known as the Dome of the Rock.

Inside are the beautiful ornate geometric designs so familiar to Muslim sites where pictorial art is considered idolatry. In the center is a huge rock thought to be the place where the prophet Mohamed ascended to heaven. Somewhere nearby is the site of the temple first built by Solomon, then rebuilt centuries later, and finally refurbished and enlarged by Herod the Great. It is also thought to be the site where Abraham took his son Isaac.

A man hears a voice saying that he should take his son to Mount Moriah and there sacrifice him to God. An awful thought. A chilling thought. And he calmly makes preparations and a three day journey to this Mount Moriah. (Those of you who are acquainted with the Lord of the Rings trilogy will remember a Mount Moira—the mount of doom--- where the ring is to be thrown into the fire. Moriah/Moira? Tolkien was a Biblical scholar.)

Down through the centuries people have tried to make sense of this terrible moment. One such person was Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish Theologian of the middle 19th century, who in his first volume of Either/Or replays the story a number of times. How could Abraham be ethically justified? Was Abraham temporarily insane? Was the voice that spoke to him the voice of God or the voice of a demon? How could he be sure? Why did he not discuss this with someone? Why did he not consult with Sarah? Could this action, flying in the face of all reason, be a model for what the loneliness of true faith is?

When a parent takes the life of a child we are shocked and outraged. There is a place for people who do what Abraham set out to do and it is behind bars.

So I don’t want to make light of what Abraham undertook, even though child sacrifice was commonly practiced at the time of Abraham and even hundreds of years later at the time of the writing down of this story.

But that is why the command from God seems to Abraham and to the Biblical writers almost OK. They are not surprised, not angered, not outraged. Hey, bad commandments happen to good people. To what was God up?

We are not told that Abraham replied to God: wait a minute. You said that I would have a child of promise through whom my descendents would number like the sands of the shore and the stars of the sky. We are not told that he tried to negotiate with God like he did for the city of Sodom. We are not told that some maverick priest from a pagan religion provoked him.

Go sacrifice Isaac. OK.

Can we understand this story at all? Some have tried.

Some have said it was just a test to see how obedient Abraham was. Even the Biblical writers seem to lead us in this direction. God never meant to go through with it.

Some have said it was about believing contradictory things: Isaac was to die yet Abraham was supposed to believe that through Isaac his descendents would multiply to infinity. Is faith believing in contradictions?

Some have said that in later days the story was used as a cautionary tale against the people of God being acculturated to the surrounding peoples. No, God does not require child sacrifice, even though the gods of the surrounding peoples do. Remember Abraham and Isaac.

Some have said that it explains the offering that parents made at the temple after the birth of the child. The child was given to the priests, and then redeemed by an offering. (We see Joseph and Mary doing exactly this is the birth narrative of Jesus in Luke.)

Muslim traditions offer yet another twist: it was not Isaac but Ishmael who was taken to the mountain as a sacrifice.

So if you think you have some way to make this story nice and tidy and rational, think again. This is not your Sunday School age appropriate Yahweh.

But I would remind you that 50 years ago in the south if not in the north, it seemed absolutely irrational to most whites to think that people of different colors could go to school together and to church together and to vote together and to marry. And that it could be the will of God.

I would remind you that 20 years ago it seemed absolutely irrational to most straight people to think that men could love men and women could love women, and that either could transcend the gender into which they were born. And that it could be the will of God.

Today in spite of the lies told to the American people by presidents of both parties, many still consider it their reasonable Christian duty to acquiesce to presidential policies. It seems reasonable.

In contrast to Abraham the father of faith, and the unbelievably irrational story of the sacrifice of Isaac. One early Christian writer, Tertullian, is credited with taking it so far as to say: “I believe because it is absurd.”

Abraham, the father of faith, what are we to do with you? John Wesley founded the Methodists on a connection of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. You can bet this wasn’t his favorite passage.

We along with Immanuel Kant and John Wesley and Thomas Jefferson are the children of the Enlightenment era, with its doctrine that all things must be reasonable. We don’t like to be Waiting for Godot. We don’t like to be in a room with No Exit. We pride ourselves with being able to think our way out of anything.

Our friends in the 12 step programs give testimony that they could not think their way out of addiction. The brighter you are, the harder to find sobriety.

Kierkegaard? He famously claimed that he could understand all the greatest philosophy (by which he meant Hegel—no small undertaking) but he could not understand Abraham. He used this Abraham and Isaac passage as a test of his faith, believing that if he gave up his engagement to his fiancé Regina, God would somehow give her back to him. So he broke off with her in the cruelest of ways, by making her believe that he was unfaithful. And then waited for God to restore her to him again.

It didn’t work and he spent the rest of his life writing books with veiled messages to Regina, which she never bothered to decipher. Toward the end he wrote in his journal that his renunciation of Regina was not a true test of faith: “If I had had faith, I would have married Regina.”

If this is our Mount Moriah, what is our test of faith? What would God call on us to give up or take on?

If we had had faith, we might someday say to ourselves, we would have….what?

Expanded our church building rather than struggling over where to put things?

Invited un-churched friends to come with us to worship?

Started a new congregation with the same wonderful DNA as our own?

Lifted up a consistent voice about what is real and what is hype in the discussion over undocumented persons among us?

Intensified our adult education and nurture program?

Laid the groundwork to begin a second worship service?

Whatever it is, it wouldn’t have presented itself to us right now as the reasonable thing to do.