“As St. Teresa Once Said to God: . . .”                  Dr. Julie Adkins

                   Text: Genesis 22:1-14

 

SERMON

 

“As St. Teresa Once Said to God:

‘If this is how you treat your friends,

it’s no wonder you have so few of them.’”

 

The saga of Abraham continues …

Last week, we saw him casting out Hagar and Ishmael,

          not one of his most admirable moments.

This week we have come to a much more familiar story:

          Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, ostensibly at God’s command,

                   and only getting reprieved at the last possible minute.

Traditionally, this has been viewed as one of Abraham’s most admirable moments,

          though most of us also find it profoundly disturbing.

More about that in a minute.

Again, Genesis is giving us a confused chronology …

          last week, just one chapter ago,

                   Isaac had just been weaned and so Abraham was throwing a party.

This week, just a few verses later,

          Isaac is at the very least an older child of age 10-11;

                   he might even be a young teenager of 13 or 14.

Either way, he’s now old enough to have survived the usual

          childhood dangers and diseases,

                   and could be reasonably expected to reach adulthood.

But what happens?

Our text tells us that

          “After these things, God tested Abraham.”

Uh-oh.

That’s never a preface to good news, is it?!

God says to Abraham,

          “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,

                   and go to the land of Moriah,

                   and offer him there as a burnt offering

on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Usually when God wants something that Abraham doesn’t like,

          Abraham feels free to argue.

Once or twice, he’s even persuaded God to change the plan.

But this time, he is silent.

No protest, not even a request for explanation.

Abraham gets up early in the morning,

          saddles up his donkey,

          takes two of the younger servant men with him,

                   for reasons that aren’t altogether clear,

          gets Isaac to come along,

          cuts a bunch of wood for the fire –

                   maybe that’s what the young men were for, to cut the wood or to carry it –

          and heads off toward the distant mountains.

I’ve often wondered what Sarah had to say about all this,

          but the text doesn’t tell us.

At any rate, we know the rest of the story:

          at the last possible moment, God tells Abraham to stop,

                   and provides an alternative sacrifice,

          so that Isaac can go on and grow up, and marry Rebekah,

                   and become the father of Jacob and Esau,

                             and so on, and so on.

 

For all its familiarity to most of us,

          the story remains a strange one.

It is hard for us to imagine that God –

          at least, the God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ –

                   doing something as cruel and nonsensical as

                             promising Abraham a son all those years before,

                             and then appearing to be ready to snatch him away …

                                      not to mention, making Abraham do the dirty work.

Various scholars talk about this story being a kind of foreshadowing

          of God’s willingness to sacrifice God’s own son, Jesus Christ;

                   and there’s probably some truth to that.

But the story also stands on its own, strange though it be.

I do have trouble with the notion

          that God ordered Abraham to do this,

          although an interesting connection occurred to me:

For the first time, this year,

          I noticed how close this story is to the one about Hagar and Ishmael.

Again, we don’t know how close or far apart in time

          the two events actually were …

                   but in terms of how the scriptures are laid out now,

                             they are almost right next to each other.

Abraham sends his first son, Ishmael, away into the wilderness,

          to certain death if God had not intervened …

Less than a chapter later, we find God telling Abraham to take Isaac,

          “your only son Isaac, whom you love,”

                   and to put him to death.

And only through God’s intervention again is Isaac spared.

Was God trying to tell Abraham something?

Trying to give him a taste of the fear that he had caused Hagar?

To show him what it would be like to lose your only child,

                   and to have to watch him die?

Did Abraham need a direct demonstration

          of the enormity of what he had done to his “other” family?

That’s still not a very pretty picture of God,

          but it would make the whole episode a little more understandable.

Abraham was a stubborn servant of the Almighty.

Perhaps this was the only way God could get through to him.

 

Or perhaps Abraham’s own guilty conscience finally got the better of him,

          and he persuaded himself that it was God’s command to slay Isaac,

                   when it was really only his own sense of guilt over

                             what he had done in the past.

That’s what Sigmund Freud would tell you,

          and he was at least partly right.

Granted, we all do stupid things and wrong things from time to time,

          but unless we are sociopaths without a conscience,

                   we tend to punish ourselves more for those things than God ever does.

There’s probably a whole sermon in that,

          but we’ll save it for another day.

Simply be aware that it’s always possible that

          God didn’t really tell Abraham to do such a horrible thing.

 

What matters, though, and why the story is here in the first place,

          is that Abraham believed that God had told him what to do.

And that, therefore, even though the command made no sense at all,

          he never questioned that he should do it.

Isaac is Abraham’s only heir,

          so it has to be through him that Abraham’s descendants are going to become

                   as numerous as the sands on the shore …

          so if he kills Isaac, there’s not even one grain of sand left,

                   much less the whole beach …

Nevertheless, Abraham doesn’t argue.

          Doesn’t say – excuse me, I left home at your command

                   more than thirty-five years ago, and this is the thanks I get?!

          Doesn’t say – you know, Lord, I’m a hundred and ten years old;

                   do you suppose you could let me slow down just a little?!

Doesn’t say – now let me get this straight:

          I’m supposed to kill this son,

          and Sarah is going to get pregnant again now that she’s over 100?!

He just makes his preparation and goes.

Which is what brought to my mind

          the somewhat bizarre title of this sermon.

I don’t remember exactly what was going on in St. Teresa’s life at the moment –

          of course, she wasn’t yet “St.” Teresa,

                   but was already recognized as a godly woman.

Anyway, whatever the specifics were, things weren’t going well,

          and with gentle good humor she commented to God,

                   “If this is how you treat your friends,

                             it’s no wonder you have so few of them.”

Abraham could easily have made the same claim:

          if this is how you treat people who have said yes to your call,

                   and have spent decades at least trying to live faithfully,

          then it’s no wonder that there are so few of us.

 

There are no doubt days when we ourselves feel much the same way.

It happens at times in our personal lives,

          when, for example, an illness lays us low,

                   and we don’t seem able to recover properly

                   and God doesn’t seem to be available to heal us.

Or, when we lose several loved ones all at once, it seems,

          and wonder, doesn’t God know how much I’m hurting already?

If this is how you treat those of us who have tried to be your friends,

          it’s no wonder there are so few of us around …?

 

It’s even more important, though,

          for us to look at Abraham and St. Teresa and ourselves corporately,

                   as a body of God’s faithful.

Because we are the descendants of Isaac –

          at least, in terms of our faith story –

                   we are in a way by definition the “friends of God,”

                   we are numbered among the insiders.

And just as last week’s story about Ishmael reminded us

          that God is active in the lives even of “outsiders,”

                   those who haven’t been a part of the story as we know it …

          and that God makes and keeps promises to people

                   different from ourselves, and strange to us …

So this week’s story brings us back to the perspective of the “insiders”

          and tells us that God indeed does not always

                   take all the bumps out of the road for us,

                   or rescue us from our own messes,

                             or set us in a comfy chair with riches at our command.

If anything, God seems to expect more

          from those of us who are and have been the “insiders”;

                   those who have known and served God for a long time.

Ishmael was not part of the covenant as we know it,

          yet God blessed him and made his descendants numerous …

Abraham and Isaac were an integral part of God’s covenant players,

          and yet they struggled, their descendants struggled.

We could argue about whether God caused all those challenges for them,

          or simply didn’t rescue them when problems arose;

                   but either way, being among the chosen people

                   didn’t make life any easier!

Sometimes it seemed to make things harder.

And it didn’t mean that they weren’t being faithful,

          or that God had ceased to love them.

It meant that being a child of God is a vocation, a calling;

          not a retirement plan!

 

It also means – and this is where the life of faith gets difficult –

          that God expects more of us than God does of those

                   who aren’t on God’s “friends” list.

In a way, that makes sense.

We feel much more free to ask favors of our human friends

          than we do of strangers.

In times of great need,

          we may even make demands on our friends,

                   knowing that in the future,

                             we will allow them to make demands on us.

Sometimes, though, God asks of us things that don’t seem to make sense.

Abraham, take this child and sacrifice him on the mountain I will show you.

          Not only is that cruel,

                   it doesn’t even make sense in light of other things God has said before!

How can God contradict God’s self?

          Your descendants are going to be numerous …

                   Kill the only descendant you have.

Likewise, God may ask of us things

          which seem at first to make no sense at all.

Which may seem to contradict other things that God said at other times.

Which may seem to contain within them the seed of their own destruction.

Or which may simply seem too difficult, if not impossible, for us to undertake.

Does that mean that God has become displeased with us,

          or is testing us,

                   or has taken us off the “A” list of divine friends?

No, if anything it probably means just the opposite.

High expectations is how God treats God’s friends.

          Which may be why there are so few of them,

                   but which is also why it’s so important for us to keep paying attention.

 

As we, and many congregations, wrestle with what our future will be,

          we need, in the first place, to recognize that

                   our current difficulties don’t necessarily mean that we’ve been unfaithful.

They might mean that,

          but the truth is, I see a lot more “success” in worldly terms

                   in churches where the gospel message is watered down and prettied up.

Struggles may mean that we have been faithful

          in a world where being faithful is difficult and therefore unpopular.

But the struggles may also mean, in addition,

          that God is now calling us forward into something new

                   that so far seems illogical to us, or even nonsensical,

                             or at best difficult,

          and so we are having a hard time seeing that it is indeed God

                   who is issuing that call.

It may seem that we are being asked to slay something that is important to us,

          and that we thought was important to God,

                   without having a clear sense of what comes after.

It is hard to respond obediently to God in the present,

          when God hasn’t yet told us how that fits in with the future.

And yet, that is our calling as heirs to the “inside” of the faith tradition.

It is our vocation as the friends of God.

To be faithful even when there are no visible rewards,

          and even when we can’t see where it leads.

Perhaps it is no wonder that God has few friends …

          but I can’t imagine wanting to exchange that privilege for anything.

Can you?

 

Amen.

 

© 2002 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)