The Reverend Barbara K. Briggs
June 29, 2008
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 8, Year A

“All that you hold most dear, all that you cherish, everything in which you have placed your hopes, your future, your security, your very survival, that’s what I want,” God tells Abraham.  “The very thing I promised you:  that’s what I want you to let go of.”

How would any reasonable human being respond to such a demand?  Before we are too quick to judge Abraham’s seemingly preposterous acceptance of a request as absurd as this, consider:  Abraham doesn’t just blindly obey.  His trust has grown through years of growing closer to God and of learning to trust over and over again.

He trusts God’s invitation to leave everything for the land God promises him.  He leaves everything that is familiar to him for a land unknown.  Anyone who has moved has known this same risk – leave what I know for the promise of a new life elsewhere, with different folk, new colleagues, and friendships as yet unformed.

Abraham has journeyed far and long with God.  God is not just “out there somewhere,” but a necessary partner in Abraham’s unpredictable life.  He trusts God’s promise that even though he and Sarah are far beyond the child-bearing years, God will, indeed, give them joy in their old age, and descendants, offspring, children and grand-children.  Abraham trusts God to provide, even to the point of setting out with Isaac when God asks him for his son.

People have struggled for centuries with this story.  What kind of god asks a father to sacrifice his son?

This story is full of wisdom, finally, because trusting and sacrifice are built into anything that finally matters.  There is no deep friendship without trust and self-giving; children do not grow up without the labor of enduring dirty diapers and sleepless nights; there is no parish without the sacrifice and giving of its members; there is no community without the countless acts of generosity – our precious time given to being the ministers of Christ to one another.  Our own survival as a nation is built on the sacrifice of our armed forces.

When we trust, when we love enough to not count the cost to ourselves as much as the benefit rendered to another, we give of ourselves without a second thought.  We let go of our own priorities in order to answer to someone else’s need.

But there also come the times when it feels as though what is dear to us has been stripped away, taken from us in such a way that we are left with hardly enough breath to ask “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  It’s one thing for God to permit us to lose what we love, but to be stripped of what matters most, our health, our loves, our jobs, our futures…  Where is God when that happens?  What kind of God is this?

A spouse is left to raise the children alone when there is divorce or death.  Families are displaced and must leave their homes when someone loses a job.  Children suffer or die at an early age.  Close friends die too soon.  People of all ages and all over the world suffer from sickness, accidents and natural disasters.

What kind of God is this?

Just after the Second World War a German pastor named Gunther Rutenborn wrote a play called The Sign of Jonas that attempted to answer that question.

A trial is set to find out who was responsible for the terrible years caused by Nazi Germany.  Charges are brought against Hitler himself.  Some blame the munitions manufacturers who profited from the war.  Others blame the cowardly German people who refused to stand up to Hitler.  None of it, though, seems quite enough – until a man stands up in the audience to say, “Do you know who’s to blame?  God is.  Isn’t He the one who created this awful world?  Didn’t He give them the power to do that kind of evil, didn’t He allow it to happen, can’t the misery be laid at His feet?”  So they decide to put God on trial for the crime of creation – for creating a world where such terrible things happen.  And He is quickly found guilty of the crime and is sentenced.  The judge says that because of the enormity of God’s crime, His punishment will be the worst conceivable:  “I hereby sentence the Creator God to have to come and live in this world under the same anguish and loss that everyone else has to.”  And he charges the three Archangels, Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael, to perform the sentence.

Gabriel walks to one end of the stage and stands brooding, and then says, “When God has to serve, I want Him to see what it’s like to be an obscure, enchained human being.  He’ll be born in the middle of nowhere and grow up in a country occupied by foreign forces, a Jew in a Jew-hating world.”

Raphael walks to the other end of the stage and says, “When God has to serve His sentence, I’m going to see to it that He knows what it’s like to be frustrated and insecure.  He’ll know what it’s like to be a refugee with no place to lay His head.  His plans won’t be fulfilled.  No one will understand him.  And He will go to his grave a failure, not sure He’s accomplished anything.”

Finally, Michael steps to the middle of the stage.  “I’m going to see that He knows what it’s like to suffer in every conceivable way.  He’ll be rejected and know what that’s like.  He’ll suffer and know pain.  He will be spat on, tormented, ridiculed, die the slow torture of a common criminal.”

And with that the lights go out, and the audience sits, utterly quiet in the dark, as the awareness dawns:  God has served the sentence.

Four hundred years ago the wife of the great reformer Martin Luther listened as her husband read this story of Abraham and Isaac and demanded, “How could a loving God ask Abraham to sacrifice his only son?”  “Why, Katy,” Luther said to her, “He did it himself.”

Our God is not small.  Our God will not stoop to arbitrary tests of loyalty.  Our God is not the great puppeteer in the sky toying with his playthings.  No, our God is an outrageous, extravagant lover of souls who chooses not even to exist without us.  Our God is a God who asks of us everything:  not this one hard thing or that precious gift or even our best effort.  We are not asked to give this or that or to let go of any particular experience of suffering.  God wants it all – our very lives.  And it is precisely here, in this outrageous gift, that a marvelous exchange is made:  all we are for all He is.  This is a God who allows in this world everything, and then comes to live with us in it.  And our pain becomes His pain, until finally He heals it all.

If we are so busy clinging to life for ourselves how will we ever know the Love who is holding us?  But who of us has enough courage, or faith, or trust?  In the story of God’s demand that Abraham give up everything was also this:  God provided the lamb.  When we cannot make the gift, God makes the gift of Himself.

I am grateful to the Rev. Sam Lloyd for the two illustrations in this sermon, as well as for much of the material on which it is based.

© Copyright 2008 by the Reverend Barbara K. Briggs