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Worship Services and Sermons»Sermons
Title: We Will Worship When my genetic makeup determined that I would have my first baby a full two weeks after my due date, one consequence I did not foresee was how it related to the schedule of preachers here at Westminster, namely, it has meant that I have spent my first week back at work writing this sermon. But writing a sermon was actually a lovely way to return to the world of adulthood with things like schedules and focus and verbal expressions that are mutually understood. At the same time, I knew that coming back to sermon writing might be a bit of a test, because it would mean I had to expand my vocabulary beyond the word “ah-goo” for the first time in three months. As it has turned out, the real test for me this morning is not anything as simple as concentration or articulation. Rather, I am being tested as a new mother by one of the most difficult passages of scripture for a parent to understand: that of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Last Sunday we heard the story of Hagar and her son Ishmael being banished into the wilderness—a story that the feminist Bible scholar Phyllis Tribble calls a “text of terror.” The story of Abraham and Isaac is no less terrifying. “In Judaism, this chapter [in Genesis] is known as the Akedah, [which means] ‘the binding,’ a noun derived from the verb in verse 9. Th[is] designation highlights the horror of a drama in which a father binds his son and places him on an altar….”1 In our terror and horror at the series of events in this chapter of Genesis, we ask the obvious questions: why didn’t Abraham volunteer to take his son’s place? Wouldn’t any parent do that? Or did Abraham know that God wanted to give him the ultimate test, and so as a parent knew that it would not be to offer his own life but the life of his child? So it seems. One of my favorite theologians, a native Croation who teaches at a seminary in California, is named Miroslav Volf. Volf describes Abraham’s call from God as a “promise….that inserted itself into [Abraham’s] life…relentlessly and uncomfortably.”2 In the story of God’s mandate to sacrifice Isaac, we see the greatest evidence of the relentless and uncomfortable presence of the divine in Abraham’s life. We have many definitions of sacrifice in our modern society. We most often refer to sacrifice when we talk about our time and our money. Parents sacrifice time and hobbies and material acquisitions in order to provide children with educations and experiences and material needs and wants. The Great Depression made sacrifice routine for one generation—those of you who are now grandparents learned from your parents what it meant to reduce, reuse, and recycle when being green was necessary—not trendy. Sacrifice is the way we talk about the service of the armed forces, and that comes about not just because of the loss of life that military service risks, but because the families of service men and women sacrifice their loved ones’ presence and talents for a period of time until they come home. Our popular culture reflects the variety of ways in which we conceive of sacrifice. The 2000 movie Chocolat tells the story of a woman who wanders throughout Europe in the 1950s, making exquisite confections wherever she goes. Her culinary skills are accompanied by a calling to provide more than just the comfort of her craft; she also has the gift to open people’s eyes to what is missing in their lives. She sacrifices a stable home for herself and her daughter because she believes it is her destiny to perpetually move on to where there is a need. Her calling is to hospitality; she is the “righteous person” of Matthew chapter 10 who welcomes all in spite of not always being welcomed herself. In the film, the town she has just arrived in has a cast of characters who are making sacrifices in their lives for both good and bad. The chocolate-maker helps a woman whose mental and physical health is being sacrificed with in the confines of an abusive marriage. The two women’s friendship helps with the wife’s self-esteem in order to reject the pressure of convention and truly begin her life anew. Another character is an elderly man who is sacrificing true love in the name of appearances. He and a widow of the town are clearly smitten with one another, but the town’s convention is that the women, widowed over 40 years, should still always wear black and not have another romantic relationship. The chocolate-maker connives to have the man and the woman attend a birthday party, at the conclusion of which they end up dancing together. The backdrop of all of these lives which are being molded and transformed alongside the chocolate is the season of Lent. The religious and civic leaders of the town promote the idea that the reason for the season is to sacrifice the worldly pleasures of things like chocolate, when in reality, the spiritual disciplines of Lent are manipulated to uphold the town’s veneration of conformity. In truth, love and acceptance of one another is what is sacrificed. By the film’s conclusion, Easter morning results in an embrace of Christ’s example of the virtue of inclusion. The church worship service of the day is a new beginning for each of the film’s characters. An arena in which we talk about sacrifice less is in the arena of worship. Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have a theology of sacrifice in their worship tradition to this day. There are priests to preside over worship and altars in their worship spaces because Catholic theology holds that each time the eucharist is celebrated, Jesus’ sacrifice happens again. The priest is present to preside over the sacrifice and the altar is the physical space of the sacrifice. The sacrifice of God’s son is what makes the worship experience the Mass—without it, the worship is called a Celebration of the Word. We Protestants have as our weekly worship services exactly that: celebrations of the Word. Presbyterian theology holds that Jesus’ sacrifice happened once and it is our duty to remember that sacrifice. We clergy are not priests, in part because we are not responsible for presiding over a sacrifice; rather, we lead the congregation in a memorial service that is above all a celebration of life. We gather around a table for communion as a physical reminder of the feast to which Christ invited us all. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac was not in the arena of war or of famine or of family strife. It was not one man conforming to expectations of a community or a culture. It was embedded in the context of worship. God instructs Abraham to treat his son the same as a lamb or a ram or another animal that would have been utilized as a burnt offering to God. In ancient times, sacrificing an animal to God was giving up a portion of a person’s livelihood—which is why it was a sacrifice. In the case of the sacrifice of Isaac, God never denies that Abraham was being asked to give up that which meant most to him. But that is not what is so difficult about this story. What makes it so difficult is an apparent lack of any protest or questioning or consternation on Abraham’s part. Abraham even lies in order to continue in a vein of normalcy: he tells the young men who accompany him and Isaac to stay put while he and Isaac go elsewhere. “We will worship” Abraham tells them. This is not the lie, although it is not the whole truth. The lie comes when Abraham tells the young men “and then we will come back to you.” Abraham was either comfortable with the ruse, or secretly harbored faith that God would not have him go through with the infanticide. Most likely, Abraham was silent as precursor to grief and to protect his son from fear. He lies again when Isaac asks about the animal to be used for the sacrifice, and his father says, “God…will provide the lamb for a burnt offering.” Poor Isaac is left for a metaphor. A parent suffering in silence is nothing new to the human experience. A parent engaging in denial or deception in order to keep a child from a difficult truth is nothing new. We would hope that no parent has to endure the loss of a child, but we know this is not the reality of our world. I am reminded of an acute instance of sacrifice when I take a route while walking in my neighborhood in north Minneapolis. It takes me past a man’s garage that has a dry erase board, which he updates daily with the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. Each time I see his sign, it bring me to tears. The number of American military personnel killed in Iraq now exceeds the number of Americans killed on September 11 by over one thousand; but we all knew that what Mr. Gandhi said was true when he pointed out that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Or did we? Now is the time when we have to face what we want to deny: that we do a very poor job of being like Abraham. We do not trust. We live in fear and we let fear guide us to be vengeful. We do allow for the sacrifice of many. Our nation is now at the time when we must confess that we embraced war six years ago in a time of fear and anger. We were able to give meaning to sending more to be potentially sacrificed. As each year has passed, the sacrifices have increased, while our confidence in our initial decisions has dramatically waned. As the number on that dry erase board increases—as sons and daughters come home in coffins—as fathers’ and mothers’ hearts are irrevocably broken in every state of this nation—the sacrifices are one too many. In this vein, Abraham’s actions seem not so radical after all. What was radical about Abraham’s actions turns out to be not the potential sacrifice itself but the larger context of worship in which that sacrifice was located. His child could have been sacrificed in a time of war or in a time of famine. Children have been and are sacrificed for less, in the Bible and throughout human history. Bible scholar Sibley Towner frames it another way, asserting that Abraham is not the only one who is tested in this situation. Towner puts it this way: “The reader wants to know whether or not there will be justice and love on God’s side of this intimate relationship.” And this is what is so tremendous about the Old Testament stories: God is in these stories along side the human beings—God is participatory, God is vulnerable, God is invested. This truth continues into the New Testament, when God takes one step further and becomes so participatory, so vunerable and so invested that God experiences sacrifice in Jesus the Christ. In Genesis chapter 22, we are shown that our God does not ask for the sacrifice of our children, but rather what God asks for is our faithfulness without precondition of anything worldly. We are simply asked to worship the source of our whole lives. Professor Towner concludes that in Genesis chapter 22, “God…is tested and, like Abraham, passes with flying colors.”3 Abraham was asked, first and foremost, to go to the land of Moriah in order to worship. The potential sacrifice of Isaac was within a greater context of worship, and that greater context of worship was also the greater requirement of Abraham as a faithful servant of God. What a God of all the nations means is that we are loyal to something greater than our ties to one nation, one culture, and, most difficult of all, one family. The Lordship of God is greater than the kinship of a son, or a daughter. In ancient times, the links with family and ethnicity included a link to local gods. Abraham was asked to leave all of these links. In our day, our links to overscheduled lives and consumer culture leave a mere hour for worship out of the 168 hours in a week. Where might we journey that would lead to a true sacrifice in the search for worship? What do we hold most dear that we might return to God, the source? In the trust we see in the eyes of a child, we might begin to find an answer. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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