Rev. Craig Jan-McMahon
Windsor UCC
A Pentecost +5; 7/2/2023
Genesis 22:1-14 and Psalm 13 • Jeremiah 28:5-9 • Romans 6:12-23 • Matthew 10:40-42
Gen..: for now I know that you fear God Ps.: I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me Rom: For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Matt: and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
The more I study Genesis, the more questions I have.
This I think is how scripture is supposed to work, not to present us with easy answers, moral bromides, but to open us to questions to match the depth and complexity and of what it means to be human, what is it like for us as we seek to live faithfully with the conflicting demands we all face.
These Genesis stories offer a kind of uncomfortable comfort..help us to see, again and again, that God chooses people who are not perfect, far from it…they keep turning to God, and God is committed to them, walks with them.
It is a truism, I suppose, to say that to love is to open ourselves to be hurt, let down, frustrated, times of feeling alone….We define ourselves in our relationships and with God by how we respond when we are required to give all we have to give, and then a bit more, for to love over time means giving all we have to give, and giving it gladly.
When we look back over time, we can see that the future is something we have discovered together….have created together…not by careful planning or rational decision-making…but by holding hands and walking into the unknown…
Faith is like this…a risk…a promise not secured but a seed planted and tended and watered…by forgiveness…by reconciliation…through healing…and…..God help us….by learning to listen not just to words said but to so much more than words can say.
We find much and all and still more than this in the story of God and Abraham and Isaac…Abraham responding again and again, Here I am..believing…as he says again and again, that God will provide….
And yet he binds Isaac…is forcibly stopped from sacrificing his own on an altar of his own fashioning.
It is tempting to see this story as all there is, the words on the page as complete… to take from it some abstract moral about willingness to sacrifice, to trust that God will provide…God teaching Abraham some sort of needed lesson at Isaac’s expense…
We might free ourselves to see something more if we accept Abraham is no more perfect than we are, see that like us he is making it up as he goes, his repeated declaration that God will provide a prayer, a hope, an expression of his own vulnerability to love, his blinding love….
When God stops Abraham then he sees the ram in the thicket, cannot see it until God shows it to him….
Why can’t he see it?
Does it appear out of thin air, magically, or was it there all the time?
Why, as we remember from the story of Hagar and Ishmael dying of thirst in the desert, does Hagar not see the water they need until God reveals it to her?
Both of parents, in their desperate love for their children, both whose future depends on an only child, come to the very end of their own ability to provide for them, both are blinded by their love for them, both see their children suffering and in their desperation take matters into their own hands.
Love make us vulnerable, like Hagar, like Abraham.
Our very human response to vulnerability is to fix and solve and rescue, and when we can’t fix and solve and rescue, desperation leads us strike out blindly for something, anything, to protect those we love from the deep truth of our mutual vulnerability,
What is it that we can’t see because of love, like Hagar and Abraham, how are we blind to how God is waiting to provide for us and those we love if our own eyes are opened?
If you imagine I have an answer to this question, you are mistaken, for I am blind too.
If I had the power to provide for those I love, though it mean binding them up and taking away their freedom to protect them I would do it.
I hate and am shamefully embarrassed by my impotence to secure the future and despise my own human vulnerability.
There is nothing I would not do, no sacrifices I would not make, for the sake of my own beloved Isaacs and Ishamaels.
I am guilty of pretending I have answers and solutions and a clear plan to protect all of them, all of you, from hurt and from pain.
But I know better, we all know better, no matter how vociferously we pretend otherwise.
What we know true of human love is true also of divine love…Like us God is vulnerable.
God has given us freedom to choose. God has made Godshelf vulnerable to us.
We are invited to listen, to say Here I am, to trust God will provide for us even when we are blind to the variety of rams in thickets and pools of water in desert times,
What Abrahamic sacrifices are required of us?
I don’t know, nor can I say.
What I see, though, not told in the story…is not the binding of Isaac, is not Abrahams desperate failure, but the unbinding of Isaac, the rapturous joy of the knife used not to kill but to cut the ropes and set Isaac free, that moment when vulnerability is transformed into beauty, into worship, that sacred, holy moment when suffering and desperation are transformed in ways we cannot see in advance, but discover through faith
Isaac and Abraham sacrifice together to celebrate God’s good provision, which was there all the time, is always there, is here with us now, and we pray that God will help us to see it….
With all that we have been through together, these past three years, in our homes and schools, in our national politics, in our congregation..with cataclysmic changes thrust upon all of us, and with all the sacrifices we have all been called to make…we can be forgiven for a sense of desperation, of falling prey to the idea that it is our job to fix and solve and rescue, to answer every question, but we are walking together with God who will provide for us and transform honest vulnerability into beauty, live and love that opens to us when we open our souls to see what is here already, provided for us though we struggle with our own blindnesses, for God knows, we all struggle with blindness…
No, it is not told in the story, we can’t see it unless we look for it, but Isaac, the one on whom the future depends, walks with Abraham, hears his father say God will provide, and when God provides and rescues Isaac, Abraham’s trust in God becomes Isaac’s trust in God, and thus the future is secured, and thus God provides.