Homily For The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost 8a
26 June 2005
The Cathedral Church Of St. Philip , Atlanta
The Rev. Canon Todd Smelser, Homilist
If you were in church on Father’s Day last Sunday, you would have heard these rather disturbing words, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her daughter.” Once again in today’s reading from Genesis, we have the story of the binding of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Another great Father’s Day text. Thanks Father Abraham. While these are not easy texts, they remind us that the word of God confronts as well as comforts us.
Our instinctive response to this story is to merely reject it. This is not the kind of God I worship, we might say. God doesn’t demand sacrifice, but a faithful heart. From an historical approach, biblical students might also observe that this story marks a key juncture in the religious and ethical development of Israel —moving away from the pagan practice of burning babies to placate the deity. After all Isaac, in the end was not killed, but released at the divine command.
But if we are honest with the text, we are not free to say that Abraham’s God is not ours. In the eyes of one professor, Ellen Davis, in her commentary on this text, this story, far from being sub-Christian, gives us fundamental and crucial information about the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ. Without this kind of information about God we begin to gain here, Jesus’ death on a cross is more than shocking and tragic: it is nonsensical.
Let’s look a little deeper, however, at this story earlier in the book of Genesis. Isaac is the miraculous fruit of barrenness and old age. Sarah was ninety and Abraham one hundred when their only son was born. They weren’t exactly enjoying a comfortable retirement either, but had been chasing around the Middle East for 25 years, ever since God uprooted him away from his father’s house with the expectation of finding the Promised Land where God will bless him and make his name great.
Abraham saddles the donkey and sets out with two servant lads and his son. His blind obedience to God is, as Kirkegaard says, appalling to watch—like a sleepwalker passing along the edge of an abyss, his footsteps guided only by the instinct of faith. On the third day, they see far off the place God intends. There is tenderness, intense togetherness in the scene, as we watch Isaac prepare the sacrificial fire. We can only assume Abraham’s internal agony during the process.
We are reminded, in this story, that the book of Genesis is primarily a book about God, and secondarily about human beings encountering God. When God tests Abraham, it is a real test. This ghastly ordeal was designed to give God certain crucial information about this man Abraham. The test will show whether he cares about God above everything and everyone else—even his own son.
This may be the most difficult story in the whole Bible. It appears in the first book of the Bible, only 22 chapters into it; because it tells us not everything we need to know, but something fundamental about the God of Israel. This story shows us a God who is vulnerable, terrifyingly so. This is not a story about an omnipotent, omnipresent God, but a God who is vulnerable, even as we are vulnerable. For both Testaments the covenant with God is fundamentally an unbreakable bond of love. And ordinary experience teaches that love and vulnerability are inextricably linked. We are most vulnerable to emotional pain when the well-being and the faithfulness of those we love are at stake.
Jesus reminds us that we are called to place our faith in God always first in our lives. Family, neighbors, work, our own needs, are all secondary to our relationship with God.
God, at the end of the story in Genesis, provides a sacrificial ram to take the place of Isaac. Isaac is left unscathed to become the beginning of God’s promise that will later form the nation of Israel . But one day, on Calvary , God himself will offer his own son as a sacrifice for the sin of the world. On that Good Friday, God will become vulnerable to the whims of Pharisees and Roman officials, so that the world might finally realize the magnitude of God’s love for us all.
In the First Eucharistic Prayer of Rite I, we hear again these familiar words. “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.” The sacrifice of God was offered twice in the Bible, in Abraham’s faithfulness in the Hebrew text, and God’s offering of his Son Jesus on the cross. That is sufficient. Let us our sacrifice be a living sacrifice, in we become the vessels of God’s love and grace in our own world.
Comments? Contact The Rev. Todd Smelser: tsmelser@stphilipscathedral.org