Those
of us who live in Washington are familiar with spin doctors—political
operatives who try to convince you that what you just saw and heard was not
really what you saw and heard. They
swarm around after presidential debates and attempt to impose a narrative on
the event that flies in the face of common sense. Sometimes candidates can be
their own spin doctors, as when Donald Trump rebounded from a humiliating
episode by saying, "Today
I am very proud of myself because I have accomplished something that nobody
else has been able to accomplish.” That’s spin doctoring at a very high level,
so please don’t attempt this at home.
In
my day I have also heard a number of what I call “spin preachers”: clergy who interpret scripture in ways that
protect you from the dangerous parts of the Bible. You know the type. When Jesus says that it’s
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person
to enter the kingdom of God, they find a way to tell you that he actually means
something else. This kind of preaching softens the force of Jesus’s admonition
about the way wealth can isolate us from each other. It tames the story to our taste. Spin
preachers are not hard to find. Any one
of us can slip into that role whenever we’re given a piece of scripture that
puzzles, frightens, angers, or revolts
us.
Today’s
reading from Genesis [Genesis 22: 1-14] is one of those passages. It’s the
story Jews call the “binding of Isaac”, and over the course of Jewish and Christian
history it has been the occasion of some epic spin preaching, even by the likes
of me in my younger days. It is just an
awful story—you heard it read, and I won’t try to retell it—and the temptation
a preacher faces is to take the awful weirdness of it away. God couldn’t seriously have wanted to have
Abraham kill his son, could he? God
couldn’t really have done this merely to test Abraham, could he? We preachers shy away from those questions by
reaching for our commentaries and coming up with more ingenious and fanciful
readings. Those sermons always fail, because they never explain why God would
do such a nasty thing to Abraham and Isaac in the first place. And while we’re
at it, why replace a child with a lamb? Why sacrifice any living sentient being
at all?
The
older I get, the more allergic I become to spin doctoring and spin
preaching. We’re not crazy. We just saw
and heard what we just saw and heard.
There’s no way to make the story of Isaac’s binding easy, simple, or
even palatable. So how do we respond to it?
I
have two thoughts: one of them concerns
the weird otherness of God, the other with what this story says about how we
treat our children.
As
to the first. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, “It is
a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” [Hebrews 10:31] In
polite traditions like ours, we tend to want everything to be beautiful and
rational. We want God to be
friendly. We want the stories about God
to make sense. Over the years, people
like me have done our best to keep the holy at bay, held safely as far away
from our hearers as we can. We don’t
think you can take it. But domesticating the holy is an impossible task. No matter how desperately preachers try their
best to insulate you from it, the divine keeps breaking through. It’s no accident that some backwoods
Appalachian Christians call themselves “snake-handlers”. If you keep messing around with God and
Jesus, you’re bound to get bit.
The
writer I know who best explains this phenomenon is Annie Dillard. This is what she said in her short, sharp,
powerful book, Holy the Firm:
I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words that
people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.
In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a
strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God
were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe,
genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.
[Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, “Day Three”]
For Annie Dillard, sitting in a church is not like sitting in a
concert hall. It’s like going to a
circus where high-wire acrobats are doing something they used to describe as
“death-defying”. You and I go to church
as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But as I read stories like the binding of
Isaac, it’s clear that churchgoing isn’t natural at all. It’s risky business. It celebrates something powerful, irrational
and weird. Most times it should be surprising.
Sometimes it can be downright scary. It’s a testament to human ingenuity
that we’ve managed, on occasion, to make it dull.
When we try to homogenize the Bible and domesticate God, we end
up talking in sentimental, greeting card language. We turn Jesus into Hello
Kitty and God into a Care Bear. Now, for the record, I do believe that God
loves us and is friendly toward us. I do believe e are all valued, accepted, and
loved. But to say that God loves us is not to say that the holy makes rational
sense. When I read the Bible not through
the lens of doctrine but through the eyes I use to examine the world around me,
I have to admit that God and Jesus do and say some really strange things
there.
When, in Dillard’s words, we “come at God with an unwarranted
air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though [we know what we
are] doing,” we are kidding ourselves.
God is God and we are not. I
believe I love God. I believe I try to follow God. But I no longer believe I can understand God
or explain God’s behavior with any more authority than you can. God is God and I am not. A story like the binding of Isaac, or the
Flood, or the Crucifixion, or the story of Job makes me fall silent before it. “It is
a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
So if I fall
silent before the story of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, is there
something I can take away from it?
Just because a story is hard doesn’t mean that
it doesn’t have something to say to us. When I search my own life and heart and
the state of the world around me, I believe there is. We recoil from this story because it tells us
a hard truth about ourselves. It asks that we confront our human tendency to do
an ugly thing—to sacrifice our children to our own interests. We live in a culture that is sentimental
about children, but that sentimentality masks our shared willingness to
sacrifice our children at almost every turn. We send them to dilapidated and dangerous
and substandard schools; we subject them to the effects of illness, poverty,
and violence far more than we do adults; and we send them off to fight wars
that people my age dream up. We talk about children in one way, and we treat
them another. If you don’t believe me, just think about the state of the planet
we will be handing on to them. Is my
freedom to drive a fossil-fueled car and use an electric toothbrush worth
subjecting my grandchildren to rising ocean levels, increasingly chaotic
weather patterns, and the cycle of drought, flood, and famine that global
warming will bring us by the century’s end?
It’s only when I
stop kidding myself about my own selfishness, my own tendency to seek my own
wellbeing at the expense of even my children, that I can be open to what Jesus
says in this morning’s Gospel:
Whoever
gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a
disciple will not lose their reward." [Matthew 10:42]
Faced with the
hard truth about our shared willingness, with Abraham, to bind Isaac over and
over again, Jesus points us once more toward the possibility of generosity and
compassion. We will always put ourselves before others. That is what “original
sin” means. It is the sad, truth of our
nature. But we’re not stuck there,
because we can choose to live not like Abraham but like Jesus. We can reach
out—to our children, to each other, to the world--with even a cup of cold
water. We can assuage our children’s
suffering, embrace and love them, make possible their nurture and growth.
Today’s readings
ask that we get real about how we will treat our children. Will we lead them up the hill, ready to
sacrifice them to keep ourselves safe?
Or will we give up some of our own comfort so that they and the world
they inherit might have some relation to the one we enjoy? The choice is ours.
Abraham failed that choice, but God saved him from it. May God save us from bad choices, and may we
have the grace to see the wisdom in serving the littlest ones in God’s name. Amen.
1 comment:
Thanks very much Dean Hall for the powerful sermon.
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