"Abraham Part 4: The Need to Sacrifice"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on August 27, 2006

Text — Genesis 22:1-19

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”  2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.  4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.  5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.”  6 Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.  7 Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”  8 Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

 

9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.  10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill † his son.  11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”  12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”  13 And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  14 So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; † as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” †

 

15 The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven,  16 and said, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son,  17 I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies,  18 and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”  19 So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba.

This is my final sermon on the themes from the Abraham stories.  Last week I ended with a question:  What could God possibly need from us?  And how does the idea of God needing anything change our idea of who or what God is?

According to one way of thinking about God, it’s hard to imagine how God could need anything from us. For example, if you think of God as the force of nature, or the laws of physics, in that framework we’re like mosquitoes on the windshield.  Not a very cheerful thought.

But Christians don’t think of God as simply the force of nature. We think in terms of “God incarnate.” God became flesh in Jesus.  Christianity offers a very different way of thinking about God, and the major implication of that way is that God is woven or infused into all human experience.  When we talk about God, or God’s needs, we’re not just talking about the God of Abraham, or Jesus. We’re talking about something in us, and this is where the idea of a personal God begins to make sense.

God is the “still small voice.”  God is our conscience.  God is our hope.  God is our sense of being led on a journey — wandering through the wilderness but we’re not sure where to.  God is our spiritual hunger. Many aspects of our consciousness and “inner life” are wrapped up in the name “God.”

For the purpose of relating this to the Abraham story and the sacrifice of Isaac, I want to focus especially on this subject of spiritual hunger. We humans have a desire, a need, to do something worthwhile, something important.  This was true of Abraham. We want to do more than just survive.  We don’t live by bread alone, as Jesus said. We want to feel alive.  Just to be clear, this “spiritual hunger” isn’t all there is to God.  But this is part of what we wrap up in the word “God.”

So, just for now, think of God as that hunger in you, that need to feel alive and do something important. If that’s God, then what does God, that hunger, need from us?  It needs obedience. It needs to be honored.  It needs to be followed.  It needs to strive for something. It needs for us to sacrifice.

Sacrifice is giving up something important for the sake of something more important. We start learning this from an early age.  At age five, we’re required by law to give up the luxury of playing all day in favor of going to school and doing work.  The Wright Brothers sacrificed their livelihoods as operators of a bicycle shop to build an airplane that would fly. Last week I talked about parents sacrificing for their children.  We all need to sacrifice, so it’s no wonder that ritual sacrifice of some kind is built into every religion.

But these sacrifices seem very different from what Abraham was prepared to do — to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering.  Here’s my main point for today. We need to do something for a higher good.  But Abraham’s story signals that there is something potentially monstrous in what people are willing to do for what they believe is a higher good.

This was true in antiquity, when people literally took their young children and sacrificed them on the altar.  In the Bible there’s evidence that, as part of large building projects, children were sacrificed and their bodies buried in the foundation to consecrate the building.  There’s archeological evidence of such practices. This strikes us as horrific, as sick superstition, and we would like to think the world has evolved beyond that. 

But when you think about it, human sacrifice, even child sacrifice, is still going on.  We sacrifice young men and women by sending them into war — for a higher good.  We sacrifice civilian lives in war. 

And in the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve seen the phenomenon of suicide bombers, viewed as a form of religious devotion and sacrifice. On vacation this summer, I read John Updike’s latest novel, Terrorist which does a convincing job of getting into the mind of a very devout, Muslim teenager in New Jersey who is given the honor of becoming a suicide bomber. Updike really did his homework before writing this book.  I recommend it.

We’d like to write off suicide bombers, terrorists, as the most deranged, evil fanatics who need to be stamped out. And I do think they need to be resisted, and tracked down, and stopped.  But I also think it’s becoming clear that bombing Arab communities won’t make them see the world as we see it.  

What makes a young person (and they are always young) who has enjoyed material advantages, aspire to be a suicide bomber.  What makes this an honor? Is it just stupid? Or is something more complicated going on?

I’m prejudiced.  I see this from the western perspective.  I don’t think suicide bombers do anybody any good.  But here are some thoughts — not my original thoughts, but ones I’ve gathered from others who have studied the Middle East, lived in the Middle East, and write about the Middle East.

There’s a deep feeling of desperation and social disintegration in the Arab world. The religion Islam has been very successful in gaining converts all over the world. There’s a beautiful simplicity to Islamic religious practice. But Islamic culture in the Middle East has failed badly to meet the needs of its people, so that Arab countries have fallen far behind other parts of the world, in spite of all the wealth generated by oil.

One factor that contributes to this failure is the Islamic understanding of religious authority.  We have the separation of church and state.  In the west, we’ve found that religious authority doesn’t work well as the basis for a civil society. This realization came the hard way, after a century of bloodshed in Europe over which religious group should be in charge.  The idea slowly dawned that no religious group should be in charge. 

But in the Muslim world, there’s still a strong conviction that everyone should have the same religious beliefs. If there’s one true faith, then everyone should follow it.  This idea obviously doesn’t lend itself to working out political differences, so the Middle East tends to be a contentious place, to put it mildly.

A second major factor that contributes to the failure in Arab and Islamic societies is the low place of women. A society that puts down and wastes the talents of half its population is not going to improve its standard of living in the global marketplace.  Not to mention the huge waste of energy spent enforcing all the rules to control women.

But not all the problems in the Middle East are the fault of the people of the Middle East. The western nations, especially Britain and the United States, have played a big role there for the last century because of oil.  To keep our access to oil, we’ve supported many corrupt, authoritarian regimes, who then keep the oil profits for themselves while the people in general stay poor. We are very much identified with these regimes — the Shah of Iran up until 1979 and the Saudi family to this day are two examples, and this accounts for a lot of resentment toward us. 

But going back to the concept of tribalism, when people are hurting, when they’re getting desperate, and feel threatened, it makes them feel closer and it makes them feel better to have a common enemy. We’re the same way. And the closer people feel toward each other, the more desirable it becomes to do something sacrificial for the sake of the group.  Striking the enemy is always a popular choice for what to do for the group.

So, becoming a suicide bomber is a high honor.  It’s martyrdom.  It’s an honor for parents when their son or daughter becomes a martyr. Think about it — you used to need a whole army to hurt another powerful nation. That’s not true anymore.  One person, a martyr, willing to sacrifice for a higher cause, can do a lot of physical damage, but even more psychological damage.  The psychological damage caused to the United States was far more serious and more expensive than the physical damage. So suicide bombers (as we call them) or martyrs (as they call them) are the great equalizer.  And now we have to deal with them.

But getting back to the main point: Humans need faith to endure what we need to endure.  Abraham is an example of faith. But there is something dangerous, even monstrous, when faith becomes religious certainty.  Abraham heard the voice of God and put his son on a pile of firewood and almost slit his throat. 

Why should we read about or care about Abraham?  That’s the question that I began with four weeks ago. We read and care about Abraham because we’re part of an ongoing community and part of a conversation about Abraham that’s been going on for thousands of years. The themes in Abraham are the themes of our lives  — our dislocation, our tribal loyalties, our need for children, and our need for sacrifice.  

Abraham was not a perfect human being.  But his journey is a model for how imperfect and difficult, sometimes desperate, sometimes hopeful, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful, every journey of faith is.