The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
June 29, 2008
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Genesis 22: 1-14¹

¹After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ²He 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.” ³So 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. ⁴On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. ⁵Then 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.” ⁶Abraham 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. ⁷Isaac 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?” ⁸Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

⁹When 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. ¹⁰Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. ¹¹But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ¹²He 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.” ¹³And 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. ¹⁴So 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.”

Gospel Lesson – Matthew 10: 40-42²

⁴⁰“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. ⁴¹Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; ⁴²and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

“What Is the Character of Your God?”

A lifetime ago, the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stood up at a lecture in King’s Chapel in Boston and prefaced his remarks by saying: “Today there is but one religious dogma in debate:  What do you mean by ‘God’?”³ Curiously enough, the “today” to which Whitehead referred was the year 1926; but it could just as easily have been today, June 29, 2008, right? The debate, I suspect, will never end. That’s why, by this congregation’s embrace of progressive Christianity, we prefer to be in dialogue – not debate – with each other. None of us will be able to prove one theological position “right” and the other “wrong,” so why not simply try to understand each other’s point of view and then see where that takes us?

We’ve got two of the more fascinating readings from the Bible as our scripture readings for this morning: one about a father prepared to slit the throat of his own son as a sacrifice on an altar to God, and the other about a rabbi named Jesus who seems to be saying to us, “Do you really want to know who God is? Watch me and do what I do.” On the one hand we’ve got a god whose capriciousness at any given moment demands that some should die and others not, and on the other hand a god who’s to be known in acts of compassion and care. You might think these summary statements are an over-simplification, but go back and read your Bible. I do mean to set one over against the other; the choice is up to you: What is the character of your God?
As far as the story of Abraham and his near slaying of Isaac, Bruce Prewer of the Uniting Church in Australia remembers this incident from his childhood:

As a child I was fed this story in a Sunday school conducted not by my family’s church (our denomination had no Sunday School in that rural district) but by a smaller, much more simplistic church. Even in my early childhood the Old Testament featured largely in the syllabus. My teacher was a sweetie in many ways, yet she toed her denomination’s party line and gave us the story of Abraham and Isaac complete with a heavy theological interpretation.

I can still remember her picture book from which she read the story. It showed a terrified little Isaac tied up on his back and flat on a stone altar, and a tall, long-bearded Abraham bending over him with a knife raised for the sacrificial kill. The knife, by the way, was a very large curved one, almost big enough to be a scimitar. Nearby, caught in some scrub, was a ram, but Abraham has not yet noticed the ram.

That scene was the stuff from which children’s nightmares are constructed. It troubled me greatly. Would my father kill me if God asked him to?

One evening, after dinner when my Dad sat in his favourite chair, and I was sitting on his knee, I plucked up courage to ask him whether he would be like Abraham if God asked him. Poor Dad! Looking back now I can see that he was totally unprepared for that question. Torn between his desire to uphold the Bible and his love for me, he made a mess of answering his child. I did not know the word prevaricate then, but that is what he did. I took his awkward response as an unlikely yet grim possibility. It did not do much to alleviate nightmares.⁴

The question that you and I are left with today is to ask ourselves, “Would a god who would ask a man to kill his child be a god I want to worship – never mind if it were a means of proving that man’s faith or not? What do you suppose we would do with such a father today? Right. We’d have him arrested and put behind bars; and if he kept insisting that he was just “obeying the Word of God,” we’d send him to a psychiatrist as a person who was mentally unbalanced – at best.

This is simply one more reason why we need Sunday School, and why we need to send our children and our grandchildren to knowledgeable teachers we can trust. We can’t just hand over a Bible to our Third Graders one Sunday and then ask them years later to tell us what they think about it.

But, then, why bring up this text anyway? Because the people we care for and minister to every day are faced with heartbreaking dilemmas and seemingly insurmountable fears. They may identify with Abraham, whose faith leads him to consent to do something horrible; or they may identify with Isaac, bound on the hard altar of some terrifying and inscrutable God. One woman like that, who faced a radical mastectomy after her bout with cancer, wrote this poem:

When I am spread out
ready for the surgeon’s knife
There will be no lamb caught
in the thicket
to spare me.⁵

There is good news – there is a gospel – in the Hebrew Scriptures; it just isn’t in this story. And we know the difference when we hear it; for instance, when we hear:

• the trusting and intimate faith of the 23^rd Psalm,

• the awesome opening allegory of creation in the Book of Genesis with its declaration that the very breath of God resides in every single one of us,

• the call to a higher morality inherent in the Ten Commandments,

• the stubbornly courageous and honest faith of Job,

• the universal love of God depicted in the tiny book of Jonah,

• the lofty ethics of social justice in the great prophets like Micah, and Amos, as well as

• the compassion of Hosea and Isaiah and the loyal love of Ruth,

• or such beauty and trust as we find in Psalm 139 where we hear the voice of the psalmist sing: “Where shall I go from your Spirit; where can I be that is outside your Presence? If I ascend into the heavens you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are also there with me.”⁶

The God we find lovingly and compassionately revealed in one Jesus of Nazareth is already there.

But it doesn’t do any of us good to make Abraham have the sensibilities of, say, a twenty-first century college-educated social worker. He lived over 3,000 years ago as a primitive tribal chief at the very edge of recorded history, where human sacrifice (let alone the sacrifice of children) wasn’t all that uncommon. It’s a piece of oral history told and re-told for a reason: as one explanation in a people’s attempt to understand the character of God – and it turns out that God is not the one who demands child sacrifice. If anything, the stories in our Bible – along with our interpretations of them – represent an evolution in our understanding of the nature of God; and, in the case of Abraham, it isn’t Abraham who says “No! Stop!” but God who does.

What could that tell us today? Well, it should give us a great reason to pause over the ways in which we still sacrifice our children – even down to sending them away to fight in a war that most reasonable people would say is obscene. Isn’t God still telling us, “No! Stop!”? If that’s true – and I believe that it is – then it never was God’s plan that Jesus should be killed to save us from our sins, but that we should finally turn away from all such violence so that we might listen to him and be reconciled – and not just with our neighbor, but with our enemy as well. So, instead of killing the son through whom a wonderful future was promised, we should drop the knife, reject the way of the cross, and come down from that dark mountain scene convinced that there is a better way.

Which brings us around to the way that Jesus lived. Eugene Peterson’s translation of our gospel reading may shine a new light on just how very close our relationships are supposed to mirror our relationship with God, as he translates a portion of this chapter of Matthew this way:

⁴¹“Accepting a messenger of God is as good as being God’s messenger. Accepting someone’s help is as good as giving someone help. This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. ⁴²Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.”⁷

Even the smallest amount of compassion and care – given or received – is enough to open up a way for much, much more of the same.

Just what is the character of your God? It makes a difference you know – not only in the way that we see the world, but in the ways that we relate to each other. The authors of the Bible had one point of view; we’re now invited to receive the treasure that they’ve given us, but put it into our own language based upon our own experience of reality. As that consummate biblical scholar, Marcus Borg, has put it:

I see the Bible as a human response to God. Rather than seeing God as scripture’s ultimate author, I see the Bible as the response of these two ancient communities to their experience of God. As such, it contains their stories of God, their perceptions of God’s character and will, their prayers to and praise of God, their perceptions of the human condition and the paths of deliverance, their religious and ethical practices, and their understanding of what faithfulness to God involves. As the product of these two communities, the Bible thus tells us about how they saw things, not about how God sees things.⁸

How we read the Bible, and then understand the revelation of that One we’ve come to know as God, makes a difference – in some cases a huge difference!

So God has “an image problem” – or at least much of the church has a problem with the ways in which it speaks about God. Traditionally God has been spoken about as being far beyond or above us, even as a threatening presence that will either reward or punish us for the way that we’ve lived. I’m sad to say that much of the theology represented by many of our traditional hymns and even some contemporary choruses is causing many people today to reject the church. So the problem isn’t just theirs. It’s ours. No wonder Alice Walker, in her book The Color Purple, has her theologian, Celie, say that “When I found out that God was white and a man I lost interest.”

Consider the possibility that God is not a person. God is not some kind of supernatural interventionist, or judgmental celestial being, but that very source of creativity within all of life that makes it possible for us to love extravagantly, to act compassionately, to offer even a cup of cold water to anyone who is thirsty – in the same way that Jesus did. That’s the kind of shift in our imagining God that might very well lead to a shift in the ways in which we, ourselves, see, think, talk and act. It’s just this kind of way of being that may help us think again about the character of our God – and how we, then, can bring others to understand a new way of being in the world as well.

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