don't eat alone

“From This Window . . .”
A Sermon for Westbrook Congregational Church UCC
Genesis 22:1-14
September 17, 2017

I was a high school English teacher for a number of years. When I had to be out of the classroom, I tried to leave lesson plans for the substitute that were easy to implement. I was not so lucky with this morning’s sermon. Our passage today from Genesis 22, often referred to as “The Binding of Isaac,” is a difficult and problematic story. Let us see what we can find there together.

Genesis 22:1-14

As I have read through this passage over the last couple of weeks, I have seen different things. This has never been an easy story for me. First, I have questions about Abraham. Here is a guy who questioned and bargained and argued with God all along the way in his life, and yet, when God told him to take Isaac up the mountain and kill him, Abraham just went without explaining himself to anyone, and particularly not to Isaac.

I also have questions about what the story says about God. I understand that, even though we talk about the Bible as though it were a cohesive unit, it is actually a collection of literature from a variety of sources collected over thousands of years, so the picture of God is not one that has been systematically thought out; there are layers and changes, even contradictions—and we are dealing with one of the oldest and earliest stories, where the picture of God is just beginning to be sketched.

I also understand we are not reading a journalistic account what happened on Mount Moriah. The stories of Genesis—the origin stories of the Hebrew people and the Jewish faith—were written down much later—after the Exodus—to explain who they were, how they got there, and why that mattered. Since our faith grew out of theirs, we lean into these stories to find our place, yet we read them differently because our story spins off from theirs. As I read Jewish interpretations of the story, which is called the Akedah in Hebrew—the binding—I found these words from Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, who says the difficult thing about this story is the fact that it can be interpreted in a number of ways.

We don’t know which interpretation is right, or which is true. It seems unfair, somehow, that the Torah—which is supposed to provide guidance, to help us live sanctified lives— is so unclear on this. The story is there, but Torah doesn’t tell us what to make of it. So where do we go?

One place to go from here is up.

Imagine a tower that stretches infinitely high into the heavens. Inside the tower is a spiral staircase, with landings on every floor; at each landing, there’s a window. The view from the lowest window is different from the view on the fifth floor, or the tenth, or the hundredth. As we climb the stairs and pause at the different levels, we see new things. Where on the ground floor we saw earth and stones, from the tenth floor we can gaze out over the landscape. After a long while we see stars. Maybe even galaxies. Eventually something vaster than we can imagine. . . . The view is different from different landings, but that view is always God. . . . What changes, as we work to ascend that tower, is us. As we ascend we become able to see more of God . . . but God is fully there on every floor. . . . Depending on what window we’re looking through, we’ll find different things in the story of the Akedah. Maybe it’s ambiguous for a reason: because the process of studying it is itself a way of learning to see God in difficult places.

The window I keep looking through in this story is wondering what it felt like to be Isaac. We have no indication of how old he was. The assumption, for most, has been that he was a child, but we have no detail in the story that supports that. He could have been a young man. Either way, he follows his father to the foot of the mountain, and then up the slope, after they leave their servants behind. He even carries the wood on his back. He never says a word as his father ties him to the altar; never asks a question, doesn’t speak up after it is all over—or at least, the writers never give him a voice.

Isaac is, it seems, a victim of the will of God. Abraham is convinced God has commanded him to kill his son—the one who is the human confirmation of God’s promise to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars. Isaac was not in on the conversation. He was not given a say in his future, or his present. Abraham did nothing to offer Isaac a view from his window; instead he just bound him up and tied him to the altar.

Part of what is hard for us to understand in the story is the whole idea of sacrifice, which was a significant part of not only Hebrew life, but most ancient religions: most everyone thought that their gods were appeased, if not pleased, when something was killed as an offering. We don’t have enough time to unpack all the theological ramifications of how the idea of sacrifice has influenced how we see God and see one another today, even though our ancestors in the faith quit making burnt offerings long ago. And I would like to name that we can too easily let ourselves offer up someone else so we can feel safer or more prosperous at their expense.

When I look at Isaac, I see those we have come to call the Dreamers in our country—young people who came here with their parents from other countries, who are now being told their days here are numbered. I see transgender people who are being told they don’t belong because they don’t fit into traditional categories. I see people who are blamed for being born into generations of poverty, as though the things that bind them are somehow their fault. I see people who live with mental illness. People who are on the receiving end of the physical, verbal, and systemic violence of racism.

And I listen to the voices of those who say these people need to be sacrificed for the “good” of the greater society and it breaks my heart that, far too often, they make that claim in the name of God.

Abraham never questions what he thinks God is telling him to do, though he does in most of their other interactions. We are not told what Abraham was feeling or thinking, but something made him move unquestioningly, convinced he was doing the right thing, all the way to raising the knife to kill his son. At the last moment, an angel cries out, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him!”

Perhaps one of the things we can take away from this story is when we come to those moments in life where we are dead certain God is on our side, that God has told us the truth—particulary when that truth does damage to another so we can get what we think has been promised to us—we may need to listen harder, to look for the ram in the thicket, if you will. We need to listen for the voice shouting, “Don’t lay your hand on them!”

Or, perhaps, we need to be that voice.

In his book, Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson tells of his work with people who have been wrongly incarcerated in Alabama. He founded the Equal Justice Initiative to give hope and voice to those bound up by our unjust system of mass incarceration. Towards the end of the book, he talks about meeting a woman he met who came to the courthouse everyday to help people. Part of what she said was,

All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, its a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other. (108)

Stevenson said later that evening he was speaking to a church group and referenced the story from John 8 where a crowd of men bring a woman to Jesus, saying the caught her in the act of adultery and that she deserved to be stoned to death. Though it takes two to commit adultery, the men had bound her up as the one responsible so they could enforce their view of God’s will, which left them unscathed and in charge. They were armed and ready. Stevenson continues,

I . . . reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers. (108-9)

From my window on the story, I can’t explain why God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain. I can’t explain why Abraham went, or what he thought he was doing in the name of God. But, from my window on the story, I see Isaac, bound and helpless, and I know that had not the angel cried out, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him,” Isaac would have been killed.

If Abraham had been left to do what he thought God wanted him to do, Isaac would have been murdered and Abraham would have thought he had done God’s will. But that is not what happened. But Abraham heard a different voice, saw God in a new way, and Isaac and his father came down the mountain together. Isaac lived because the angel spoke up.

The ones who most often make the news speaking for God keep saying that God is demanding the sacrifice of those on the margins so the privileged can continue to prosper. God needs others —God needs us—to speak up, to shout, “Don’t lay a hand on them.” In big ways and in small ways, God needs us to be stonecatchers, to offer life and love and hope to those bound up and unable to free themselves. We may not make the news, but have to do more than just watch from our window. Amen.

I am a few days late posting my sermon from last Sunday, but here it is.

“A Forgiving Air”
Genesis 32: 3-12, 22-32
A Sermon for The United Churches of Durham, Connecticut
August 6, 2017

To say their relationship was difficult would be an understatement. Jacob, the younger brother, had cheated Esau out of the blessing due him as the oldest son. Then Jacob fled, at his mother’s urging, because Esau was so angry. The air, you might say, was thick between them. Jacob changed his location, but not his conniving ways. He always seemed to feel he had to play the system, somehow. It was in his name: Jacob means supplanter—which is not a word we use often these days—how about circumventer, overreacher, deceiver. Almost from the beginning he thought that if he was going to get what he thought he deserved, he was going to have to make it happen. No one was going to give it to him. He was last in line, even though it was a line of only two. He had to get to the front so he could grab it all. Even though he ended up quite wealthy, and married to the woman he loved, it was not enough. There was never enough.

Esau’s name means hairy; some say it’s Hebrew word play on the word red, like the desert soil. He was an outdoors guy, a man of the desert. A hunter. Things were what they were. There was not a lot of ambiguity in the desert. He gave up his paternal blessing for breakfast because he was hungry. Only later did he realize Jacob had stolen him blind.

Where we join the story, Jacob and his whole family are on the move again—this time because of a “misunderstanding” with his father-in-law Laban. The whole crew—family, servants, livestock—are in flight when some of the servants bring word that Esau is on his way to meet him. With four hundred men. As far as Jacob was concerned, that could only mean Esau was coming for his long-awaited revenge. Jacob tried to think of some sort of deception, and ended up sending an overflow of gifts in Esau’s direction and then sending everyone else in the opposite direction to camp across the river Jabbok. Then, he settled down for the night to wait for daylight and the coming confrontation with his brother.

As we read, some time in the night an unidentified man showed up and began to wrestle with Jacob. They struggled the remainder of the night, under whatever star shine there might have been, until—at daybreak— the man yanked Jacob’s hip out of joint and Jacob hung on for dear life to the point that the man pleaded to be released.

“Not until you bless me,” said Jacob.

The man responded by saying, “You are no longer Jacob; you shall be called Israel.” Jacob had a new name. He was no longer to be known as the deceiver, but as one who had prevailed with God. One who hung in there. One who didn’t hit and run. The man disappeared—we are not told anything else about him. Jacob built an altar because, he said, he had seen God face to face. He walked away broken and blessed.

Most of the time, as with our lectionary passage this morning, this is the point where we stop and talk about what the story means; we often talk about how God works through our suffering, how we struggle to come to repentance, or how our woundedness deepens our faith and compassion. All of those thoughts have merit and meaning, yet the story between Jacob and Esau doesn’t end in the dusty dawn on the banks of the Jabbok.

As the night air turned to dawn, Jacob looked up and saw Esau and his whole entourage coming across the desert. There was nowhere to go. No other cards up his sleeve. Instead of wrestling, he fell to the ground in apparent submission. Esau picked him up and hugged him. Hard. There was no trace of anger in the man. No bill to pay for all Jacob done to his older brother. Esau asked about the family he could see gathered on the other side of the river. He asked why Jacob had sent all the stuff, and Jacob was honest enough to say he was hoping to buy favor with his brother. I love Esau’s reply:

“I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.” (33:9)

Enough. I’m not sure that was a word Jacob understood. He had never had enough. He had never been enough. Even with his flocks and family in abundance, he had—only hours before—been begging desperately for a blessing. Now, face to face, his brother was offering one without a struggle. And Esau had more to say: “Let us journey on our way, and I will go alongside you.” (33:12)

Let’s do this together—you and me.

“You go ahead,” Jacob said. “I’ll catch up.” He watched his brother move off in one direction and, once he was out of sight, Jacob went another. Esau’s blessing was more than Jacob could was willing to receive. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat offers this take on the moment in her poem, “Encounter.”

When Esau saw him he came running.
They embraced and wept, each grateful
to see the profile he knew better than his own.

You didn’t need to send gifts, Esau said
but Jacob introduced his wives and children,
his prosperity, and Esau acquiesced.

For one impossible moment Jacob reached out.
To see your face, he said, is like seeing
the face of God: brother, it is so good!

But when Esau replied, let us journey together
from this day forward as we have never done
and I will proceed at your pace, Jacob demurred.

The children are frail, and the flocks:
you go on ahead, he said, and I will follow
but he did not follow.

Once Esau headed out toward Seir
Jacob went the other way, to Shechem, where
his sons would slaughter an entire village.

And again the possibility
of inhabiting a different kind of story
vanished into the unforgiving air.

The unforgiving air. What a phrase. It was the only air Jacob knew how to breathe. Whatever had happened the night before, new name or not, when he looked into his brother’s eyes and saw God face to face he couldn’t take it. He didn’t hang on; he let go. It was far easier to see God in the stranger than in the unabashed forgiveness of his brother.

How could he talk it all in? How could he enter a new atmosphere? How could he draw from a new life source?

The companion gospel passage from the lectionary today is what we commonly call the Feeding of the Five Thousand. A multitude of people had followed Jesus out into the desert, hoping for words that mattered, and without much thought, it seems for their personal well being. They were hungry and isolated and there was no food. Even the disciples were convinced it was a suffocating crisis. There was not enough. All Jesus said was, “Feed them.”

They found one boy with a sack lunch of fish and bread. Not enough, for sure. They brought him to Jesus anyway. Jesus blessed the lunch and they started serving. The little boy’s offering changed the atmosphere. People relaxed, ate, shared, and when the had finished there were leftovers. They all breathed in the forgiving air.

My friend Kenny reminded me that years ago Jason Robards was interviewed on Inside the Actor’s Studio and he said, “The actor’s job is to rearrange the molecules in the room.” Another way to say it might be to change the atmosphere. The change the air. Esau tried with his invitation to a new relationship, but Jacob refused. The little boy offered his lunch and everyone ate. Both made small gestures that loomed large.

Our Communion Table is set with small gestures. As people often prone to expect scarcity, perhaps we do ourselves a disservice by setting our table with these tiny morsels of bread and miniature cups. Like the little boy’s lunch, it doesn’t look like much. Our meal hardly qualifies as a tasting, yet the love it represents in overflowing and abundant. When we take and eat, we rearrange the molecules of our lives in Jesus’ name.

The apostle Paul challenges us to set things right with others before we come to the Table: to commit to travel together for the days to come; to fill our lungs with a forgiving air. We can walk away hungry, like Jacob, or we can fill our hearts with our life together in Christ.

The hymn we sang just before the sermon, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” was one of my father’s favorites because of the story behind it. George Matheson was engaged to be married when he found out he was going blind. When he told his fiancé, she broke the engagement. And then he wrote,

O love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee . . .

It is that love that brings us to this meal together, that fills our hearts and lungs with a forgiving air. Each Sunday morning, my wife Ginger begins our service in Guilford by saying, “Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.” Her call to worship is our call to the Table: breathe in the forgiving air of God; breathe out the love that feeds one another, the love that will not let us go.

Come, all is now ready. Amen.

I’m taking a break from miracles this week and posting, instead, the manuscript of the sermon I preached Sunday at North Haven Congregational Church in North Haven Connecticut. I hope you find something here that speaks to you.

“No Easy Way Out”
Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39

We have sparrows in our barn.

Behind our house is an old barn that we have worked hard to fix up. I use it as a writing space, and we also use it for social events when the weather cooperates. Last night we hosted a hymn sing. As we were setting yesterday afternoon, Ginger, my wife, called me over to see the sparrow’s nest she had found on an empty bookshelf, tucked into an old Red Sox hat. There were eggs in it. This year, instead of having to worry about who was going to find her nest outside, our little sparrow tucked it away on an empty shelf in a mostly empty barn. Life must have felt safer.

Little does she know we could sweep it all away in one motion. Safe, it seems, doesn’t last for long. I looked at that little nest—so much effort put into creating a place where her eggs could hatch, her new little ones grow to build nests of their own—and I thought of Jesus’ words in our passage for this morning:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from God. . . . So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Hagar, the one at the center of our first reading, was a sparrow—a person perceived to have little human value. She was enslaved woman owned by Abraham and Sarah, as much as Sarah could own anything, being property herself. Some versions translate the word as servant or concubine, but Hagar had no choices of her own in her life. She was enslaved. She was forced to have a son with Abraham without her consent because Sarah thought she couldn’t have children and the custom of the day said Hagar’s son would be Abraham’s legal heir. Then Sarah got pregnant and became jealous of Hagar and her son, Ishmael. She told Abraham to banish them to the desert—to send them out to die. The wandered around, finding nothing to eat or drink, until finally Hagar left her son to die under a bush and walked away, trying to get out of earshot of the boy’s crying—and that is where God found them.

Many years ago, Scott Peck wrote a book called The Road Less Traveled. The subtitle was, “A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth.” It’s a good book. It helped me. One of the things that helped me most was his opening sentence:

Life is difficult.

He was not saying something new. To say life is difficult is to state the obvious. Hagar knew it. The little sparrow in our barn knows it. Both our biblical passages for this morning speak to the truth of those three words: life is difficult. Then Peck goes on to say,

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Once again, he is not saying something new. He is saying something important. Something true that bears repeating. When we face difficulty in our lives—tragedy, grief, sorrow, hardship (our list could go on)—we are not facing something other than life. Let us say it again: life is difficult because it’s life.

There’s an oddly humorous moment in Hagar’s story. She, as we said, had come to the place where she had abandoned her son because she couldn’t watch his suffering, and an angel showed up and says, “What troubles you, Hagar?”

I picture her turning around and saying, “Are you kidding me? What troubles me?”

The angel goes on, “Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.”

God has heard the voice of the boy right where he is. You can’t bear to hear it anymore, but God hears the boy. In your difficulty. In your pain. Do not be afraid. The story was not over.

Jesus’ words about in Mark’s gospel point to another side of the same truth: life is difficult, sometimes, because of the choices we make. You have probably heard a parent say to their teenager as he or she leaves the house, “Make good decisions.” Our poor choices can make life harder, but that is not what Jesus was talking about.

Our good choices–our right choices—can make life difficult. On purpose. We make choices we know are going to cost us. I think about Rosa Parks refusing to get up from her seat on the bus. Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison because he was committed to freedom for everyone in South Africa. Those are big picture examples. Our lives are filled with moments—small intersections—where we can choose to put someone else before our safety or our comfort. A spouse, a friend, a stranger.

Jesus told those who were listening that following him was a difficult choice: lose your life to find it, he said. He wasn’t trying to be witty or poetic. The call of God on our lives is to choose to make it more difficult for the sake of others.

I get the impression that, somehow, Hagar was not as surprised by her difficulty as those around Jesus were. Perhaps Jesus was spelling it out because he could tell those around him thought they were signing up to be a part of an inside circle: the chosen ones. Jesus was quick to say choosing to live a life centered in God was not the way to the top, or even to easy street. It was a choice to engage life, to complicate our relationships, to choose to make picky details matter, to make our comfort something we don’t satisfy first. To not allow fear to be our primary value.

Sometimes, being blessed by God feels like a backhanded compliment. We are chosen to live through the pain, to let God make something out of all the broken pieces, which, of course, means we have to be broken first. It does not mean God is the one doing the breaking.

Recently, I’ve been up close to two extreme difficulties. One friend took her seventeen year-old son to have his wisdom teeth removed. He had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic that left him brain dead within a week. His funeral was this past week. Another friend just found out she has ovarian cancer. She had no symptoms. She went to her doctor on a hunch, for which we are grateful, but she still has cancer. I’m sure you have stories to tell as well.

God didn’t choose them to suffer. God didn’t cause the allergic reaction or the cancer. God didn’t engineer circumstances so Hagar and Ishmael would end up desperate in the middle of the desert to prove a point. When the biblical accounts say they were chosen by God doesn’t mean they got the same deal as Sarah and Abraham and Isaac. Chosen doesn’t mean privileged, or even protected. it means intended.

Remember, Jesus never says anything about God catching the falling sparrows. He says God knows when they fall. God knows. God is there. It’s in Jesus’ name, Emmanuel: God With Us. And even when the angel came to tell Joseph what to name the boy, he began with words we have heard twice this morning already: do not be afraid.

We are all chosen by God. We are intended–created–for God to incarnate through us, if you will, and that activity will be disturbing, both for us and for the world around us. The point of being chosen or intended or called is not to be on the inside track or to come to power or to get to take the easy way out. There is no easy way out. Life, remember, is difficult. And remember also that God is with us. Paul said it this way ;

Can anything separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, pain or persecution? Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of arms? , , , I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom. 8:35, 38-9 Phillips)

Whatever our circumstances, and leaning into a love that will not let us go, let us choose to make life more difficult: to be the ones who call attention not to ourselves but to those who cannot speak up; to call attention to relationships, both personal and systemic, that are dehumanizing and destructive; to become agents–disturbers, agitators–for compassionate change; and to carry one another’s pain willingly.

Life is difficult. Do not be afraid. Thanks be to God.

Peace,
Milton