Scripture: Genesis 22:1-19.
I want to talk about the story that you have heard this morning, but I also need to talk a bit about how we interpret the Bible, because once again we are confronted here in Genesis with a difficult story.
I think one of the reasons we have trouble with the scriptures sometimes is that we expect too much from them. We read a passage, any passage, and our attitude as we read it is: o.k. what’s the message here? What is this passage trying to tell me? We expect to be instructed somehow. We can find reasons not to follow the instruction, but we expect it to be there. Here’s what you should think or believe or do. Here’s a truth to live by or some moral guideline to follow. This idea about how to read the Bible is deeply ingrained in us, probably because the church has mostly used the Bible this way, to instruct, to teach—and when I say the church has, I guess I have to admit that what I really mean is that ministers have mostly used the Bible this way, to give us pointers on what to believe or how to live.
An aside: Some time ago a member of a church I was serving gave me a gift. He was a whittler. He carved things out of wood and painted them, elaborate things, usually birds or fish. I would have been happy to receive one of them as a gift. What he decided he wanted to make for me, though, was a carving of a minister, or really a preacher, who had a Bible in one hand and with the other hand was pointing a finger at an imaginary congregation. I said thank you, and I was grateful because I knew he had spent a lot of time doing it and meant it with affection, but I was also depressed by how he saw me, or hopefully not so much how he saw me but how he saw ministers in general. The reality is, I had to admit, that sometimes people will see me this way just because I am a minister, regardless of how I see myself, or whether I want to be seen that way.
Sometimes, of course, the Bible is in that mode—lots of the time in fact. Sometimes the messages we are given are quite direct and we are supposed to take them that way. Love your neighbor. Do not be anxious. Do not heap up treasures here on earth. That kind of thing. It’s up to us, of course, how we respond to these messages and how we apply them in our lives, but there are simple and pointed messages. But not all Biblical writings are like that. Some maybe are just expressions of something like giving praise to God. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless God’s holy name.” Or sometimes there may be meaning for us but it is not so much that we are looking for the meaning of the story but for the meanings that may be found in the story.
Now, to get to our story for this morning: I have tried, over the years, to find the meaning of this story for me…and I have failed. I have heard and read a whole lot of interpretations of “what this story is really all about” and I have found that for me the best of them have been unconvincing and the worst of them have been unacceptable. I have never made my peace with this passage.
There are two things here that I can’t get past. One is that in order for Abraham to believe and obey God in this story, he would have to shut down his mind and his heart. That is not the way I understand my own religious faith, and if we in the church are about nurturing and supporting and building up faith in one another, this is not the kind of faith I would want to wish for another person. Abraham is in no way a good example for us here.
Most all the interpretations I have ever come across see Abraham as being tested, and the assumption is that he passed the test because he showed that he was willing to carry out God’s will no matter what. The only thought I have ever had that would allow me to deal with this passage is that in fact Abraham didn’t pass the test. He flunked. Got an F. Got a 0. Didn’t even make an effort in the right direction. Maybe God gave this command just to see if Abraham would protest, to see if he would say back to God that he would not betray his responsibility to think for himself, that he would not betray his love for his son, or God’s love for Isaac, or indeed any other human being, would not betray his humanity or what he knew to be God’s nature in the name of religion. But the story doesn’t say any of that, and without it I have never been able to deal with the mindless and heartless aspects of this story.
Also, there is the image of one human being ready to kill another human being in the name of God. To me, you blow this picture up and what you have is crusades and inquisitions and genocide, holy wars and religious wars of all kinds, killing justified by the will of God. Again, there is no positive message here, not for me. I am told that what I see here is what many Jewish people also see. They see themselves, the Jewish people, as Isaac, persecuted, threatened, sometimes killed, but also somehow surviving. And in the post-World War II era, this image has had particular relevance for many people, especially given that the word used in this story is often translated as “holocaust”. That is what Abraham was preparing Isaac for, a holocaust. I have never been able to turn that image into some kind of a positive message.
But maybe that’s not what this story is supposed to do. Maybe we’re not supposed to be trying so hard to find “the message” or “the point” of the story. Maybe all it is meant to do is give us things to think about. And it certainly does that. What does the idea of obedience to God mean for us? How do we know whether our calling is from God? Does God only ask things of us that we might consider reasonable? What kind of “tests” does God put us to? How do we judge whether we are acing, passing, or failing these tests? Or is the whole idea of tests wrong? And so forth. There are lots of things to think about on the basis of this story and every time we ask a question it may lead to a hundred more.
What I have generally found, though, is that most of the discussion about this passage centers on Abraham and God. It’s God who gives the command, and it’s Abraham who has to carry it out. In all of this Isaac doesn’t have much of a part to play except as the intended victim. And it occurred to me, especially as I thought about doing several sermons under the heading of “untold stories”, that we really should look at this story from his standpoint too.
When I first chose to do this, some weeks ago, thinking of what I might say about Isaac when I got around to it, what first occurred to me was that Isaac was a victim, not once but twice. There were two stories I immediately thought of—this one, where he lives through the experience but for the rest of his life will have this image of his father standing over him with a knife engraved on his memory, and then the scene on his deathbed where one of his sons, Jacob, tricks him into giving his blessing and his inheritance to the wrong person. Isaac intended it for his older son, Esau. Jacob manages to get it for himself. From his father, rather than I love you he gets attempted murder. From his son rather than I love you as the last words between father and son, there is selfishness and trickery. So I was going to treat Isaac as a victim, and I guess in some ways I still am, but I’m not going, I hope I’m not going, to “preach” about it.
We aren’t told a whole lot about Isaac in the scriptures. Even though for Jews God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Abraham and Jacob get a lot more press than Isaac. One thing that we may not know for sure but that is strongly suggested by scripture is that after this incident where Isaac is almost done in by his father, they go their separate ways. Not only is there no record of them ever speaking or seeing each other again. In addition, and this has been noted by many people, the story concludes by saying that Abraham returned to his servants and returned to live at Beersheba. It does not say that Isaac returned with him. It says nothing about Isaac. We are left to infer, and our common sense might tell us, that this incident may not have brought about the death of Isaac, but it did bring about the death of Isaac’s relationship with his father. Abraham went home, without Isaac.
And Isaac went…somewhere…to go on with his life in the best way he could. It was my intention, I think, originally, to reflect on Isaac, or to use Isaac to reflect on the experience of being a victim,
…what it means to be a victim,
…when it is important to understand ourselves that way so that we know for instance that with regard to some traumatic event or situation we really were the victim of it, not the cause of it,
…but also to know when or how to move beyond that sense of being victimized so that our whole being is not defined that way
…and what it may mean to be a survivor rather than a victim,
…and what other terms or identities may be available to us other than victim or survivor.
I was starting to think in these terms about Isaac and about ourselves, pretty much the way I just did, just starting to think about it a little bit, but then as I actually came to the point of preparing this sermon, I realized that I couldn’t do it. What I couldn’t do was make a few minutes’ worth of general comments or offer a few paragraphs worth of advice on how a person who feels that he or she has been victimized should deal with it. The reason I couldn’t do it is that I began to think of specific people I have known, and I began to think of some of the different ways people I know have been victimized, and I wanted to honor their experience, and I think I have at least some sense of how involved and how difficult it can be to deal with various kinds of afflictions or traumas and to somehow move on, and how this can easily be a lifetime of work. And then for me to try to reduce all this to a few words just didn’t work for me. In this sense, I hope I can avoid preaching about this, preaching in the sense of delivering some simple message or three points to be made about the subject of being victims.
An example: The name Isaac means “one who laughs”. When Sarah was told she was pregnant, she laughed, and she named her child in a way after her laughter. Commentators on this story often try to make something out of this, talking maybe about the healing properties of laughter, or talking about how important it is for us to be able to maintain our ability to laugh in the face of our own troubles, or the troubles of the world. And that’s all well and good, and on one level I agree. But laughter is also not something that can be commanded or recommended. It is not something that can be suggested as a good way to live or offered as a solution to some problem. Laughter is a gift—a gift from God. And when a person has lost that gift, to talk about what a good thing laughter is seems beside the point. Perhaps even insulting if we talk as though a person could just will it to come back, implying that they had willed it away in the first place.
Then there’s the issue of forgiveness. Isaac probably needed to forgive his father, Abraham. Probably everyone in this room right now has someone they need to forgive. Forgiveness is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the person being forgiven. But it is also a good thing for the person doing the forgiving. Very often when we forgive someone it is for our own benefit as much or more than it is for theirs. We know that from our own experience.
But I am also aware that this too can be a long, involved, difficult process for people. Again it is not something one can recommend as a good thing, as though all it would take is for a person one day to decide to do it. Often for forgiveness to be real, a number of things have to happen that do not happen easily. And sometimes to try to bring about forgiveness prematurely is not only to make it ineffective or incomplete but may actually be hurtful.
So I am explicitly not offering laughter, or forgiveness, or any other good thing for that matter, as the points of the sermon this morning. I am explicitly not offering 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 ways to cope with trauma and feelings of being victimized. On a lot of grounds I am not qualified to do so. And besides what I have in my heart to say this morning is again not so much to make points about anything but to recognize the strength people need to work through these issues and to acknowledge how hard laughter or forgiveness or any number of other precious gifts—how hard they may be to come by and how long they may take to arrive.
Actually, we don’t know how Isaac coped anyway. We can only guess since the Bible doesn’t tell us. We don’t know whether there was laughter in his life. We don’t know whether he ever forgave Abraham…or God. We don’t know whether he just sort of made it through one day and then another and then another until it turned into many years or whether he just turned over a new leaf and wiped the past out of his mind. We don’t really know if Isaac ever saw his father alive again. What we do know, and we know it from a single verse in the 25th chapter is that when “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age…and was gathered to his people…Isaac and Ishmael buried him in a cave at Machpelah.”
When I first read that verse I was stunned. It’s only a short verse, half a verse actually—not very long, not very loud. No fanfare. No bold letters. But for me it’s really important that it’s there. We don’t know what kinds of feelings Isaac may have had toward his father, don’t know how many hours of therapy were filled with memories of dad ready to kill. But the story does say that Isaac came home to bury his father. And so did Ishmael. The brothers, who had been estranged from their father and from each other, come back to bury their father. This all speaks to me at several levels.
For one thing there is the political meaning, though it is a political meaning with a human face. Isaac is one of the ancestors of the Jewish people. Muslims have always considered Ishmael one of their ancestors. Genesis tells us how these two factions of Abraham’s family quarreled and split off from each other, Ishmael being banished to the wilderness and Isaac going off somewhere to try to escape from his past. The people of Isaac and the people of Ishmael have never made it back together, and we’re aware of just how bitter and bloody the history has been and continues to be between these two groups of people. But here in this one little verse Isaac and Ishmael are reunited. They return to bury their father. They recognize their common ancestry and we must assume they recognize that they are brothers. That verse provides a glimpse of hope that the bloodstained history of these people can be overcome, and if it can be for them, then why not others. Isaac and Ishmael returned home to bury their father. Perhaps one day the people of Isaac and Ishmael will find an occasion to affirm that they are part of one family.
On a more personal level, Isaac and Ishmael had both been victimized. They each went off to carve out their lives in their own ways. What their returning symbolizes to me is a breaking out of their separateness, breaking through the isolation that so often accompanies the experience of being a victim. Again, I do not mean this in the spirit of a preachment but simply as a recognition of what I believe to be true: that very often healing for victims comes when people resolve not to keep their experience to themselves but use their experience, painful though it may be, use it to make contact with another human being in some way that perhaps only someone who has had that experience can do. It is that coming out of isolation that is symbolized for me in Ishmael and Isaac coming back together. Isaac and Ishmael—together—buried their father. Again, what hopeful words.
They are not so much words that make points but they do the point the way for us. They point the way toward what Jesus would later call the reign of God. We live in a world which creates far too many victims. But we live toward a world where ancient hostilities are overcome, where individuals and nations are able to recognize their kinship, and where traumas have been turned by courage into love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 13, 2000