Faith of Our Fathers

Lessons for today:

Psalm 13
Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

When I was attending Waverly Yowell Elementary School, back in the 1960s, we had a special visitor once a month. We called her the Bible lady, and her name was Miss Neff. She brought in an easel with a flannel board and told us stories from the bible, using colorful flat figures arrayed on scenic backgrounds, all depicted in flannel. When she needed a new scene, she would just flip a new sheet of flannel over the top of the easel and be ready to continue her story. I especially remember the dark open maw of the empty cave and the gray rock she moved away from it to show us Jesus' tomb. Having a visit from the Bible lady was fun for us, and looking back on it, probably one of the few times during the month when our teachers got a break from their students. If we memorized Bible verses and recited them to Miss Neff, she gave us prizes. I still have the white faux-leather KJV Bible I received after learning 500 verses.

I attended Sunday school regularly, and often read evening devotions with my mother, who was a devotee of the King James Version. That beautiful language, the stories and pictures, the images I formed in my head of important figures in our faith history, such as Abraham and Jesus, gave me a distorted sense of historical time, I believe. I knew Jesus and Abraham lived a long, long time ago, but since they seemed to dress alike and speak the same language, I had no idea that nearly 2000 years separated the eras of their lives. I didn't have a clue that Abraham lived in a very primitive, ancient world and, in contrast, Jesus lived in the highly civilized age of the Roman Empire. That distinction is very important to our understanding of today's scripture lessons.

The Old and New Testament lessons for today are truly bookends, in an unexpected way. For modern Christians, the Genesis story, of God ordering Abraham to kill his son and Abraham's near compliance, is one of the most disturbing episodes of the entire Bible. The words of Jesus in Matthew 10 clearly suggest his desire that we adults should take care of children, an attitude toward children more closely reflecting our modern one: "...and whoever gives even a cup of water to these little ones in the name of a disciple...truly, none of these will lose their reward." In Jesus, there is a special blessing for those who care for the little ones.

We do believe we live in a world that cherishes children, that puts children first, and it is unimaginable to us that a father would be willing to kill his own son--or that our God would ask him to do such a thing. After the devastating tornado that ravaged Joplin, Missouri, I heard an interview on NPR with a young woman who was searching for the body of her sister. She knew her sister was dead because her nine-year old nephew had survived. In the chaotic hours just after the tornado, neighbors had found the little boy under a pile of debris, his dead mother's body above him. This young woman had done what any mother instinctively does--she had used her body to shelter her son from the storm. He was injured, but he will survive, thanks to his mother's self-sacrifice.

During my years of teaching, I had occasion to think of the legal term for the relationship between teachers and their students. Teachers serve "in loco parentis," Latin for "in place of parents" as they foster and nurture the children they teach. During mass school shootings at places like Columbine High School, teachers took that designation to its fullest extent, giving their lives to stand between their students and the shooters who took aim to kill them. We like to believe that most of the adults we know would go out of their way to protect children, and that's clearly the way the Lord would have the world operate.

So how do we comprehend the order God gives Abraham to kill his only son Isaac as a sacrifice on the altar? Since the story has a happy ending, with an angel intervening and a ram provided for the sacrifice, as a child I simply thought of it as an exciting suspense story. God knew all along he was going to preserve Isaac's life; who worried about how Abraham and Isaac must have felt when the father laid his boy, bound by rope, atop the pile of wood and took his knife in hand. The lesson was a pretty simple one: if you have as much faith as Abraham (and that's a lot of faith) you will always trust God to do the right thing. It wasn't until I reached adulthood and became a parent that this story began to trouble me.

If we put the father's near-sacrifice of his son into its historical context, taking place about 2000 years before the birth of Jesus (4000 years ago), we can see this incident from a very different perspective. Among the peoples of the region, child sacrifice was a common practice in those days, especially the sacrifice of a first-born child. That would explain why Abraham doesn't seem very surprised by God's command, why he obediently takes his son to the appointed place and prepares for the sacrifice. Oh yes, Abraham proves his faith, his complete trust in God. It is easy to see why he is the chosen one of God, with that much faith. But the truly important lesson is one the psalms and prophets reinforce repeatedly: God doesn't want human sacrifice. As the prophet Hosea simply states the Word of God: "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." Yahweh, the God of Israel, is a God of love, and in this pivotal story about the patriarch of the Hebrew faith, God shows us that he wants his people to be different from all the others. He wants us to love Him with steadfastness and obedience, to love one another, and to take good care of our children!

Of course, this story also carries with it a darker side, one that we may not choose to examine too closely. Yes, we love children and pass laws to protect God's "little ones." But we know that every day all over the world, children die for lack of food or clean water or decent medical care. Children are daily abused in horrendous ways, in spite of laws and our good intentions. On what altar are these children sacrificed? What, if anything, are we called to do?

One more thing to remember--as much as it must have pained Abraham to be told to sacrifice his son, in the end he was spared that terrible agony. But God did not spare himself; he allowed his own son to be sacrificed for the salvation of all of us. Father and Son have endured the worst the world can offer. Let it be a consolation to us to know they are with every child who suffers. Their eyes are on the sparrows, and their hearts are with the little ones.

Thanks be to God.