Proper 08, Year A: Genesis 22:1-14 | Romans 6:12-23
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
June 28, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 17:15 in, in case the link doesn’t drop you in the right place).
“…do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.” – Romans 6:12-13
This morning we’ve had two difficult readings: Romans 6, with its apparent support of slavery, and Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his own child. Neither of these fit well with our modern understanding of life, and I feel like we need to address both.
Starting with Romans, the biggest problem most people have with this passage is Paul’s seeming embrace of slavery. And while I can try to explain that slavery in the Roman era was different than slavery in the American Colonies and United States—for example, it wasn’t based on a visual marker like race, it was sometimes voluntary, and it wasn’t necessarily permanent or generationally perpetuated—slavery is still slavery, and after our American version of it exposed such horrific extremes, it’s hard to understand it any other way than as evil.
But for Paul, slavery wasn’t so much evil as it was culturally embedded, an assumed norm.[1] It was just “the way things are.” When anywhere from one-third to half of the population—and Christian converts—were enslaved, when you couldn’t necessarily tell who was a slave just by looking at them, everyone he wrote to would have understood the metaphor.
If we can find a way to look past that distasteful image, Paul’s main point is that, even if you aren’t physically enslaved to another human, all of us live in service to something. It might be a cause, our own comfort or self-interest, or some sort of understanding of God. We can claim to be free and independent all we want, but our actions show who we’re really working for. God, in Christ, has given us the opportunity to be free from evil or destructive choices, and Paul wants us to take that opportunity by choosing to serve God instead of ourselves.
Moving on to the Binding of Isaac, though, we find a much more difficult story. Modern scholars call it a “Text of Terror”—somewhere the Bible seems to be condoning or even celebrating acts of brutality, torture, or sexual violence. People have been trying to explain this tale for anywhere from 2,500 to 4,000 years, and I don’t think any of us have done it well. Some say we’re seeing remnants of an ancient initiation ritual, Isaac’s rite of passage into manhood for which we have no context but people of the time would have recognized as symbolic. Others say that Satan tricked Abraham into trying to sacrifice Isaac. Several early Christian writers viewed it as an analogy: Abraham followed God’s command to sacrifice his son but, in the end, was allowed to spare him; God, on the other hand, went through with his Son’s sacrifice in order to free us from death and sin. Many simply try to divert our gaze, distracting us from the horror dancing in front of our own eyes by focusing on a metaphysical or spiritualized outcome: evidence of Abraham’s unseen faith in God.[2]
Personally, I’m among those who think Abraham was deceived, making this a cautionary tale. However, I also think our viewpoint and terminology has changed enough since the time the story was written down that, told in a modern context, we wouldn’t say that God (or the gods) commanded him to murder his child. We would likely describe Abraham as deluded.
After a century or so of being in a relationship with God—one that included live conversations—I suspect Abraham had become complacent, no longer taking the effort to distinguish his own thoughts from God’s voice. Genesis shows God rescuing Abraham from his own poor choices time and time again, to the point where I’m guessing the patriarch presumed that he could do just about anything and have it work out in his favor. I question if God was testing Abraham so much as Abraham was testing God, something Jesus himself warns us against.[3]
As I said, I think this is a cautionary tale, a story of what not to do. And I think we can apply our Romans reading to it.
Some might object that Paul clearly respected and admired Abraham. That’s true: he spends a number of chapters talking about and praising him in both Romans and Galatians. However, although he talks about stories preceding and following the Binding of Isaac, he never addresses—or even references—this particular incident. I wonder if the apostle had trouble reconciling this part of his heritage with his own understanding and experience of God in the present. And while Paul doesn’t say anything about Abraham’s actions here, in our time, silence is often a tacit form of assent or compliance. It’s important to be able to recognize and state the flaws in our heroes—and in ourselves—even “heroes of the faith.”
So, if we apply Paul’s concepts from Romans 6 to our Genesis reading, who do you see Abraham serving? Looking at his actions—which is the only recorded evidence we have from his experience[4]—who was Abraham listening to in that moment where he decided to murder his child? Was it to the God of Creation, the God who builds up and sustains, the God of Life? Was he following the Way of Love or a pathway to Death? We can imagine as many motivations for our religious ancestor as we want, but clearly, if we were to see someone attempting to slaughter their own child in the name of God, we could only interpret that as evil.
So what about ourselves? Who do we serve? To whom—or what—are we sacrificing those around us today? What do our actions tell us about the nature of the one from whom we take our commands?
Frankly, Abraham was lucky. The Lord, true to character from everywhere else in Abraham’s story, stepped in to rescue him from his horrific mistake, preventing him from killing Isaac and ending the story of the people of Israel before it had even begun. But notice that God simply spoke. Abraham still had to take action. No one stopped his arm for him. That instance, where he had to choose to drop his knife instead of slitting his son’s throat, is the moment where we see proof of Abraham’s repentance. That is the point in the story where we see him truly serve God.
So again, what about us? What about our lives—individually and collectively? Where are we blindly following our own delusions, living according to our presumptions about the way things should be? Where might God be trying to break through our stubborn fantasies, warning us to stay our own hands before we commit irrevocable harm? Look at your own life, your own actions. Without trying to justify ourselves or explain our motivations, what do you see? Who are you really listening to—is it the God of Life and Love, God as revealed through Jesus Christ, or is it a god of Death?
Thousands of years after the life of Abraham and the writings of Paul, God is still giving us the opportunity to change. Through Christ, we have the ability to distinguish good from evil, to consider our ways, to choose for ourselves who or what we will serve.
“Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.”
[1] Elsewhere Paul does tell slaves to take their freedom if they gain the opportunity (I Corinthians 7:21). He even appears to find the imagery problematic as he writes it: see verse 19 of our passage.
[2] Even the New Testament does this in Hebrews 11:17-19.
[3] Matthew 4:7; Luke 4:10
[4] The text tells us it was a test, but Abraham would not have known that. We only know what he thinks through what he does.