Midrash Behavior (Genesis 22:1-14)

This story is traditionally called "the binding of Isaac," and sometimes the sacrifice of Isaac, although those who call it that must not have read it that closely because--spoiler alert!--Isaac isn't sacrificed.  Come to think of it, perhaps that isn't such a bad title after all, because if Isaac's life is not sacrificed, his innocence certainly is.  As one commentator wrote, this story captures that growing realization we all face as children that (a) we and our parents are separate beings, (b) we are totally dependent upon them and (c) there is no guarantee that we will get what we need or be protected from evil in the world. All of this dawning terror is packed into one line, as Isaac begins to realize just who the sacrifice is intended to be: "The fire and the wood are here,” he says to Abraham, “but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"  Can you imagine the sense of betrayal, of being alone in the world,  of absolute terror that a child would feel faced with this?

I don’t think that was the author’s point, I don’t think it was intended to elicit sympathy for Isaac, to strike terror in every parent’s heart.  It is a set-up for Abraham’s reply, which is surely one of the points of the story: “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering.”  It has been left to modern interpreters to point this out, accusing God of child abuse for putting Isaac through that emotional hell, which will at the least produce a big, fat case of post-traumatic shock syndrome in later life, along with extreme narcissism and repeated psychotic breaks.

Now, I don't want to belittle these musings, I think they have value, especially in this time of increasing awareness of child abuse and domestic violence in our congregations.  What I don't agree with is the inclination of some preachers to avoid this passage like the plague, arguing that it is an abusive text and has no place being inflicted upon modern congregations. 

This is certainly their right, it is a bedrock principle of Presbyterian polity that nobody can dictate what a pastor preaches, and far be it from me to advocate anything else. But I think it overlooks a rich opportunity to think about the nature of God, scripture, faith and a whole lot of other things, only a fraction of which we'll get to today.

So, I'm going to tackle it, and the first thing I want to say is this: I do not believe God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son  (And what does that make Ishmael, anyway?  Chopped liver?  Last time I looked, Ishmael was Abraham’s son as well . . . and he was set to become the ancestor of a great nation, just like Isaac)  But once again: I do not believe that God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, I do not believe that the God of love would do that to anyone, much less a child, and before you walk out griping about my lack of taking the Bible seriously -- those if you who didn't walk out at the thought of God the child abuser, that is -- answer me this: how many of you believe that The Lord created the earth in seven 24-hour days?  That it really is an abomination to wear two kinds of cloth together, or eat bacon?  How many believe that God blesses people who rejoice when babies' heads are bashed against rocks, as is claimed by Psalm 137?   If you’re going to take the Bible literally, you have to deal with those things, and much more.  However, if you agree that the Bible is a product of its time and place, and in that time and place, nobody had ever heard of PTS-whatsit and only a thousand years later would Narcissus be a twinkle in Ovid's eye, you can get past all of that and see this passage for what it is.

As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that the original audience of this story-- Hebrew tribes-people a thousand years before the common era--would take it as historically accurate. It is only in the last hundred years or so that a certain segment of Christianity has insisted that the bible is literally and historically true.  The original audience of the Old Testament understood that the Bible is symbolic in nature, and that only in broad strokes can it be considered to be historically accurate.

Personally, I consider this story a parable, and like Jesus' parables they are told to make a point, and whether a parable describes an historical situation is beside that point.  When Jesus said “there was this rich young ruler,” his disciples and whoever else was listening knew that although there certainly were rich young rulers, the one Jesus was talking about was just a talking point.  The value in the story is what it tells us—or doesn’t tell us—about God. 

In the case of this scripture, perhaps it’s more of the latter, perhaps its more in the way of “doesn’t tell us” about God.  Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, in her wonderful blog “the Velveteen Rabbi,” reminds us that while some scripture answers questions, others, not so much, and that this is clearly of the latter variety.  Not only does it answer no questions, but it leads us to ask many more: Why would God ask this thing? Does God ask it, or is it a story made up for a particular point?  Maybe it really did happen, and Abraham is listening to the wrong voices?  Why doesn’t Abraham say anything?  Why doesn't he explain anything to Isaac? Why doesn't Isaac cry out when he's bound to the altar? What goes through Abraham and Isaac's heads during this traumatic scene? Why is Sarah absent?

The first line of the passage says that God put Abraham to the test. If the test was the binding, and potential sacrifice, of Isaac, did Abraham pass?   Was he supposed to be willing to go through with it, or w as he supposed to resist? What was he supposed to do, when was he supposed to do it, and what are we supposed to learn from it?

A particularly Rabbinic form of biblical interpretation, with which Rabbi Barenblat would be well familiar, seeks to answer these kind of questions.  It’s called Midrash, and though Rabbinic interpretation is every bit as complex as Christian, it can be said  that midrash "fills in the blanks" of a story in scripture, it reads between the lines, wondering about that which has been left unsaid.  It acknowledges that there might be more to the story than has actually been written down.  Which makes sense, when you think about it: surely we don't imagine that what is recorded in even the most meticulous history is the whole story?  We don't think that historical accounts of, say, writing the emancipation proclamation tell all there is to tell, do we?  I'm sure there was a fair amount of "Mr. President, are you sure you want to do that?" from his friends, or "you sure that's honest, Abe?" going on, and maybe even some "Abraham, put down that quill and come to supper.” There's always more happening than meets the historical eye, and Midrash is a way of performing controlled speculation on what that might be.

So.  With all that in mind, let's do some midrash.  Let's take one of the many questions about this passage and try to use midrashic interpretation to examine it.  And one that comes up almost immediately is "why is Abraham silent?  Why doesn't he say anything when all of a sudden, God tells him to kill his son, the one out of Sarah, upon whom depends the future of the Jewish people.  And one way of answering this is to say "well, what if he did say something?" 

And in fact, in one of the delightful volumes of midrash collected by Lewis Ginzberg at the beginning of the last century there is such a midrash, and it begins like this:  "The Lord decided to test Abraham and Isaac ... And He said to Abraham, "Take now your son." And Abraham said "I have two sons, and I do not know which of them you mean for me to take." So God said "Your only son,"  and Abraham replied "The one is the only son of his mother, and the other is the only son of his mother."  God said, gritting the divine molars, "You are to take the one you love," but Abraham said "Eh ... I love this one and I love that one."  Finally, God is forced to be particular: "Take Isaac," he said.

And it's interesting to note that this one midrashic fragment, this one, simple riff on a single question -- why doesn't Abraham talk back -- addresses a bunch of considerations.  It acknowledges that it is odd that the angel would call Isaac Abraham's only son, when everyone knows he has another named Ishmael.  It inserts Sarah into the story, where she wasn't before, and makes room for her concerns (and in fact spins them out in a later portion).  But most of all, it humanizes Abraham, allowing him to show concern through his bargaining.

And speaking of bargaining, this is not the first time have we’ve seen Abraham doing that.  Remember?  He bargained with God for the city of Sodom, weaselling God down from destroying the whole town to promising that if there is only one righteous person in all the city, it will be spared, and though it didn't work out so well for Sodom, it illustrates one of the major points about midrash: it doesn't just make stuff up.  It builds on other scriptures, using other passages to justify and shore up its interpretations.  As I said earlier, it’s controlled speculation

So.  Let's do some more.  It's clear that Abraham is stalling:  he argues with God, he pretends not to get it, then he uses the oldest dodge in the world: like Moses and Isaiah after him, he argues that he's not suitable for the task, and  "Am I fit to perform the sacrifice?" he asks, "Am I a priest?"  Then, again in time-honored tradition—see Adam—he tries to pass the buck: "Get Shem to do it, after all, he is high priest."  And God says "when you get to that place, I'll consecrate you and you'll be a priest.  Happy?"

Of course, Abraham isn't.  Happy, that is.  He is deeply troubled over what he is being told to do, and not just for himself:  "how shall I separate my son Isaac from Sarah, his mother?"  But, he's always obeyed the Lord, and he's never regretted it, God had always gotten him out of a jam -- that whole telling Pharaoh Sarah was his sister episode, for instance, and so he saddles up his donkey  . . . Slowly . . .  and calls two of his men in from the back forty and tells them they're going on a little trip, but that they have time to go say goodbye to their wives, all the time in the world, and he goes to Sarah and tells her they're going to get religious instruction for Isaac -- he doesn't have the heart (or is it the guts?) to tell her the truth,   And he tells the same thing to Isaac . . .

So they travel for three days, toward the land of Moriah, and they take the scenic route, stopping to take pictures along the way -- a smiling Isaac standing in front of the donkey, one of his servants pretending to fall into a well, that sort of thing -- and on the fourth day, though Moriah is still a long way off, he tells the servants to wait for them where they were, and Isaac and his father trudge on.

And in this midrash, Abraham is hardly complacent, but tries instead to walk a middle line ... while not disobeying God, he does all he can to delay until God, . . . what? Comes to his senses?  Finds another sacrifice?  What?  And the cool thing about this form of story-telling, of question-exploring is that we all can do it, it doesn’t take a degree in biblical studies, or ordination as a Presbyterian preacher or rabbi, though it helps to have a knowledge of the Bible.  We can all practice this imaginative form of interpretation, we can use it as a form of daily meditation, if we like, or daily bible study.

And maybe that’s actually part of the point of passages like these.  Maybe they’re there in part to get us asking those questions, to get us to think about the answers, and to understand that God is big enough to countenance them.  As Rabbi Barenblat puts it, maybe this and other passages are ambiguous and difficult for a reason: because the process of studying them, of asking the hard questions, is itself a way of learning about God, of learning to see God in difficult places.  Amen.

Promises, Promises (Genesis 18:1-15 & 21:1-7)

Today begins a month-long sojourn in the book of Genesis, with one Gospel break in the middle; we’ll be dipping first into the Abraham narrative arc and then the Jacob cycle.  Today's lesson begins in the middle of it all so it's a good that we catch up a little, and though it can be argued that, like everything else, it begins “in the beginning,” we'll start a bit later, where Abraham -- who is still called Abram -- hears God's call:  “Go from your country Haran and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing ... [so that] in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him ...”  He’s told to leave the only home he knows, the only family he knows, and set out to God knows where ... Literally, only God knows, and God's not telling Abram.  But he goes anyway.

And this is why theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls the Abram/Abraham narrative a story about faith: Abram had faith that God wouldn't let him down, that God would do right by Abram, that it all wasn't some big, divine joke, look what that idiot has done, he thought I was serious. And that wasn’t the only thing he had faith in, he had faith in a promise: that God would make of him a great nation, which God later elaborated by taking him outside and showing him the night sky, and saying “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them... So shall your descendants be.”  And he believed the Lord, our narrator says, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Now, let's get something straight: this isn't just any promise, like the promise of a thunderstorm later this week, or the promise in a pretty girl's smile ... This is The Promise, the capital-T-the and capital-P-promise promise.  It's central to the Jewish tradition, and pretty darn important in ours as well ... This is The Promise that is elaborated upon and echoed and theologized about in the entire rest of the Bible, the promise that we Christians believe we have grafted into, as Paul would put it, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And one way to read the stories in Genesis are as tales of repeated threats to the promise, followed by the repeated overcoming of those threats, and the first one happens shortly after Abram sets out from Haran.  A famine strikes the Middle East, and Abram and Sarai head south to Egypt where Abram, to preserve his own hide, tells the Pharaoh's people that Sarai is his sister, and they, in turn, tell the Pharaoh how beautiful she is, and he, in turn, takes her into his household, and this might have been the end of The Promise right then and there except for the fact that God inflicts great plagues upon Pharaoh -- innocent though he is -- and so Pharaoh, who acts with more integrity and morals than Abram, even though he is not of the "chosen people", gives her back and runs them out of town on a rail, saying "Why didn't you TELL me she was your wife?"

Well, could it be that “Father Abraham,” patriarch of both the Jews and the Muslims, is a snivelling little weasel, willing to give away his wife’s, ah . . . virtue to save himself?  Anyway, in our passage, the promise is imperilled once again, this time by Abraham's and Sarah's extreme old age -- the way our narrator puts it is that Sarah had ceased to be  after the manner of women, which, if you think about it, is a crummy thing to say, as if the only thing that makes Sarah a woman is her ability to have children, but in that culture, in that time, that's what women were considered to be: brood mares, whose worth was only to produce an heir, and of course, to step and fetch it for her husband, which, now that I think of it, might explain why he felt he could sell his wife’s favors to the highest bidder: if Sarah was his property, then so was her sexuality.

Now.  If the promise is threatened by a simple biological fact, like old age, it's also threatened by a certain complacency on the part of the man of the tent.  Abraham has got to be feeling pretty fat and sassy ... In the years since leaving Haran, He'd done quite well for himself, thank you very much, and he could afford to while away the hot part of the day lounging in the shade on his front porch.  And though it's not that he doesn't have faith in God, you understand, he still believes that Sarah will provide him an heir, even though he did ROFL (that's roll on the floor laughing for you non-techies) when God promised it the last time,  but let’s just say he feels more secure since he had his hedged by his sleeping with Hagar and producing Ishmael, who was a fine, strapping boy, perfectly suitable to be his back-up heir.  Just in case, you understand.

But if Abraham is complacent, Sarah has a full-fledged case of the ennui's as she sits there stewing in the half-dark of the tent, thinking bitter thoughts about what a mistake it had been giving the old goat her slave in the first place, how much of a nothing she felt at being unable to give him an heir, because the thing about societal expectations, about social ostracism of "the other," is that the victims tend to buy into the nastiness as well, and she more than half-believed Hagar when she called her worthless, just as she more than half-believed the sneers and furtive whispers of the other women.

So Abraham is feeling expansive and Sarah a mite bitter when the visitors show up, all dusty and sweaty from the road, and Abraham does what he’s supposed to:  he orders Sarah to make bread, tells a slave to ready the fatted calf, and invites them to stay for supper.  And this is to be expected in the ancient Middle East honor-shame culture, where honor and shame were accrued according to what you did, because one of the biggest honor-producers was hospitality, and conversely, one of the biggest shame-bringers was its opposite—not being hospitable. And so, in the ancient Middle East, hospitality was raised to an art-form, because nobody wanted to accrue shame.

Of course, there was a reason hospitality was so important to a culture of wandering desert nomads ... in that harsh environment, it was a long way between water sources, between wells, and when a traveller got to one, they were inevitably controlled by wealthy land-owners (like Abraham) and guarded by their men.  And so a tradition of hospitality  developed partly as a mechanism for maximizing the chances of everybody's survival, because after all: tomorrow it may be you who is in need of food and water.  It was kind of like the original version of pay it forward.

So Abraham scurries around to prepare a repast, ordering Sarah and the slaves to do the work, then stands off to one side to watch them eat.  And it is at this point that things get a little bit ... strange.  The visitors ask “where is your wife Sarah?” and on the outside, Abraham is all cool nonchalant, saying “There ... In the tent,” but inside he's thinking “How do they know the name of my wife?  I've never seen them before in my life.”  And then one of them makes a promise: “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son,” and is it then that Abraham gets who it is he’s talking to?  Did he tumble to the big, fat hint?  Because who but the Lord can promise a child?  Who but God can open a womb?

Meanwhile, back in the tent, where there are no visitors, and it's hot as the gates of Sheol from all the sun beating down on the skins all day, Sarah has heard it all.  And even though she knows that something extraordinary is going on, that they aren't in Kansas any more, such is her state of mind that she sloughs off the whole thing: “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”  And she laughs a quiet little laugh—no more than a chuckle, really—at the absurdity of it all.

And now the jig is up, and the narrator gives up all pretence and calls their visitor by name, it’s the Lord, of course, who asks Abraham: “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?'  Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” And maybe it’s my imagination, but I detect a little peevishness when God says: “At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”

Note that even then, our narrator has God talking to Abraham, not Sarah, but it’s Sarah who talks back: “I did not laugh,” she says, and finally, God talks to Sarah herself:  “Yes you did laugh,” and I always get this irrational thought when I read this, that if Sarah had said “No I didn’t,” God would’ve come back with “Oh, yes you did!” and they would’ve gone round and round like children, and maybe it would’ve been that way, too, but Sarah takes the better part of valor and shuts up.

But I imagine she doesn’t stop thinking . . . I certainly wouldn’t have . . . after all the times she’s been cut out of the conversation, all the times God has reiterated the promise to Abraham, God finally talks directly to her, and it’s a rebuke.  And what was God rebuking her for?  A lack of faith: Is anything too wonderful for the Lord, God had asked, and Sarah had shown that she didn’t buy it.

And so we’re back to the matter of faith, as Robert Hamerton-Kelly pointed out: faith that God will do as he had promised, faith that indeed, nothing is too wonderful for the Lord, but really: can you blame Sarah for it?  I can’t . . . she had led a hard life, full of sorrow and disappointment, caught up in a patriarchal system that made it seem perfectly all right for her husband to give her away like a prize sheep, caught up in a system that makes her believe she’s worth nothing more, living her 90 years as a part of that system, so that she herself believed she was nothing more than chattel . . . and yet, the Lord had spoken to her, even though it was a rebuke, God had talked directly to her,  and that must’ve given her hope, and maybe just a tad more faith.

When we talk about faith, we often get all Presbyterian, we often feel the need to define it and dissect it as if it’s an insect under glass.  We say that faith is more than belief, that it is, in the words of the author of Hebrews, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” and worry that and other definitions to death . . . in fact, I think I’ve preached a sermon like that a time or two.

But I think that, in the end, it is stories that teach us the best, about things like faith and hope and love.  Because faith is a living, breathing thing, and I don’t believe that one size fits all, that it is expressed differently in each and every one of us.  As Hamerton-Kelly puts it “Definitions freeze human experience like specimens in the scientist’s bottle, while stories flow like life itself, twisting and turning, like life itself.”  Humans learn through stories, from the earliest days of our childhood, we listen to them and absorb them in their endless variety.  Whatever our religion means by faith will emerge in the twists and turns of living, both our living and those of the saints who have gone before.

So, friends, let’s take some time to tell the stories of those imperfect saints, like Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and Isaac, and let faith seep into us, like water into thirsty soil, and let it produce within us a deep gladness, a deep hope in our lives that the answer to God’s question on that long ago day, the answer to “is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” is a resounding, joyful “No!”  Amen.