The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
June 29, 2008
The Rev. Steve Smith

One night, long ago, I woke from a deep sleep to the ringing of the phone. It was the kind of call I dread. On the line was a woman I knew, a parishioner, calling from a Boston hospital. Her thirteen year old son had just died, succumbing after a long and valiant battle with kidney disease. “Could I come?,” she asked.

As we held hands and prayed around the child’s lifeless body, and as I anointed his head with oil, my heart was filled with terror. Moments earlier, I had myself left my own three little ones at home sound asleep, and but for a twist of fate, any one of them could have been here lying still and cold beside me.

“Oh Lord,” I prayed that night as I drove home on the dark and empty streets, “Oh, Lord, do not put me to the test.”

For there is no greater test than this: than for a parent to give up a child. Of all the relationships life gives us, the one parents and children share is the most sacred and time-honored. This, in large part, is what makes the story of Abraham and Isaac we have just heard, at once so poignant and yet so chilling. The story is about a test, a test of relationship, a test each of us who are parents, in some measure, must face.

The story begins not with our reading, but long before, with God calling a wandering Aramean, from the distant land of Ur, a man named Abram, to be the father of a chosen people. Abram and his wife, Sarah, by this time were old and childless. But God insisted their heirs would be like the grains of sand on the seashore.

When this did not come to pass, Sarah had her maidservant, Hagar, go into Abraham’s tent to lie with him, and from that union, Ishmael was born. And so it seemed their vexing problem had been resolved.

But God was not finished. Sarah, God announced, would conceive and bear her own child. And so it was, in her ninetieth years, that Isaac was born. Now, however, jealousy between the two mothers ruled the home, and Sarah compelled Abraham to put Hagar and Ishmael out of the home, and sadly Abraham consented.

It was then that God put Abraham to the test. “Take thy son, Isaac, thine only son, whom you love,” the Lord commanded, “and take him to Moriah and offer him as a sacrifice.”
This, in itself, was not a strange request, for the people of that land regularly sacrificed their children to their gods. What was strange, more so seemingly perverse, was the cruelty in God’s command, of giving and then snatching away. And from this time, the Jews have had this prayer: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

There was nothing blessed, though, about that day, when Abraham set off for Moriah with his son. I have often wondered, if the Lord God had asked Sarah for her son, or if the Lord God had asked any mother for that matter, would the story be the same? But off they journeyed to this fearsome destination, like so many other fathers with their sons, down through the ages.

Isaac was not so young by then, and as they left the servants behind him, and began to scale the mountain, he sensed something was wrong. “Daddy,”, he said. “Yes, my son,” his father answered. “The fire and the wood are here,” Isaac went on, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” “God will provide the burnt offering,” his father responded.

What happens next, as Abraham takes his beloved son, and bind the boy, and places him on the altar, and takes the knife from its sheath, and raises it high, is an image that lives infamously in art and scripture. Who can bear to look? What loving parent would do such a thing? It is impossible to watch what comes next.

But if we can stay with the image a little longer, if we can summon courage from deep within ourselves, if we can put aside our moral repugnance, if we can hold off from rushing to the ram in the thicket that saves the day, there is a lesson for all of us who are parents of children, and all of us who are children of parents.

In our world, there is a great temptation we face in how we treat our children. On the one hand, there is the temptation to idolize our children, making them demigods, or beauty queens, indulging their every fancy, giving them an infatuated view of themselves, and thereby crippling them when they must take their place in the real world. Or, on the other hand, there is the temptation to denigrate our children, making them extensions of our own egos, or doormats for our whims, casting them off in neglect, sacrificing them on their own Moriahs..

The story of Abraham and Isaac, hard as it may be, presents us though with a third option. And that is to treat our children not as objects to venerate or denigrate, not as possessions to hold on to or dispose of, but as icons, through which the light of God shines forth, and as gifts of God, in whose stewardship we are privileged to be parents.

It brings to mind a story of myself as a father of which I am not especially proud. The challenges of discipline in childrearing have been tough over the years, at least they have been for me. It wasn’t all that hard with our firstborn, because like many firstborns, he didn’t rock the boat. But when #2, Martin, arrived, I had to reach deep into my bag of tricks. In that bag of tricks were forms of discipline I had inherited from my own parents, and by extension, from their parents going back through the generations. One of these was spanking. It was a rare event, but after exhausting every other means of discipline, I occasionally spanked Martin when he was young. That is, until the day, he turned his tear-stained eyes up at me and said: “Daddy, do you have to hit so hard?”

Something broke in me that day as a father, something akin to what broke in the heart of God first, I believe, that day on Moriah, and then, many years later, as God looked down his own dying son on Golgotha. What broke was something old and brittle, something hard and no longer useful; what broke was something that could no sustain the relationship; and what began in that moment was a deeper trust and acknowledgement that love in the end must triumph. That in the end, it is our relationships that save us. For they are our lifelines in this world, and our guides to the world to come.

The relationship between parents and children is a precious one, a sacred trust, because in this relationship, we believe God’s presence in known. But in this relationship, there is always a test. It may not be a dramatic as our story on Mt. Moriah, or as searing as the death of a child. But there is still a test. Can we let go, can we give up our many designs on our children, can we trust God enough, can we accept God’s love for us, can we make our relationship with God the ground of our being, the source of our hope, and love, and joy?

God knows there is pain in every relationship. There is pain and there is loss. William Sloane Coffin Jr., when his son, Andrew was killed tragically in a car accident, knew in his heart of hearts that even before he shed his first tear, God was already weeping. This is who God is. God is here for us. We are tested as parents, and as children, not to diminish us, not to sever the tie that binds, but always to draw us closer to the One who loves us into being, as children of parents, and as parents of children.