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May 17, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Genesis 22:1-14
‘Here I Am’
In recent weeks, the PBS ‘American Experience’ series has
focused on the history of Native Americans. This series is titled
‘We Shall Remain’. It tells the Indian side of
American history, a long series of wars, displacements, broken
treaties, even genocidal strategies by European Americans. We,
who felt called to some ‘Manifest Destiny’ to take this
land and develop it for our own purposes. The Pilgrims felt they
were called by God to “an errand into the wilderness,” to
escape religious persecution in Europe and start over in a new
land. American history is a great story of redemption when we
look at it from the white, European perspective. But it’s
an unmitigated disaster from a Native American viewpoint.
At the same time, we whites have long indulged romantic images of the
Native American peoples – the so-called ‘noble
savages’ that unfortunately just, well, got in our way. For
all our idealized notions of American Indians, white Americans
generally believe that they had to be marginalized for the sake of what
we call ‘progress’. We have sacrificed a lot to this
god we call ‘progress’. Anthropologists have noticed this
pattern in a variety of cultures. An individual or a group will
be driven out, killed, even ritually sacrificed, for the sake of the
people’s sense security or harmony. And then, after the
deed is done, they speak very reverentially of the person they have
just scapegoated, or people they’ve just sacrificed. In
some cases, the victim even becomes a god.
This is uncomfortable territory for us. It’s uncomfortable
for us as white Americans as we think about our history with Native
Americans. What have we done? It’s also uncomfortable
for us as Christians. Is the gospel of Jesus Christ just another
story of turning a scapegoat into a god?
The story Ted just read for us is a disturbing one. God asking
Abraham to sacrifice his son – that’s disturbing, even if
it’s only a test of his faithfulness. There were religions
around ancient Israel that did sacrifice children to the gods.
But the Hebrew Scriptures always report that as totally
repugnant. So what’s going on in this story?
The opening phrase of this story is “after these
things.” Over the years, I’ve come to realize that
it’s one key to the story. What has just happened before
this story begins? You may recall that, after many decades of
waiting, in their old age, Abraham and Sarah have finally have a child,
Isaac. But before that, in her desperation, had offered her
handmaid, Hagar, as a proxy, to have a child by Abraham. And
Hagar bore Ishmael as a son to Abraham. But once Isaac was born,
Sarah wanted Hagar and Ishmael out of there. This is another of
those Old Testament rivalries I mentioned last Sunday. Sarah
pulls rank on Hagar and insists that Abraham cast Hagar and Ishmael out
into the wilderness. Well, this is very disturbing to
Abraham. But God assures Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael will be
taken care of. In fact, Ishmael will become the father of a great
people, just as Isaac will. So Abraham permits Sarah to cast out
her handmaid and son.
So “after these things,” we’re told that God tests
Abraham, by asking him to sacrifice the only son he has left –
Isaac. A psychologist, interpreting this story, has raised the
question, is this God’s command? Or is this Abraham’s
guilt and grief over Hagar and Ishmael, working on him in unconscious
ways? We can’t really answer it, but it’s a
worthwhile question. It adds some psychological dimension.
So many stories in Genesis have strong archetypal, psychological
overtones. That doesn’t explain away the higher theological
meaning of the stories, but it adds to it. After all, whatever
God is doing in our lives, it happens by way of our hearts and minds,
our psychological make-up.
Guilt and grief are difficult for all of us. But when guilt and
grief work on us in unconscious, unacknowledged ways, they become
dangerous. They can make us do things, without knowing quite what
we’re doing. Jesus got in bigger and bigger trouble because
he kept saying things that people couldn’t stand to hear.
He kept doing things they couldn’t stand to see. Jesus
offer God’s free acceptance and forgiveness to everyone. He
offered the chance for everyone to start over together But
forgiveness suggests guilt. And starting over brings up our grief
over what we’ve already lost. And those who already
accounted themselves righteous couldn’t stand it. We still
can’t. So we put Native Americans on a pedestal – out
there in Oklahoma and further West on their reservations – while
we keep offering sacrifices to the god of progress.
So rightly or wrongly – or perhaps rightly and wrongly –
Abraham believes he has been commanded to do the unthinkable. No
story in the world leaves more space for us to fill in what’s
going on in people’s minds. We get no clue to
Abraham’s thoughts or feelings. And Isaac seems as clueless
as we are.
Reading through the passage, Ted noticed that three times, Abraham
answers, “Here I am.” The first time at the
beginning, when God calls him to sacrifice Isaac. The second
time, when Isaac asks him, where is the lamb for the sacrifice?
And the third time, when the angel stops Abraham from killing
Isaac. “Here I am.” At Life and Worship Team
this week, Dortha (?) reminded me that, when God called the boy Samuel
three times, each time, Samuel answered, “Here I am.”
I had mentioned that story in my message last Sunday. The first
two times, Samuel thought it was Eli calling. Third time, with
Eli’s help, the boy understood that it was God calling.
Maybe here in this story too, “Here I am,” spoken three
times, reveals a growing awareness, a growing consciousness of
what’s really going on. Maybe Abraham is hearing the voice
of his unconscious the first time – the guilt he hasn’t
fully worked out. Then the second time, he’s answering his
son Isaac – he’s moving out of his tortured inner dialogue
and reawakening to his flesh-and-blood son, Isaac. Abraham is
starting to reawaken, but he’s not there yet. He still
feels compelled by this inner command. Finally, the third time,
with the knife raised, the angel calls, and Abraham is delivered from
his unconscious guilt. As the story continues, God provides a
lamb (actually, a ram) for sacrifice, and that will help Abraham
release his guilt over Hagar and Ishmael. But he is not to
sacrifice Isaac, the son of promise, the son by whom Abraham will
become father of a great people.
Christians traditionally have understood this story as foreshadowing
the gospel. Jesus becomes the lamb provided by God, the sacrifice
that takes the place of all of us, who atones for the sins of the
world. I believe this is true. But it’s tricky
business. We need to handle this truth with great care. We
have to handle it consciously. If we want to accept the
forgiveness and atonement that Jesus offers, we need to bring
everything to the table. Everything we are, everything we have
done. Because the things we can’t acknowledge and admit,
even to ourselves, even in prayer – these are dangerous.
They run around in the unconscious and play havoc with our lives.
They may cause us to do more things we will regret. We may hurt
others.
When Paul says we all have to work out our salvation in fear and
trembling, it’s not because God is such an ogre. It’s
because we’re scared to be that conscious, to really face God,
because it means facing ourselves. It means pulling things out of
the shadows, out of the closet – facing up and fessing up.
It means saying again and again, “Here I am.”
“This is me, warts and all.”
Jesus faced his situation consciously. He wasn’t passive,
like Isaac, just doing as his father told him to do. Jesus could
have evaded arrest. He had every opportunity to escape
death. But by exposing himself to the worst, he gave us the
chance to see ourselves at our worst. He gives each of us the
opportunity to leave it all at the mercy seat of God and start
over. And when we make that fresh start, when we really do it
cleanly, we see not only ourselves, but each other with new eyes.
We are no longer willing to sacrifice one another to some so-called
higher purpose. The whole human race is God’s higher
purpose. This whole creation and our tending of it is God’s
higher purpose. That is how we must measure this thing we have
called ‘progress’.
“Here I am.” Those three words sum up everything our
prayer and meditation is supposed to be about. “Here I
am” – becoming present in God’s Presence. When
we say that with growing awareness of ourselves, our neighbors, the
earth on which we stand, everything changes. We resolve that
Jesus must be the last human sacrifice, the last victim, the last
scapegoat. We must do what we can to stop the unspeakable things
that have been done in the name of Christ. And so, here we
are. Let us enter into this time of open worship fully conscious,
fully together with one another, fully present to God’s Presence.
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