Trust Beyond Understanding (Proper 8A)

Marc Chagall, The Binding of Isaac

 

Trust beyond Understanding

Proper 8 Year A

2 July 2017 8 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Holy Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

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

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

“On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.”

Elena and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I witnessed the unbearable, feeling betrayed by God and wondering if he existed at all, or if so, if he were good and loving.   My mother-in-law, after a long life of hard work and joyful service, deserved, to our minds at least, the golden years with her children and grandchildren.  But cancer robbed her of that, and us of her.  My father, whose faith in God, love for others, and joy in living was such a sign for me as a young man of God’s love, also did not get what appeared his just reward.  Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease robbed him, bit by bit, of his personality and memory, and destroyed his very personhood and left his sweetheart, my mother, bereft and abandoned, a mere shadow of her former self.    

Life at times seems to be a succession of situations where God, if Good, seems absent or impotent, or if Almighty and All-present, seems to be a monster, far removed from the most basic demands of human, let alone divine goodness.  There is no way to get our heads, let alone our hearts, around it.

“God said, ‘Take your son Isaac, your only son, the one whom you love, ... and kill him … for me.’” This is a text of terror, a tale of horror.  Right up front in the Bible where you can’t miss it, this story it raises all sorts of questions, without a doubt one of the most troubling and disturbing stories of the Bible. 

But the key in understanding it is to know that this story does not attempt to explain God to unbelievers, nor attract outsiders to faith in God.   No—this story is for people already in a relationship with God.   It is not about God, but about us, and our faith.   It is about us when we run up against horrors in life that make us question God, be angry with God, and either deny God’s being there or God’s goodness. 

I had a spiritual director once who told me that love was risk.  “Love means putting your heart out there where the beloved can break it.   This is all the more the case when it comes to loving God. This is certain:  sooner or later, God will break your heart.  At least that’s how it will feel.”

Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible at Duke University, says this, 

“[T]he hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful, more often than we like to admit. … The 22^nd chapter of Genesis is the place you go when you do not understand at all what God allows us to suffer and it seems asks us to bear – and the last thing you want is a reasonable explanation, because any reasonable explanation would be a mockery of your anguish. This story … is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or deny that God cares at all, or deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind. To deny God any meaningful place in your life would be to deny your own existence. And so you are stuck with your pain and your incomprehension, and the only way to move at all is to move toward God, to move more deeply into this relationship that we call faith. That is what Abraham does: without comprehension, nearly blinded by the horror of what he was told to do, Abraham follows God’s lead, for the simple and sufficient reason that it is God who is leading – to what end, Abraham has no idea.” 

Many people read this story as if it’s about obedience and literally God testing Abraham’s faith.  But that makes it an ugly story indeed.  Many rabbis in the Talmudic tradition note that Sarah dies in the next chapter, probably of a broken heart, and that this is the last time scripture says Abraham walked with God.  If this is about obedience, then Abraham is like the defendants at Nuremberg:  “I was only doing what I was ordered to do!”  In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard says that an Abraham willingly obeying this wicked command is an Abraham whose hand is not stayed by the angel at the end.   No—this is not about obedience.  It is about trust. 

God asks him something that is against everything God has promised.  God behaves in a way that is contrary to everything Abraham knows about God.   The child Abraham is called to sacrifice is the very child through whom God’s promised blessing to Abraham would come.

Abraham goes to Moriah because he trusts, not because he obeys. The great post-Holocaust Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits, in With God in Hell, explains that this trust beyond understanding is what kept Jewish faith alive despite the Nazi mass murders.   He imagines Abraham saying to this God during the heart-broken walk to Moriah: 

“In this situation I do not understand You. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust You because it is You, because it is You and me, because it is us….

“Almighty God! What you are asking of me is terrible…. But I have known You, my God. You have loved me and I love You. My God, you are breaking Your word to me…. Yet, I trust You; I trust You.”   (Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps [New York and London: Sanhedrin, 1979], 124.

As my director told me, sooner or later, if you are close to God, God will break your heart.  That is just the nature of an intimate relationship.  When my father got sick, the Alzheimer’s was not just his illness.  He and my mother shared that terrible thing together.  When we go through hell, we go through hell with those we love, for good or for ill.   Abraham goes through this with the very God who he thinks is causing him the pain.  He does so because he loves him. 

The story says that God was testing Abraham.  But this merely expresses how things often look to us when we are suffering. It is an insult to God to say that somehow God was actually testing Abraham here, checking to see whether he would be obedient to such a horrible command.  Again, this story is about the human heart, not the heart of God.  The point is that we must trust especially when our understanding fails us.

During the Holocaust, Jews risked and sometimes suffered death by gathering a minyan, a quorum for public prayer, in the barracks of the death camps.  They risked and suffered abuse and death by circumcising their sons in the ghettoes walled in by the SS.  Elie Wiesel tells a story from his time at Auschwitz.  “Where is God?” asks one inmate on seeing the SS senselessly hang a ten year old boy.  A rabbi replies, “He’s there, on the gallows.”   They had no where else to go, no other way of acting, if they were to remain true to their deepest identity.  Like them, Abraham faces the great paradox—trust and have faith in a God who is breaking your heart, who looks to have broken every promise he has made, and even seems to demand the very thing that will destroy the hope of any promise.  Abraham can do no other.  

I think this is what Jesus called us to when he said we must take up our cross and follow him.  Remember Gethsemane’s plea, “Not my will, but yours.”  Remember Calvary’s cry, “Why have you abandoned me?”  These are not descriptions of the heart of God, not evidence as some would have it that God ruled that Jesus had to die in order to somehow sate his own blood-lust against his broken creatures.  These are descriptions of how Jesus felt, experiencing life as one of us.  And he remained true to the God he called Papa, and said was love. 

Loving the Living God, the God of Abraham and Jesus, is dangerous, fraught with risk.  Sometimes it will hurt like hell.  It will rob us of any meaning or sense.   Our heart will be broken by the one we love best.   But that is because we are crazy about God and God is crazy about us.  We will find ourselves, in the words of Dante, “midway in our life’s journey lost in a dark wood.”  The way will not be clear.  But we must descend into hell and come out the other side into joy.  Only the stark cross stands before us.  But beyond the cross, is resurrection morning.  Hidden in the bush, there is a ram.  God’s angel stands where we cannot see, ready to keep us and save us though we have no idea how.   All we need to do is in bewilderment keep on putting one foot in front of the other as we climb Mount Moriah.  All we need is trust beyond our understanding. 

Amen.