Texts: Genesis 22: 1-19; Matthew 9:35-10:8
The desert is hot and brutal. It does strange things to the mind and the soul beyond what it does to the body. People who live in the desert have long realized its hold on the spirit, but those who must traverse it look upon it with fear and trembling.
Abraham had been living in the desert. Believing he was commanded by God, he took his son Isaac to Mount Moriah, a place not really identified but which in Jewish and Islamic tradition is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; in Hebrew the name means ordained by God. The text then tells us that God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering as a test of his faith in the same God who promised to make of him a mighty nation.
The nineteenth century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard approached this text by asking a different kind of question. Rather than seeing this as a test of faith, he asked if our individual relationship with God suspends a universal ethical demand, in this case, not to kill the boy. Kierkegaard argues that for Abraham, however, it was a demand from the Absolute, that is, God, versus the demand of what seems ethical or moral. These demands are reflected in the New Testament when we are commanded to obey God rather than authority. So we are faced with the old question of whether something is wrong because it is wrong absolutely or whether something is wrong because it goes against our instincts or against the laws and moral codes we have created in society.
This past week the Middletown Board of Education passed a policy it calls “parental notification.” This policy, pushed by certain anti-LGBT+ groups reversed the New Jersey policy of respecting the choices students make for themselves and maintaining a student’s confidentiality in such decisions. In other words, school staff are now required to become the Gestapo or the Stasi, where people are expected to inform on others.
In response, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin has gone to court requesting an injunction preventing these policies from taking place as he did two weeks ago when Hanover enacted such a policy.
In this case, the basic question is what constitutes our duty towards God, especially if we feel that we are called to do something immoral, unethical, or just simply illegal. Suppose a teacher refuses to rat out the student. What will be the consequences?
These are not easy questions. Each of us must struggle with them. Sometimes there are no answers to our questions when we are faced with conflicts that run deep within us. We can only try to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul writes in Philippians, and pray that we are moving in the right direction. In the history of our country, people have struggled with the question of the duty to the Absolute, to God, versus the duty to laws established by authorities.
Next week we will celebrate Independence Day, a day conceived as John Adams put it, rebellion. The signing of the Declaration and the call to Independency as Adams put it so well, was not just an act of disobedience; it was rebellion, a rebellion called in the name of a higher authority, the inalienable rights that we are endowed with by our Creator. The patriots of another century worked out their salvation with the same fear and trembling that faces us today.
How do we work out our salvation? How do we make decisions about what is commanded of us by God, especially when they run counter to what may seem to be ethical or legal obligations? It’s an old witticism to note that the best prophets and saints are the dead ones, for they can be more easily admired from afar; that way their actions and the consequences of those actions place fewer demands on us.
Few people, for instance, saw Martin Luther King as a moral prophet in his own time. When he began the Montgomery bus boycott, he was called a rabble rouser. Memory does tricks with us; in 1963, Washington, D.C., was paralyzed by fear because of the impending march that is now seen as a lynchpin of civil rights legislation.
Look at how we respond to the prophets of our own time. We brush off William Barber, who organized the Poor People’ Campaign. We smile when we read Wendell Berry -- he’s just spouting the same old stuff about the importance of saving the land. We arrest people who bring water into the desert to save lives -- they’re just aiding illegal immigration. And we confiscate medical goods intended for Cuba -- it’s the second greatest threat to our national security. Cuba? Give me a break.
The story in Genesis is something more than a story of a test of faith. It is a parable about how we work out conflicts and struggle with our consciences and with God. The Genesis story has a happy ending; the angel of the Lord, the deus ex machina, comes down and holds the knife and they find a ram in the bushes.
What I’ve always wondered about is the relationship between father and son after Mount Moriah and whether Isaac told his mother Sarah about what happened. But that’s a story for another day. Meanwhile, we still have to wonder: What kind of God makes these demands?
Let us pray: We come to you, O Holy One, God who often commands us to do what we do not want to do, in deep humility to try to discern your will for us. Help us in our daily struggle to be faithful to your word and to give water to those who need it as Jesus instructed us to do. In the name of the One who gave freely to all, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.