Preaching on:
Genesis 29:15–28

There are all kinds of different families, but one thing most families have in common is that they are a place of promise. For many of us family is all about relationships. It’s about love. It’s holidays and special events together. It’s friendship, support, stability: the people you can count on. It’s the next generation—kids. It’s also grandparents, and great-grandparents, patriarchs and matriarchs—heritage. These are the aspirations, the promise of family, and we do our best to invest in this promise and we trust that we can rely on this promise in our time of need.

Jacob has a great aspiration for his family. As we heard last week, God visited Jacob in a dream and told him that his offspring would become as numerous as the dust of the earth and they would inherit a promised land. Jacob had been chosen—his family had been chosen—for a great promise. But, boy, what an inauspicious and traumatic way for that promised family to begin.

On the day that should have been a milestone in the keeping of that promise, on a day that should have been a day of celebration after years of hard work and devotion—Jacob and Rachel’s wedding day—there is a trick (the old switcheroo) which is really more than a trick, isn’t it? It’s an betrayal, an assault,  a heartbreaking trauma. I mean really—put yourself in Jacob’s shoes, into Rachel’s, into Leah’s. A day of love and promise is transformed through alcohol and sex and deceit into a day of lasting trauma for this budding young family.

And that’s the dark side of the promise, the dark side of family. I’m not being overdramatic. Almost every family—yours and mine—has its secrets, its betrayals, its lies, its conflicts, estrangements, abuse, addictions—broken promises—trauma. This story this morning is a particularly salacious example, but even boring families while they are working to pass on the promise to the next generation, somehow also manage to pass on the trauma.

I spent Friday and Saturday with my extended family up in Rhode Island. It was a family reunion of sorts. We were in from Mexico, California, New York, and New Jersey. The event that brought us all together this weekend is that tomorrow morning my aunt and uncle’s house—their home of more than four decades, the childhood home of my two cousins—is going on the market. My aunt and uncle both recently died within a year of one another, which came as a shock to us all. And so it’s time to clean out the house and say goodbye and spend some time together as a family.

The clean-out resulted in the kitchen table of my dad’s house being covered in old photos and memorabilia. And to sort through it all we needed to pull out all of the photos and memorabilia from my mom’s side of the family which we organized after she died. So, there are photos and documents and letters and childhood drawings and baby shoes in piles on the table going back for more than a century. And Romey and Felix (my two boys) are running around the table trying to grab things off it with their grubby little hands because they know that there’s a treasure up there that they can’t quite understand yet—a record of their family: a triumph of promise.

A few highlights:
A newspaper article from a Boston paper titled “Wedded on Shipboard after 3,000-Mile Trip” telling the story of my great-grandparents’ immigration and wedding.

A love letter from my grandfather to my grandmother that he wrote to her from the Pacific on a Thanksgiving Day near the end of WWII. His perfect penmanship on unlined paper that doesn’t give out for the entire six pages. He tells her he didn’t get any turkey in the mess that day, but then he goes into a story about spending the day on the beach. He’d never seen bigger waves than on that day. And he describes with the eye and the pen of a poet the beauty of the water, of the coral, of the warships sailing past, of watching his friends get pounded by the surf while he sits on the rocks wearing all their wristwatches. He tells her he has so much to be thankful for. He’s thankful the war is over, and he’ll be coming home soon. He’s thankful he survived it. And his brother survived it. He’s thankful that a girl like her loves him, and he’s thankful for the baby she’s carrying after his visit home on leave, and he’s thankful for the family they’ll be once he’s back home with her.

And, of course, all the baby pictures. We have baby pictures going back four generations. And it’s wild to look at a baby picture more than a century old and to see a resemblance to the baby sitting on your lap trying to put that priceless old photo in his mouth.

But these triumphs of our family aren’t the whole story, are they? No, of course not. I have the best family. The best family! I really do. I’m very lucky. But even my blessed and healthy family has its trauma. And that story is laid out on the table as well.

My great grandparents who got married onboard that ship? Well, there are stories and pictures of my great-grandmother all over the table but about the only one of my great grandfather is that photo from the Boston paper. We think he was bipolar. And in the days before any kind of medicine was available, he was locked away in an institution where he died. And the shame and the poverty and the loneliness and pain my grandmother and her brothers and sisters experienced were a trauma that continues to influence our family in subtle ways.

And that love letter from my poetic grandfather to my grandmother? In photos of him as a young family man, he always looks like the king of the world. He wears his hat rakishly, he cocks his head, he loves his pipe. But in the pictures of my grandfather in my childhood (as I knew him) there is a vacant look in his eye. He died very young from Alzheimer’s—a trauma which has literally been passed down through generations in my family. We lost my aunt exactly the same way we lost her father. We see it in great uncles and aunts, and in cousins and second cousins too. And as we sit around the table, we know it will probably go that way for some of us. It may go that way for our kids. It may go that way for theirs. A genetic trauma, literally passed down from generation to generation.

And those baby pictures? My cousin Mike has hundreds of pictures in the pile. So does my cousin Pam. So do I. So does my sister, Christina. But there’s not one baby picture of my older brother Josh in this vast pile. Not one. Because my mother got pregnant out of wedlock. The father of her child was black and so her son would be black. She was sent away to a Catholic home for embarrassed young women who were hidden away until they gave birth, and then their children were taken away from them and put into foster homes and Catholic orphanages and hopefully adopted. It was a lifechanging, even life-defining pain and trauma for my mom and for my brother. And it was a secret so big that it leaked toxically into my relationship and my sister’s relationship with my mom before we ever even knew about Josh.

And, of course, there’s more in that pile of memories than this. More triumph. And more trauma. And that, I think, is every family. Even God’s chosen family experiences trauma and brokenness. Jacob tricks his older brother out of his birthright and his blessing. Then Jacob gets tricked by getting an older sister when he thought he was getting the younger sister. This creates not just a love triangle, but the dreaded love pentagon because there are also two handmaid slaves who Jacob is sleeping with and having children with. Unsurprisingly, the 12 sons from this pentagonal family will not all get along. And the older brothers will plot to kill one of the youngest brothers. They don’t kill him, but they do sell him into slavery in Egypt. And this act leads the descendants of all 12 brothers to be enslaved in Egypt. You see? Trauma really is generational. It gets passed on. We often think, “I’ll never be like my mom or dad,” and then we realize that we have unintentionally recreated in our lives so many of the traumatic patterns and decisions that we were trying to escape from!

Yet God uses our families, with all their imperfections, to fulfill promises. God can help us redeem our stories of trauma into testimonies of hope. Yes, my great-grandfather died in an asylum. And my sister cofounded an organization that fights against inhumane immigration detention policies, and fights for immigrants who die in detention. My grandfather and many others in my family have been lost way too young to the terrible disease of Alzheimer’s. And one of my cousins studied neurobiology in order to understand and to help treat the disease. And there is not one baby picture of my brother Josh, but there are hundreds of baby pictures of his daughter, Frana, because he and Mom found one another and reunited despite the obstacles.

We can’t erase the pain of past generations, but we can choose to break destructive cycles in our families. Part of the promise of a family is the call to heal one another. May we have faith to embrace the complicated and sometimes deeply traumatic stories of our families. May we have faith to heal and to be healed. If we can do that, then the promise of our families can always be victorious over the trauma of our families. Trauma leaves its mark on every family; God's grace rewrites the story into one of hope and promise.

Preaching on:
Genesis 25:19–34

While Rebekah is pregnant the two babies in her womb are so active, it feels like they’re fighting in there—wrestling, struggling with one another. It’s so bad, she loses hope and she wonders if she can keep going. She prays to God about it, and God has very little comfort for her: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other: the elder shall serve the younger.”
 
When Rebekah gives birth, it is indeed twins—two sons. The first son emerges all red and hairy, which is certainly unusual. He’s named Esau. The second son is born just after Esau and holding onto his older brother’s heel. This son is named Jacob, which comes from a verb meaning, “to follow at someone’s heel,” but it can also mean “to usurp”: to seize something that isn’t yours, to take over something that doesn’t belong to you. So, right from the very start, we know that these two brothers are fated for an epic, maybe even mythic conflict.
 
As we read on, Esau seems a bit simple minded while Jacob reminds me of Alexander Hamilton: “I am not throwin’ away my shot!” Esau sells his birthright to his brother for a bowl of lentil stew. Jacob is only too happy to oblige him. Later on, Jacob and Rebekah will trick Isaac into giving his final blessing (intended for Esau) to Jacob instead by covering Jacob in goat skins so that when the blind old Isaac laid his hands on Jacob he would think it was actually his hairy older brother.  What’s going on here?
 
Rabbis and preachers and theologians have been fascinated by Jacob and Esau for thousands of years now. To give you one famous example, Saint Augustine believed that Jacob represented the saved and that Esau represented the damned. Well, from here in July 2023, when last month was the hottest June ever recorded in human history, and when last week was the hottest week ever recorded in human history, and here in the year when the hot topic on everybody’s mind is artificial intelligence and the effects it’s going to have on our future, I’d like to add my own interpretation to the story of Jacob and Esau.
           
Remember that Genesis is a book of origin mythologies. There’s the creation story from Genesis 1, there’s the creation story of Genesis 2, and then there’s the recreation story of Noah’s Ark. And then there’s the stories of all these original great ancestors: like Abraham and Sarah, like Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Esau. These stories of origin told the ancient Israelites (and tell us) where we come from, why things are the way they are, and (potentially) where we’re headed. 
           
I think the story of the conflict between Jacob and Esau is the ancient story of the conflict between humanity and nature, between civilization and wilderness. Esau is born hairy, like a caveman, like an animal. He’s also red. Now, we think of the color of the Earth as being dirt brown, but to the ancient Mesopotamians the color of the Earth was clay red. One of Esau’s other traditional names is Edom, which is basically just a variation of the name Adam, the original human.
 
Esau is a hunter, a man who lives in the fields, just like all of our ancestors did before the beginning of agriculture. Jacob lives in tents like a civilized person. And he’s described in this translation as “quiet,” which is an interesting choice. It’s more commonly translated “perfect” or “upright.” Today we might describe a person as “polite,” or “civil,” or “well-mannered.” Jacob has evolved into the world of morality and appearances. He knows how to think, he knows how to present himself, his mama raised him right. He is civilized.
           
Esau lives and dies by what he can hunt. If the game disappears, he doesn’t eat. He comes into Jacob’s tent famished, and Jacob has bread and lentil stew—food that requires a civilization to plant, to grow, to harvest, to grind, to dry, to bake and to cook.
 
Esau was born first. Hunters and gathers come before farmers and herders and cities. But Jacob is surpassing his older brother. And he’s determined to take his brother’s birthright. He’s determined that human civilization will inherit the Earth and its resources from the natural world. And it’s easy to take that birthright away. Because of course the patriarchal system of primogeniture—where the firstborn son inherits everything—is itself an invention of civilization, and Esau can’t possibly understand its implications.
 
Famously or infamously, Native Americans sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24 worth of civilized junk that the Dutch traders didn’t really want anyway—beads and trinkets, as the story goes. This story may be just as mythological as Jacob and Esau’s. And it’s similar in another way as well. It’s the story of “civilized” people trying to blame indigenous or prehistoric people for their own demise due to their inability to value what they have through a “civilized” understanding of things.
           
For thousands of years now civilization has been at war with the natural world. It’s not hard to understand the animosity civilization felt for the natural world in the beginning. The natural world was harsh and unforgiving. Yes, it provides everything we need to survive, but it can also kill you without any warning. You are not in control of nature. Nature is in control of you. Farming, herding, cities, culture, technology—all of these developments of civilization are an attempt to take over the natural world, to control it, to subdue it and have dominion over it, as Genesis 1 famously puts it.
           
Before civilization, nature could have destroyed humanity. One scientific study suggests that 70,000 years ago volcanic activity led to a change in climate that reduced the human population to about 40 breeding pairs—an endangered species. But here in 2023, we are now well past—centuries past—the tipping point where nature threatens to destroy us. Instead, it is we who threaten to destroy nature, and if we do, we’re likely to destroy ourselves as well. Climate change is a big one, of course, but it’s not just climate change. It’s over population, wilderness and habitat loss, overfishing, overhunting, overfarming, pollution, forever chemicals and plastics in the water, in the soil, in the air, in our bodies, and yes, still nuclear war.
 
So, perhaps for the sake of nature, which has been more than subdued by us and has become threatened by us, and for the sake of ourselves, it’s time for us to go back to the story of Jacob and Esau and question the circumstances by which we have stolen the natural world’s birthright. A few thousand years ago this story must have seemed like a scrappy and civilized thing to do. It may have been funny to laugh at dumb ol’ Esau for not having the wits to bake himself a loaf of bread. But from the perspective of 2023, it seems like just another example of human hubris—excessive pride and overconfidence combined with shortsightedness that ultimately leads to a predictable downfall.
 
As Christians, isn’t stewardship of the earth one of our core values? Isn’t the natural world and even the wilderness one of the places where we can most intimately connect to God and hear God speaking? And isn’t excessive, short-sighted pride that harms ourselves and our neighbors precisely the kind of sin we want most to examine, confess, and cut out of our lives? Isn’t it possible that we would just all be happier and less anxious, if we lived in a civilization that was not at war with nature? Isn’t it possible that we’d all be happier and less anxious, if we lived closer to nature and further from the somewhat bizarre goals of modern civilization—money, and stuff, and constant progress?
 
And I’ll go one step further. We stole the birthright from the natural world. And for thousands of years, the second son of civilization, had a new and empowering vision of a human future—a human future. We didn’t always know exactly where we were going. We weren’t always progressing by leaps and bounds. But we believed in civilization as the future of humanity. As recently as the mid-twentieth century that vision for humanity’s future was bold, hopeful, and (although always involving change), it was human—not alien to us, not artificial, not empty to us.
 
But I have a sense that in our culture today we no longer have any real human vision of our own human future. What will it be like to be human 100 years from now? Most of us today really have no idea, no vision of it, no hope for it, no sense that it will even happen at all, or even any sense that we have any control whatsoever over what the world will be like in a century. Right? That’s something relatively new for our civilization. Without a vision for a human future, we have lost the birthright we stole from nature. We stole the birthright in order to ensure a human future. But now we don’t know what a human future even looks like. We don’t know if there even is a human future.
 
And now with the advent of AI, there’s this new threat to human civilization, again of our own making. At the end of May, a group of industry leaders from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic (all the people making AI) that AI poses a risk of extinction to humanity on the order of pandemics and nuclear weapons. There’s a sense with AI, sort of like the creation of the atom bomb, that civilization itself, apart from humanity, is making its own progress. We’re not in control of it. There’s a sense from those in both projects that if we didn’t do it, someone else would have. It’s like we see the invention of these new technologies as inevitable, as if humans can’t control them. We don’t think we have control over our own futures. And it’s literally coming true. Soon our technologies may actually be making decisions for us and about us that we’re no longer capable of making for ourselves.
 
It's not Esau who despised the birthright we stole from the natural world. It is we who despise the birthright we invented for ourselves—that we would create a civilization that would ensure a human future. We’ve lost it.
 
So, maybe it’s time for us to give it back—back to the Earth. If we don’t know where our civilization is leading us, let’s stop following it. And let’s reimagine a human future, not where we turn into a bunch of luddites and go back to hunting and gathering—that’s impossible, but in which we dedicate ourselves to bringing our civilization within the boundaries of the natural world, in which we imagine a future for humanity that is more in touch with the environment than it is with markets and commodities and technologies, in which we’re more connected to nature than we are to the internet or to social media, where we’re more interested in the profound intelligence of the Earth and its ecosystems than we are in the intelligence of our machines. That is a vision of a human future. And we know we need it. And we know where we need to start. But the question is, will we do it? Will you do it?
 
Will you take up the great work of building an ecological civilization that draws us back to nature, back to ourselves, back to God’s creation, and back to a vision of a human future?

Preaching on:
Genesis 24

The 24th chapter of Genesis, which we just read selections from, is often referred to as “The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.” This chapter is 67 verses long and the actual “marriage” only happens at the very end, in the 67th verse. The other 66 verses tell the story of everything that had to happen before the marriage—before Isaac and Rebekah went into the tent together, joined with one another, loved and comforted one another.

And what has to happen before a one-verse union? 66 verses of hoping, longing, searching, negotiating, consenting, and journeying—always journeying into the unknown. First Abraham had to desire to find a wife for his son, Isaac, from back in the land of his birth. It would have been much easier to simply find a wife for Isaac in the place where they were living. But Abraham longed for something more.

He made his servant swear to him to accomplish his dream. And Abraham’s servant had to make a long and difficult journey with a nearly impossible task—to convince the family of some young woman that they should send her far away to the home of a man who left long ago to marry (sight unseen) this man’s son. It would have perhaps been easier to at least bring Isaac along for the trip to court the young lady, but the servant leaves him at home and instead brings gifts, and his words, and his unwavering loyalty—everything he has—and asks this family to use their imaginations and to take a flying leap of faith—into the unknown.

And, finally, Rebekah herself then had to consent to the journey—but it was much more than that, of course. This incredible journey required more than a simple nod of the head; it required a person who could say YES to the unknown with every fiber of her being without even a delay of a single day, without even a single hour to consider it. She had to already be prepared, to already be filled with hope and faith, with confidence, and with a desire to become more, in order to be ready to answer such a call. Her heart was filled with a longing for love and a trust in God that allowed her to say yes to this journey before she was even asked.

All of this preparation had to happen in the 66 verses before Isaac and Rebekah could finally enjoy one another’s company, before they could join with one another in physical and spiritual union, in marriage, in the tent. Now, perhaps, after all this buildup, perhaps, you found that when we finally get to the actual “marriage” it’s a little anticlimactic. One verse in the tent? That’s all we get? I get it, But, come on, let’s give these kids a little privacy, OK? This isn’t a romance novel. It’s not 50 Shades of Gray, for goodness sakes. It’s the Holy Bible. All kidding aside, it is interesting that after 66 long verses full of the desire and the willingness to embrace the unknown, that when the marriage actually happens, it happens in a tent with the flaps closed and we are the ones who are now asked to use our imaginations, we are the ones left to imagine a beautiful, powerful unknown—a Mystery.

Now I don’t know if the story of the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is pure history, or pure myth, or a little bit of both, but what I am certain of is that it is written in a way that is meant to spiritually inspire and instruct us. This story leaves us a little unsatisfied. It leaves us wanting to peek inside the tent, to see what’s going on in there that was worth all that trouble.

Because the story is given to us in a way that it is about more than Isaac and Rebekah, it’s about our spiritual longing, our desire to seek God in the unknown, journeying far and wide, preparing ourselves, and saying YES to our lives and our callings with every fiber of our beings, all leading us to a tent of our own—a place or a moment where we connect intimately and soulfully with God, a moment perhaps in which we realize that God is in us and we are in God—the great paradox of human being: that we are majestic, miraculous individuals who can only become complete when we join with the infinity of God; that we are all the universal Breath who can only become fully realized when we know ourselves through the One who breathes each breath.

The irony in all this is that we are a people who understand and live out the first 66 verses, but we do not often allow ourselves the joy of the 67th verse. We do allow ourselves the experience of that union, that holy presence of God.

We’re the kind of church that attracts seekers, right? Now there’s nothing wrong with being a seeker. In fact, our scripture reading this morning makes it very clear—whatever else you are, you must be a seeker, a longer, a journeyer. Many of us are seekers (certainly this is a part of my story) because we have come to feel dissatisfied by the absolute certainty of the dogmas of the faith.

There’s no absolute certainty in our scripture reading this morning. No one breaks out a scroll and says, “Look, it’s written right here, you must go. So, go. It’s a no-brainer.” There’s faith. There’s hope. There’s longing. But no absolute certainty of the nitty-gritty details of how or even if everything is going to work out. In fact, let’s face it, if everyone in this story were absolutely certain, rather than making these big romantic gestures, and taking these enormous risks, it would be a boring story. Because stories of people who are absolutely certain are only edifying to people who are absolutely certain, but people who are absolutely certain don’t need edifying stories, because they’re already absolutely certain. In our realization that there is no absolute certainty to faith we become (like Abraham, like his servant, like Rebekah) seekers.

So, we realize that certainty is less spiritually mature than hope, than longing, than seeking. That’s good. We’re on the right path. But the mistake we often make nowadays is to come to believe that uncertainty is somehow the goal. So, we seek and seek and seek, for 66 verses, and for 66 verses more. We journey and we journey and we journey, and we don’t remember that the goal is the marriage—the tent. Imagine if after all that, after Rebekah finally put on the veil and went out to Isaac that Isaac didn’t take her into the tent and take off the veil. Imagine if they just all got back on their camels and started seeking all over again. Oftentimes that’s us. We miss the 67th verse.

The goal of all our seeking is something REAL. Uncertainty is the path, not the goal. Maybe we never learned of the promise of the Mystery in that tent. Maybe we haven’t realized and understood this paradox: that the capital-M Mystery which must always remain Unknown to the parts of us that desire certainty, can be known through an experience that cannot be explained. It can only be experienced in the tent; it cannot ultimately be seen from the outside. Your journey is a journey to the tent. You must enter it yourself. You must experience it yourself.

This realization—that our escape from certainty is meant to eventually lead us to an experience of the Mystery of God—is a big one. It’s a shift of spiritual consciousness. And for those of us who have spent time (maybe years, maybe decades) uncertain about God, it makes God real again. And one of the most basic Sunday school lessons a child can receive prepares us for the growth: that it is not just we who long for God, it is God, fist and foremost who longs for us. It is not just our longing for God that gets us to the tent. It is the fact that God has prepared that tent for us, and God has sent the servant out on the journey for us because God longs for us first.

So beloved, where do you meet God? Where is your tent? Is it prayer? Is it meditation? Is it worship? Is it down at the beach? Is it in service to others? Is it in studying, reading, exercising, yoga, gardening? Beloved, it could be anywhere, but it's got to be somewhere. You’ve got to be headed somewhere. Maybe you don't know exactly how you're going to get there, but the tent is real because God is real. Yeah. We long to be something more and God longs to be that something more for us. And as we navigate the 66 verses of our lives filled with hope and faith and seeking, let us remember that the ultimate goal is not perpetual uncertainty, but a profound union, a profound experience of the presence of God.

We long to be something more. And God longs to be that for us. As we navigate the 66 verses of our lives, filled with hope, faith, and seeking, let us remember that the ultimate goal is not perpetual uncertainty but a profound union, a profound experience of the presence of God. Let us enter the tent of our own spiritual encounters, where the Mystery unfolds, and where we discover our truest nature, meaning, and purpose.

Preaching on:
Genesis 22:1–14

Abraham is a fascinating figure. He’s portrayed in Genesis as a righteous and faithful man totally committed to his relationship with God. He’s brave and decisive when it comes to battle, but he’s also a compassionate peacemaker who prefers compromise to conflict. He admirably shows compassion to strangers through the hospitality of his table—he is willing to run out of his tent in the heat of the day to welcome in dusty travelers, wash their feet, and feed them. He’s so compassionate he’s willing, in one story, to argue with God to spare the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities God has decided to destroy. And he’s so skilled in his argument that he cools God’s anger and apparently changes God’s mind. He’s a sly trickster, capable of persuading and manipulating great powers through clever reasoning or even by bold and audacious deceptions. There are many ways to admire Abraham, but let’s face it nobody’s nominating this guy for Father of the Year. 
           
And maybe we just want to leave it at that. We don’t want to associate with anyone who would even consider participating in human sacrifice, let alone child sacrifice, let alone the sacrifice of his own child! Fair enough. We also don’t want to associate with a God who would encourage child sacrifice, even as a joke or a trick or a test. “Just kidding, Abraham! You passed the test! You can put the knife down now. Man, you should see your face!” Whaaat?
 
It’s strange to think that God might prefer an obedient child murderer to a headstrong almost-anything-else. If I was in Abraham’s position, that realization alone would be enough to drive me mad—that the God of love and justice and morality, the God of care and compassion for the least of these, was actually a God so transcendent, so absolutely other, so powerful and so alien to us, that even the most obvious moral truths (like don’t kill your kids) could not be relied upon to satisfy Him. He could ask anything (ANYTHING) of you at any time and you would have to comply. That’s scary. That’s a horror story.
 
We’ve been taught in the Christian tradition—taught through Jesus really—that God is a loving Father, who can be relied upon to care for us, to give us good things, and to (more or less) make sense. You don’t always get what you ask for, but whatever you do get is going to fall within a range of predictability. So, when we hear someone say, “God told me to kill my family,” we are certain, absolutely certain, that that person is just crazy. We don’t believe it at all. I don’t believe it at all, and neither should you. God wouldn’t ask that of anyone for any reason. But God asked it of Abraham. What?
 
The easy thing here for us would be to dismiss it. Let’s just skip that part. Bunch of ancient superstition. Another way Christians deal with this is through the sanitizing power of orthodoxy. If I were preaching that sermon to you right now, I would simply tell you that Abraham was the pinnacle of faithfulness, willing to give everything to God, and we should emulate that; and that God was good and merciful by not ultimately requiring Isaac’s sacrifice; and we wouldn’t talk about all the disturbing and weird stuff that we would all feel underneath the surface. We would label all that stuff “doubt” and, again, we would just skip that part.
 
Because we want to be in control. I believe that when you encounter something holy, like Holy Scripture, you are by definition not in control. God’s in control of Holy. Not me, not you. And when we enter into the Holy space of scripture or anything else God can do whatever God likes—we don’t know what’s going to happen. What don’t know what the message will be. An exclusively “literal” reading of scripture and orthodox interpretations of scripture that hog up all the space within a reading, are ultimately human attempts at controlling the Holy, at controlling God, of setting boundaries beyond which we are refusing to let God go. There are rules here, we say. And they’re our rules. And we expect God to follow them.
 
But that’s not the way that Abraham sees things. Even though he’s a legendary trickster who has succeeded in arguing with God in the past, ultimately Abraham knows that he is not in control. And Abraham knows that there will arrive moments in every life where nothing is fair, where nothing makes sense, where everything we thought we could rely upon is yanked out from underneath us. There comes a time in every life where we will be called to sacrifice something we do not want to sacrifice. There will come a time in every life where there will be a loss so great that nothing can make sense of it. And when that moment comes, what will do?  Whose example will you follow?
 
This week, Ralph Yarl, the 17-year-old child who, back in April, was shot twice (once in the head) for ringing the doorbell at the wrong home while he was trying to pick up his younger siblings, he made his first public appearance since the shooting on Good Morning America. Watching the interview, I was struck by how much has been taken from young, beautiful, good Ralph Yarl and how none of it, none of it, makes any sense.
 
Yarl describes the moment his attacker opened the front door to the house and thinking, “This must be the family’s grandpa.” And then he saw the gun and he froze in fear. And he thought, “He’s not going to shoot me. He’d have to shoot through the glass door.” He’s not going to shoot me. It wouldn’t make any sense. And then he shot him. Twice. Once in the arm and once in the head. And it changed Ralph Yarl’s life forever.
His mother said that her son took the SAT in the 8th grade, but now his brain has slowed down. “A lot has been taken from him,” she said. But Ralph Yarl had no harsh words for his attacker. He wants justice, but he says he doesn’t hate him anymore. He says that he’s just a kid. He’s going to go on with his life doing the best he can and doing the things he enjoys.
 
I worry for Ralph Yarl. I worry for the headaches he’s suffering from. I worry about the horrible emotional trauma he’s suffered. I worry about his brain injury and everything that’s been taken from him. But I don’t worry about Ralph Yarl’s soul. Because Ralph Yarl has faced that terrible altar of irrationality, that altar where nothing makes sense, where no amount of arguing or reasoning or resistance can save you, where something vitally important to you is taken away. Ralph Yarl has faced that altar and “given it up to God.”
 
I don’t think our scripture reading this morning is about needing to be willing to become child sacrificers for God, if that’s what God requires of us. We don’t believe that God requires that. Because there is no reason for it and there is no excuse for it. But Ralph Yarl is a child who was shot in the head. And there was no good reason. And there is no excuse. And it doesn’t make any sense. And though he survives, a lot was taken away from him. It happened. And for Yarl to heal and move on with his life, he can’t get stuck in regret and bitterness. And so he has walked up to the altar that can’t be negotiated with, holding something precious, something no one, not even God had a reason or a right to ask for, and he has had to leave it there, to let it go, to give it away.
 
There come times in our lives where we are asked to participate in our own loss, to participate in a loss that isn’t right, that isn’t fair, that isn’t moral, that we want no part of. In my own life, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I scribbled down as much information as I could—Stage IV Rhabdomysarcoma or RMS. When I was alone, I typed it into Google and started searching for mortality rates. The statistics for Stage I RMS stopped me cold. The statistics for Stage IV were unambiguously devastating.
 
We took my mom to Dana Farber Cancer institute in Boston, about an hour’s drive from my parents’ home in Rhode Island. And the doctors looked everything over and one of them said to me very gently, very tactfully, “There are wonderful cancer doctors in Rhode Island, who I trust completely. I think your mom will be more comfortable closer to home.” I knew what she was really telling me: “There’s nothing I can do for your mom here that anyone else can’t do for her. It’s just a matter of time. And very soon the drive you just took up here is going to be impossible for your mom.” And I realized that even as I was doing everything I could do to save my mom, I also needed to do everything I could do to prepare for her pain, her suffering, and her death. I was being called on to participate in my mom’s death. You have no right, God, to ask me for that. No right! And yet, it’s a nearly universal human experience.
 
About a year later, my mom was hospitalized and in terrible shape. The doctors had had to take yet more heroic measures to save her life—she had nearly died. And this was after radiation, chemo, major surgery, and multiple procedures. She was suffering and nothing was getting better, and she didn’t want to be stuck in the hospital. And when I visited her, she told me, “I think I’d be better off dead.” And she didn’t say it with any depression. She was standing at the altar of irrationality, where she was forced to confront a terrible reality that could not be fixed. And she was asking me to stand there with her. And I said, “Mom, when you see your doctors next you can tell them that you’re feeling like the time has come to go to hospice, and you can ask them if they agree that the time has come.” And she felt better. And that’s what she did. And the doctors agreed. And she went home to die. She was able to lay her life on the altar. And I had to do it too. And everyone who loved her had to do it or is still struggling to do it.
 
That’s what I think Abraham’s story is telling us: that you have to be willing to part with the things you love most, the things it is most unfair to ask of you. Not just to part with them, but to participate in the reality that is taking them from you. And in the midst of that terrible journey to the altar of irrationality where no human effort can save you, you need to remain faithful and not lose hope in God. That’s what Abraham achieves. And it’s far easier to simply say, “We don’t believe in child sacrifice. God would never do such a thing,” but the deeper truth lies in the willingness to face the incomprehensible and the inexplicable and the unacceptable. It’s in those moments when our faith is tested, and the world seems to crumble around us, that we are called to trust in the God’s ultimate goodness, even when we cannot understand God’s strange ways.
 
Faith is not always neat and tidy. It is a messy, uncomfortable, and often bewildering path. And you don’t know what is going to be asked of you. But you can be certain that it’s not all going to be nice or fair or easy. But it is also a journey of hope, of redemption, and the unshakeable belief that God is with us, even in the darkest of times, in the most difficult of losses. May we find the courage to face the altars of irrationality in our own lives, knowing that God who walks beside us, offering strength and grace, contains and cares for everything that is lost. And may we, like Abraham, trust in the goodness of God, even when God’s ways test our faith.