Do we really follow a God who asks for child sacrifice?

This article is a sermon on the Binding of Isaac, at St. Matthew’s Evening Service on October 14.  Listen to the whole thing here. Featured image is Sacrifice of Isaac, by Adi Holzer, 1997 from Wikimedia.

When I preach, I usually sit with a text and ask myself the question: What is the good news that makes a claim on us in this story? What good news is God offering us in response to all the mess and bad news that we carry today?

Our church is exploring the stories of the Old Testament in a narrative arc, from Genesis 1 to Daniel, to dig deeper into this ancient relationship between God and Humanity. One can’t go back into our history without looking at Abraham: the forefather of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–and in all these faiths, no one can escape the moment when God asks Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. It’s central to our stories about our origins, the culmination of  decades  of wandering around, waiting for a promised child–which was why I sat, struggling on a Thursday night, asking myself: “What is the Good News here?”

But each time I tried to answer the question, I was met with another question that shoved it out of the way, and that was:

Do we really follow a God who asks for child sacrifice?

An honest answer to that is that I don’t know. I want to unequivocally say no, but it’s right there in the text. God tests Abraham by asking him to take his son, his only son,  whom he loves, to Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering.

Do we really follow  a God who asks for child sacrifice?

I don’t know.

But, I do know is that we live in a world that asks for child sacrifice. We live in a world where children are offered up on the altars of capitalism, pride, and injustice all the time.

We live in a world where the childhood of our children is sacrificed to achievement–endless schedules for the sake of being somehow above average. We live in a world where children are sacrificed to the media—a honey booboo world, a “toddlers in tiaras” world.

We live in a world where children are taken from their parents at the border to prove a point—a world where unarmed black children are shot by civilians who then walk free; children sacrificed to a system that is too proud to change.

We live in a world where children get cancer and die, where women desperately desire children and miscarry again and again.

And we rage—why would God allow this to happen? Why would God ask me to walk this path? What kind of a loving God puts us through this—for if you are all powerful and all knowing, O God, surely you could have not tested me in this way.

This world lays claim on our children and takes them—either because of systemic injustice, or our own systems of idolatry, or simple, cruel, and impersonal biology. And living this life, we don’t get an explanation for why these things happen. Any attempt to simplify things with trite religious clichés are absolutely unhelpful.

And it isn’t just our children: our partners, our pets, the causes we  have dedicated our whole lives to—by loving, by existing, by being present in reality, we are put on impossible paths all the time.

I often hear the quote that having a child is like taking your heart out and having it walk around outside of you. What an incredible sacrifice to make. What a terrifying thing to be asked to do. Is it an all-powerful God, almost like a trickster, asking us to make this sacrifice to prove ourselves? Or is this the nature of real love in a messy world?

And perhaps this is the only simple part of the story: that in loving, in following, in being who we are called to be, we open ourselves up to moments when it can all be taken away for no reason what so ever.

The only way to love is to be vulnerable to the sacrifices the world puts before us.

So I will leave you with three reflections:

One: we don’t know what would have happened if Abraham had said no.

Perhaps the test was not to see if he would do this awful deed, but to walk along together. Perhaps if Abraham had fought with God—God would have said the same—“Now I know that you love your son, that you are a man of integrity and strength in love, and you believe me to be a just God, who keeps my promises, I will bless you.” Perhaps there wasn’t a right answer to this test, only a journey to be on together.

Two: It is quite likely that the sacrifice of the first born was normal and expected in the ancient world.

Perhaps in the ancient understanding, one gave the first child to the gods so that they would not take the others. Perhaps the last test that Abraham needed to complete was letting go of an old kind of religion—a religion that said God could be controlled and manipulated by sacrificial transaction.

And perhaps that was not a point in time, but a continual conversation across millennia—even in Christianity, the idea that the sacrificed son was a transaction for us is prominent to this day. Maybe even for us, we are called to let go of this transaction mentality and look instead to the walk to the mountain with God, see Jesus not as a sacrificed child, but as the one who walks with us along our impossible paths.

So, we may also be called to let go of practices that no longer serve the promise God has made to us—we may think we know what God wants, and then at the last minute hear God calling us to do something completely different.

Three: None of these things may redeem this story for you.

If you still feel rage, and devastation, and confusion, and loss when you read this story—that’s okay. We don’t have to have everything wrapped up in a bow, or a faith that is unshaken by moments like these.

It is alright for you to be where you are on this—this faith is big enough for that.