February 25, 2024
Second Sunday of Lent, February 25, 2024 – Genesis 22:1-2, 9A, 10-13, 15-18; Romans 8:31B-34; Mark 9:2-10
How many of the boys and girls here in church this morning heard the First Reading very, very clearly? They got the story. I’m going to ask you a question. In your mind, when you heard the story, how old do you think Abraham’s little boy was in the story? The reason I am asking is because there are famous paintings, and in some of the famous paintings, he’s a little boy. In other paintings he’s a teenager. And in other paintings he’s already a young adult. Because we just don’t know how old he was. But it seems like a very sad story, doesn’t it?
In order to understand the story, there are some things we have to know. The first one is that we haven’t heard the whole story. You see, over the course of three years in our church, we read to our people about 60% of the Bible. But, in order to make it easy for us to do that on Sunday morning, if we have a long story - like this one is in the Bible - we cut out pieces of it and just give you the highlights. But sometimes we cut out important pieces. And here’s one of the important pieces that we cut out. It says that, “When they were going on their journey, Isaac said to his father, Abraham, ‘We’ve got the wood for the sacrifice. Where are we going to get the animal for the sacrifice?’ And Abraham said to Isaac, ‘Don’t worry. God will provide.’” That’s what was left out of the story. But there’s some other interesting things about the story, if you open up your Bible. Nobody in the place where Abraham and Isaac were living didn’t know what Abraham was going to do. It was a terrible thing, sacrificing a child to God. But why did nobody object? Not even his mommy, Sarah, objected. All through the story of Abraham, Sarah is a loudmouth. She’s always complaining to Abraham about something. But here, when you’d think she would complain, not a word. This is the reason why.
In the place where they were living, in the time when they were living, everything depended on good crops and good animals. And so, they prayed, all the people in that area, to their gods. For good weather. For the wheat and the grain. And for their cows and their lambs to give birth to young. Because, if it didn’t happen, within a year or two everybody would be hungry, and people would die of hunger. And so, they reasoned, wrongly, but they reasoned, if we sacrifice one of our children - the thing that we hold most dear - then we’ll be able to save everybody. A big sacrifice but a necessary one.
That’s what Abraham was going to do. But maybe not. Because here’s another line that was left out of our reading today. When they get to the Mount of Moriah, what Abraham says to the servants is, “You wait here. We (meaning him and his son) are going over there to pray and then we are coming back.” If we are coming back, Abraham has no intention of really killing his son. It’s just pretend. Why is it just pretend? Because Abraham believes that if he follows what God says, God will provide a different kind of sacrifice. And sure enough, that’s what happens. At the last minute, there is a ram caught by his horns in the bushes. And they sacrifice the ram.
Why is this story in the Bible? It seems like a terrible story. It’s in the Bible because the people who wrote the book in which the story appears thought it was a terrible thing that anybody should ever sacrifice a child. In order to teach that, they told a story about their greatest ancestor refusing to go along instead of to get along. But it’s easier to teach by stories than by shaking your finger and saying, “Don’t you do that.”
So, what do you think is the takeaway for us in the twenty-first century? Well, the first thing is a lesson for all of us. Before you make a decision about anything, be sure you know the whole story. Otherwise, you may make a wrong choice because you didn’t get all the facts first. Be sure you know the whole story.
The second thing is to pay attention to the one most important sentence in the whole story. “God will provide.” And sometimes all of us wind up in a situation where we think that the only path forward is to do something that we know is wrong to do. For example, we didn’t study for the test and now it’s test time. The only thing we can think of doing is copying from the person sitting next to us, but we know that’s wrong to do. If we do it, we’ve done something wrong. If we trust in God, maybe something will happen, and everything will be okay.
I’ll tell you a little story. When I was a junior in high school, I didn’t do well in Algebra. And on the test, there was a question that I had studied the night before. A very hard question. But, when I was studying the night before, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table and she said, “Read me the problem.” Now, my mother never got out of grammar school. She said, “Read me the problem” and she said, “Oh, that’s simple. The answer is three fish.” I said, “How do you know that?” She said, “I don’t know. I just do.” So, as the teacher said, “Pencils down,” I wrote down on the page, “Three fish.” No work, just “three fish.” And, writing down the answer that my mother got without using her pencil, I just passed the test. You never know, if you are going to do the wrong thing, what will happen next.
And the third takeaway - just for the adults here right now - is that we look with horror on this story. In point of fact, we still metaphorically sacrifice our children in many different ways. Well, what can we do about it? Well, we can learn. We can make better choices in the store. We can make better choices in the polling booth. We can make better choices in our use of social media.