The God of Abraham
by Rev. Colin Bossen, September 27, 2009
It is one of the most horrific images in the Bible. Isaac lies bound upon an altar. His father Abraham stands over him, knife at the ready, prepared to spill his blood and offer up his son as a burnt offering to God. At the last moment, when his knife is at the boy's throat, a voice calls out: "Abraham! Abraham!" Abraham looks up, sees an angel and learns that he is not to sacrifice Isaac. He is to offer God a ram instead.
What kind of God would have demanded that Abraham sacrifice his son, only to provide reprieve at the last moment? What kind of father would consider sacrificing his beloved child? From the distance of 3,000 years it is hard for us to imagine. Child sacrifice is foreign to our culture. We do not make blood offerings to the gods.
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, "Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed." I take these words as a point of departure this morning as we begin our exploration of Abraham and his God. Abraham, father of three faiths; Abraham, binder of Isaac; Abraham, who cast out his son Ishmael; Abraham I do not understand and I do not understand his God.
Perhaps, it is meant to be this way. For do we ever truly understand another human? Do we every completely understand the divine? Sometimes when I read Abraham's story I see him only as a fanatic. At God's command he casts out his son Ishmael into the wilderness to die. At God's command his prepares to ritually murder Isaac. Reading the text I chastise Abraham for having his priorities wrong. He places God ahead of his beloved sons. His family is less important to him than his deity, a deity who often proves to be violent, vengeful and fickle.
Maybe his story is really a riddle. Other times Abraham appears to brave, compassionate and wise. Learning that God is to destroy the city of Sodom Abraham challenges God, "Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike." God and Abraham barter and finally God agrees to spare Sodom if ten innocent men can be found there. The city only has six and God destroys it.
Reaching into Genesis I discover a complicated text, shrouded in tangles and mysteries. It contains layers of meanings, some available at the surface and others only found by digging deep. Like most stories its meaning depends as much upon the reader as upon the text itself.
Abraham and his God belong to the realm of myth. Joseph Campbell describes myths as "clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life." Elsewhere Campbell quotes Sigmund Freud as writing: "The truths contained in religious doctrines are...so distorted and systematically disguised...that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth." The truths and clues may be distorted but there are many to be found in the myths of Abraham and his God. These truths are compelling enough to unite Jews, Christians and Muslims in their veneration of him.
For all three religions Abraham is the first person to know God after Noah. At a time when his contemporaries are engaged in polytheism Abraham becomes a monotheist. The Islamic tradition relates two episodes from his life that capture this transition. The first story has a young Abraham stay up late one night looking for God. First he sees a star rise and calls it God. Then the star sets and he says, "I don't like gods that set." The same pattern is repeated with the moon and the sun, each rising and setting in their turn. And so, the Qu'ran has him say, "I am done now with mistaking anything for the One Being. Instead, I turn my face towards the One who created both heaven and earth".
Sometime later all of the other members of his community travel to celebrate a religious festival. They leave young Abraham to guard the tribe's shrines and the idols within it. They are afraid that another tribe might come and steal the idols while they are away.
Once everyone is gone Abraham does the unthinkable. He smashes all of the idols except for the very biggest one. In that idol's hands he leaves the ax he used to destroy the other figures. When the tribe returns he points to the idol with the ax and says, "That idol did it! He's the one! Ask him why!" The tribal elders look at Abraham with incredulity and reply, "We all know that the idols can neither move nor talk." The young Abraham retorts, "Then why do you worship them?"
The names of God in Genesis suggest who the other gods that Abraham's tribe worshipped might have been. Throughout the book God is variously named but many of the formulations of God's name begin with the word El. God emerges as El-elohe-yisrael, God of Israel, El-roi, God of Seeing, and El Shaddai, God Almighty.
El is the name of the chief male god of the Canaanite pantheon. Anita Diamant's book "The Red Tent" offers a midrash on the relationship of the God of Abraham and the rest of the Canaanite pantheon. According to Arthur Waskow, "Midrash literally means 'searching'." A midrash is what is found when one searches "the spaces between the letters, between the words, between the verses for hidden treasures..." When Diamant searches she discovers that for a time Abraham's God was just one of many gods. While Abraham and his sons gave tribute to El alone those around them--including their wives and sisters--continued to honor the full pantheon. That El was originally but one God of many should be a reminder that in our pluralistic world, no matter what our personal viewpoint, there are many ways that people reach out, understand and relate to the divine.
But then, so should Abraham himself. This biblical figure exists before monotheism splits into Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, his religion is not even Judaism. In the Bible the creation of that faith only comes in the time of Moses, hundreds of years after Abraham. And when God reveals Godself to Moses God offers Moses a name he had not offered Abraham or his immediate descendants. The Bible relates: "God spoke to Moses and said to him, 'I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name Adonai.'" A more universal God becomes a particular God.
The pre-sectarian aspect of Abraham appeals to my Unitarian impulses. It serves as a reminder that however people may choose to worship the divine the divine itself is beyond whatever sectarian or dogmatic boundaries we may place around it.
There is an interesting parallel here with the origins of our Unitarian faith in Europe. During the 16th century Unitarianism emerged among Christians who realized that the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was the same God. Theologians like Miguel Servetus and Jacob Paleologus studied Judaism and Islam and sought to reconcile the three monotheistic faiths. As Susan Ritchie describes it, they thought that "Unitarianism might play [a role] in unifying Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as a single religious family."
Abraham's smashing of the idols is a reminder to me that so many of the things we humans worship are really just human creations. Whether monotheists, atheists, or pagans, most humans that I know worship things wrought by human hands or dreamed by human minds. Our consumerist culture places a higher value on manufactured goods than on nature's beauty. Likewise many people and many religions mistake the god or gods of their particular sect--surely human creations--for the divine essence itself.
Abraham's realization that God is beyond the stars, the moon and the sun can provide an antidote to this folly. In understanding that there is more to reality than he can perceive he discovers the limits of human knowledge. The universe is vast. No matter how great our understanding of it becomes there will always be more to learn. And ultimately even if we reach a point where we grasp the mechanics of reality--glimpse beyond the atom and quark into the core of matter or back into time to perceive what existed before the Big Bang--we will still not be able to answer the question: Why does the universe exist? We are surrounded by a mystery far greater than ourselves. When we forget this we do ourselves a disservice.
In Genesis Abraham, then named Abram, first comes to know God when God says to him: "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
And him curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you."
God's promise to "make of you a great nation," to give Abraham many descendants, proves to be problematic. For many years Abram--he does not change his name to Abraham until God physically appears before him--and his wife Sarai--later named Sarah--remain childless. Finally, Sarai does what many infertile women of her time did, she gives Abram her handmaiden Hagar to conceive a child in her stead. Hagar bears Ishmael but not before in a fit of jealously Sarai, with Abram's permission, treats Hagar so harshly that she runs away. God sends Hagar back to Abram and for awhile the family of Abram, Sarai, Hagar and Ishmael is able to continue together.
Trouble comes when in her old age Sarai, now Sarah, is finally able to give Abraham a son, Isaac. As Isaac grows to maturity Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and tells Abraham, "Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac." Abraham is reluctant to fulfill Sarah's wish but God commands him to do it and he furnishes Hagar and Ishmael with a skin of water and some bread and casts them out into the desert to die. God ultimately saves Hagar and Ishmael but not before they suffer almost unto the point of death. According to the Islamic tradition Ishmael goes onto to be the father of the Arab peoples. Eventually he forgives and is reconciled with his father. Alternatively, the story can be understood as Abraham falling victim to Sarah's narrowness and placing his faith in God before his desire to provide for his son.
It could be argued that this pattern repeats itself when it is related that "God put Abraham to the test" and commanded him to offer Isaac, who he thinks to be his only remaining son and heir, up as a burnt offering. Isaac and Abraham, accompanied by an entourage of servants, set out to the place of sacrifice. Abraham comes so close to slaughtering his son that he is only stayed at the last minute by an angel.
It is hard not to find this story troubling. To many readers Abraham appears as a man obsessed. In a fit of insanity he considers murdering his child. God, who demands human sacrifice, and who later slays thousands in order to favor God's chosen people, comes off as bloodthirsty and cruel. Even if God in the end accepts a ram instead of Isaac the necessity of a blood sacrifice at all revolts our modern sensibilities.
One counter reading of the text popular among some contemporary scholars argues that this story is not about God's command to consider child sacrifice at all. Instead, it is about the authors of the Biblical material learning to repudiate child sacrifice. Child sacrifice was practiced in the ancient Near East and so, the critics argue, what is remarkable is not that Abraham considered killing his son. What is remarkable is that God stayed Abraham's hand before he did the deed and taught him to replace the human with the animal. That God did not suggest that Abraham should replace the human with an incense or prayer offering probably troubles many among us. Nonetheless, if the interpretation is correct then it does mark a moment of significant ethical progress. Turning away from human sacrifice as a religious practice is an important turning.
But have we really made that turning? Earlier I said that we no longer practice child sacrifice. In truth I suspect that the practice is widespread. The gods our culture offers its children up to just happen to have different names than God. We give our children over to murder and violence when we send them off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We place them on the altar of consumerism when we despoil our planet--their future--for the sake of profit and material goods. We sacrifice them to economic ideology and the idol of the profit when we fail to provide access to health care for all and under-fund public schools and do not furnish our cities with sufficient resources to make them safe and thriving.
Where is God's voice to stay our hands when we make these sacrifices?
Where is the angel or the voice calling out for us to stop? Perhaps this is the remarkable thing about Abraham. When he was challenged to sacrifice his child he was able to stop before he committed the deed. If only we could do likewise before sending our children across the ocean to die, failing to provide them with their needs or sacrificing their future prosperity for our own. Considering this I come back to Kierkegaard's words, "Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed."
Let us learn to hear the voice and stay our hands. Then we may cease to be amazed. Instead we will recognize the unity of humanity and of creation and cease to worship and offer sacrifice to the false idols that so often surround us.
May it be so.
Amen.