Sermon by the rev'd. Pamela Snare

Sermon
March 12, 2006
The Reverend Pamela P. Snare

“If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him give us everything else?” Romans 8:31b-32

Today’s readings, from both Genesis and the gospel, bring us to the outer limits of the life of faith. I use the term “outer limits” in order to convey the radical surrender and obedience that is at stake both in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and in Jesus’ acceptance of his passion and death. Both are willing to give all that they have, and all that they are to God as an act of love and of trust. Both freely surrender any claim of possession or control over what is most dear to them, and place themselves, their life, and their future in the hands of God - on no other ground than trust. Trust that God is good. Trust that God is faithful to his promises. Trust that He will not go back on his word. Abraham and Jesus trust God to provide a way out of no way. Both trust God to open a way in what appears to be a dead end street.

Christian mystics have called this experience “the dark night of the soul.” They use that phrase to describe the experience of having no interior or exterior sense or verification that God is, that God is faithful, or that God is acting. That is why it is called a dark night. One cannot see that God is working or how God is working. One can see nothing. There is no affirmation or consolation of God’s presence or his blessing. All that is left to one is pure faith, pure trust, in the face of pure darkness. This is an authentic and well-attested human experience, in the scriptures and in the lives of the saints. Thus from the prophet Isaiah, “He who walks in darkness, to whom no light appears, let him trust in the name of Yahweh, let him rely upon his God” (50:10). And from the Psalms, “You have laid me in the depths of the Pit, in dark places, and in the abyss…My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me, and darkness is my only companion” (Psalm 88:7, 19). Even if we have never faced such a dark night ourselves, although I would venture to say that some of us have, today’s Scriptures confront us with just such a reality.

Today’s test of Abraham’s trust in God’s goodness, and faithfulness to his promises, in spite of all appearances, is the culmination of a series of tests by which the genuineness of Abraham’s faith is proved. The first test of Abraham’s trust is in Genesis 12 when the Lord directs him to, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” Abraham went, and he was 75 years old when he started this odyssey of faith. Now it is one thing to be willing to leave your homeland, your relatives and your parents in your twenties, not knowing where you are going, and trusting that God will make of you a great nation. It is quite another matter to be told that at 75 when childless, and to trust that that will be so. But Abraham did.

When Abraham is in his 80’s or 90’s, still childless, the Lord tells him in a vision that he will have offspring and descendants as numerous as the stars. Abraham believes the Lord, in spite of the seeming impossibility of this promise, and the scriptures say, “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abraham believed the Lord against all odds.

And God is faithful to his promise. When Abraham is 100 and Sarah is 90, Isaac is born. Isaac is Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah, not by his slave girl, Hagar. Isaac is the son of his old age, the fulfillment of God’s promise to him.

In today’s narrative, Isaac is now old enough to carry wood. Abraham believes that God has asked him to offer Isaac as a burnt offering. For the moment, please suspend all questions about God and let us focus our attention on Abraham, for that is whom the author intends us to focus on. Abraham, not God, is our point of entry into this story.

One version of the classical Jewish midrash or commentary on Genesis 22 potently captures Abraham’s position: “He said, ‘Take your son. [Abraham] said to him, ’I have two sons.’ He said to him, ’Your only one.’ [Abraham] said to him, ‘This one is an only one to his mother and this one is an only one to his mother.” He said to him, ‘Whom you love.’ [Abraham] said to him, ‘I love both of them.’ He said to him, ’Issac.’”

Are you in the position of Abraham? Do you see his place of darkness, of incomprehension, of apparent contradiction? If he does what he believes God is asking him to do, he is surrendering to God the dearest thing in the world to him, but Isaac was never Abraham’s possession, he was God’s gift; and it would appear that God is not faithful to his promise. If he does not do what he believes God is asking him, then he is denying his God; severing his relationship with the one he has trusted and who has been leading him these thirty-five plus years; nullifying all the years he has spent loving, serving and trusting this God.

Although the narrator wants us fully to appreciate this night of crisis and of faith from Abraham’s point of view, there is another person in this story whose trust is not to be overlooked, and that is Isaac. Isaac trusts his father implicitly. Their wills are as one. They walk together as one to the place of sacrifice. Abraham’s faith that “God himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering, my son,” becomes Isaac’s faith as well.

From the outset, the narrator has wanted the reader to know what Abraham does not. Namely, that God will not, does not want the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a test of the outer limits of Abraham’s faith – a dark night of the soul if ever there was one. But we are given this story for a reason. So that we may know, through Abraham’s experience, that God provides a way out of no way. That God never denies or goes back on his promises. That trust in the goodness and faithfulness of God, even in incomprehensible darkness, is never disappointed.

For God himself provides the substitute for Isaac – a ram caught in the thicket. But for us my friends, that is not the end of the story. What God does not desire or require of Abraham, he freely submits to himself – the sacrifice of his son, his only Son, his beloved Son. The angel does not appear to stay the hand of the powers that are aligned against Jesus. There is no ram in the thicket. God himself experiences God forsakenness, in Jesus, so that we may know that we are never forsaken – that nothing, not even death, can separate us from his love.

“If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him give us everything else?”

If we have been taken to the outer limits of faith today, through the experience of Abraham and of Jesus, it is to help us to know and to trust, even in the midst of incomprehensible darkness, that nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

“Love so amazing, so divine, demands our soul, our life, our all.”

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