Sermon 26 June 2005
6 Pentecost Proper 8 Year A
Genesis 22:1 – 18

“God Will Provide�

I don’t know about you, but this passage of scripture has always bothered me. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, and then at the last minute, God tells him to stop. No matter what your position in the family – father, mother, sister brother, etc. – this story of this particular father and son is kind of hard to take.

Through the use of some very rough, raw and painful narrative, we hear an amazing story – one of extreme faith lived out in extreme circumstances with extreme results. This extreme faith is why we’re here today.

You remember the story of how this all got started? God called Abraham to leave his hometown, which was somewhere in what is now Iraq near the town of Fallujah, and go to the land he would show him. He didn’t tell him where he was going. So Abraham got his family together and set off across the desert. Eventually, he ended up in what is now the West Bank.

Abraham was 100 years old, his wife was 90. They hadn’t had any kids. Something wasn’t working right. So God comes by and says, “Hey, Abraham, your wife’s going to have your child about a year from now.� And they laugh. God said, “very well, since you laughed, you’re going to have to name your boy ‘laughter.’� Oh, the poor child! Imagine what names he must have been called in elementary school! “Hey there, Laughter! Got a joke for us? Ha, ha, ha!� You see, the name Isaac [pronounced Hebrew style], or more familiarly, Isaac, means “laughter.�

Anyhow, Sarah, Abraham’s wife, has a baby – at 90 years old, no less! And they call him Laughter – Isaac. And then God says something amazing: he tells Abraham that he will bless him and make his name great and make his descendents like the sand of the seashore or the stars in the sky. He’s going to give him his own land to live on. And he’s going to do all of that through Isaac.

In other words, this miracle baby’s the way God’s going to fulfill all his promises to Abraham – including the one that says “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through you.�

Of course, Abraham hedges on this promise. He’s not quite convinced that God will do what he promised through his wife Sarah, so he sleeps with her servant girl and has another child, Ishmael. But God reiterates the original promise: I will fulfill my promise through Isaac. There will be no other child.

Well. The scripture says that God tested Abraham. So one day, God says to Abraham, “Go sacrifice your son as a burnt offering up there on the mountain.� Setting aside our moral repulsion at this point as to sacrificing a child as an offering to God, God is asking Abraham to do a very symbolic thing: go up on the mountain and sacrifice the very means by which the promise will be fulfilled, with the result that the promise cannot any longer be fulfilled.

Basically, God’s asking Abraham to prove whether which one he trusts in more: God, the source of the promise that he would have descendents like the stars in the sky, or the sole descendent means through which the promise would be fulfilled, namely Isaac.

Abraham demonstrates his faith throughout this entire ordeal. When Isaac asks him, “where is the sacrifice,� Abraham responds that God will provide it.

The same is true for us: god has given us a call to be witnesses to his kingdom – to do all what his disciples did: heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, cleanse the lepers, all the while proclaiming that the Kingdom of the Heavens – God’s Kingdom – is available to all who turn and follow Jesus.

We can be assured that he will provide us with the means whereby we will fulfill our call to do that. His promise to us, as to Abraham is that all the nations will be blessed through us – through the church of Jesus Christ.

Nonetheless, God often challenges us: where does your faith lie? These challenges invite us to demonstrate our faith in him.

He has given us a lot of things: a lot of gifts as fulfillment of his promises to us. There are three particular Isaacs – gifts to fulfill the promise – that let’s look at today.

God has given us a two-hundred-year-long history. Does our faith lie in that, or in the one who made that history possible?

God has given us a number of ministries and programs throughout the years. These have served to fulfill our calling during that time. But in light of Abraham’s experience, we must ask: does our faith lie in those ministries and programs or does it lie in the One who called us to serve him, using those ministries as tools for that service?

And again, related to the issues Dave Bevan raised concerning our roof a few minutes ago: God has given us a wonderful building and grounds through which to carry out his calling on us. And when the question arises about how we will fix the roof – how we will pay for it, and will it get done in time, the question of where our faith lies becomes essential.

You see, faith is a risky thing: if we knew exactly how to get from Point A to Point B, no faith would be involved. Faith is involved when we don’t know how we are going to get it all done and still move forward anyway.

So if our faith lies in our Isaacs – in our history, our ministries or our building – the question of how we will make it becomes unanswerable. Those things cannot in themselves provide.

But since our faith lies in God, then we know that no matter how close those Isaacs come to the knife, God will provide.

Abraham saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. This was a very awkward and unusual place for a ram to be. But until Abraham was willing to surrender it all – to give up the very means by which he knew the promise would come, he couldn’t see it.

And so it is with us: fixing a leaky roof is a way for us to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt where our faith lies.

And we know that as we look on this altar, built up on this kind of architectural mountain, that God will provide what is necessary to follow his will.

God will provide.

Amen.