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My father and I had some pretty good times together when I was a young. Dad taught me all kinds of things. I remember him trying to teach me to play guitar one Christmas morning when I was four or five. He taught me how to use a hammer and a saw, even a circular saw. How to frame in a wall and paint a house. How to mow grass and trim bushes. He left it to Granddaddy to show me how to butcher a chicken. Dad taught me how to plant and tend a garden. He taught me how to fish and the basics of hunting.
About hunting, the last time we went hunting together became an odd adventure. I was fifteen. We did the normal thing. Before sunrise we drove to Dan’s Camp and walked up the trail on a ridge. He told me to stand by this tree. He walked on a way’s further to stand under another tree. We stood and watched and waited and froze and as was typical for us, the sun came up but the deer didn’t. Once the trees were glistening in the sunlight he came back and we walked down the ridge trail to get in the car. We started putting the guns safely back into the car. He took the shell out of the chamber of his shotgun, but forgot to unload the magazine. When he closed the gun back up a shell unknowingly loaded into the chamber. With the gun pointed at the ground between us, he pulled the trigger to uncock it and kaboom. A round of buckshot hit the ground about ten inches in front of my feet. How I didn’t catch the ricochet is a mystery. I think we both lost our nerve for hunting that morning. I did go out a few times with my brother when I was in my thirties. That was just in case he shot something I could help him drag it back. But Dad never hunted again after that.
My father was also a man of faith; though it took losing nearly everything for Dad to come to faith in Christ. I was probably eleven or twelve when God touched him. My parent’s divorce had finalized and his work made it so he had to live in another town about a half hour away. He sold insurance and surprisingly he was able to build his agency up from scratch during separation and divorce and to do so in such a way as to be recognized as one of the most successful agents in the company. Unfortunately, for something I’ll call a personality conflict with his regional supervisor, they let him go. He had to start over from scratch with another company. He was a beaten man. He told me of a time in the midst of that painful transition with all the feelings of failure, rejection, financial stress, and dysphoria of how he was out for a drive one day and he took a friend’s advice and began to pray. He said the next thing he knew the warmest feeling of peace he’d ever felt just washed over him and he knew Jesus was real and everything would be okay. He came to faith.
Looking towards our reading, I don’t want to compare my dad to Abraham and say he had the faith of Abraham or anything like that. But I will say, and it may not make sense, Dad did not withhold his youngest son, me, from the Lord. He had faith talks with all four of us, his children. But with me, he rather strongly encouraged me to pursue what it was that Jesus was calling me to and in my case, it was pastoral ministry. I guess he saw something in this shy kid with esteem problems that nobody else saw. He wanted me to do what God wanted me to do because he knew it would be best for me for I would find life, purpose, and hope.
Looking at our reading, Abraham and Isaac, father and son, took a difficult walk one day. Part of the purpose of the walk, in the end I think, was for God through Abraham to pass on to Isaac the live or die nature of faith that was incumbent in the promise that God had made to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations. The faith of Abraham must become Isaac’s too. The promise God made to Abraham must be owned by Isaac too. Yet, this promise was not something for Abraham or his descendants to take into their own hands to make happen. They must let God provide. That walk was a horrific venture. If it would have happened today, most likely the two young men that accompanied them would have contacted Children's Aid who would have come and removed Isaac from the care of Abraham and Sarah. Then, once the whole incident hit the papers they would have been branded as delusional religious fanatics and shamed into reclusion.
But Abraham wasn't delusional. God had really spoken to him, directly. It happens people. God had called Abraham by name and asked him to do something really horrific, sacrifice his own son. Why? Was it just a test Abraham's faithfulness? But then for Abraham to carry through with it. Just try to imagine how utterly terrified Isaac must have been; Abraham too. Why was God demanding this obscenely horrible thing? Why was God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the one through whom the Promise God had made to him would be fulfilled?
That’s a big question to which we must in the end step back and scratch our heads. Regardless, there was a point being made here, particularly with Abraham. Abraham and Sarah had a problem with God’s promise. The problem was they didn’t trust God to make it happen and rather tried to make it happen themselves. When they did this, they truly made a mess of things. Just a couple of examples. Abraham and his family were nomadic in the land that God was giving them and God hadn’t given it to him just yet. He had a policy that when they passed into the land of another king of telling the king they told everybody that Sarah was his sister instead of his wife. He did this so that the king wouldn’t kill him and take Sarah as his own. If the king believed she was his sister he might still take her as his own, but at least they wouldn’t kill Abraham. Abraham time and again evidenced that he didn’t trust God to protect him from other kings. There was also Ishmael. Sarah, being too old to bear children, didn’t believe God could give them a child through her so she gave her slave, Hagar, to Abraham to bear children in her name. Thus, Ismael.
This lack of trusting God comes to a head here with God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. To Abraham God keeps calling Isaac, “your son, your only son”, which Isaac was not. Ishmael was still Abraham’s son, his firstborn son actually, whom he had just sent him away with Hagar into the desert wilderness where there was the very high risk of them dying from exposure. Though it is not noted in the story, there is something to be aware of; Canaanite kings had a practice of sacrificing their firstborn son to one of their gods believing it would make themselves to be powerful kings. When Abraham sent Ismael off into the wilderness to die of exposure, it was, in a sense, a way for Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn as did those other powerful Canaanite kings who lived in the Land God was promising to give him. Abraham could make himself a great and powerful king by sacrificing his firstborn and that would make his descendants more likely to become a great nation as God had promised.
To correct that horrible lack of faith God has Abraham put Isaac on the block. He takes Isaac on a walk to the place where the Jerusalem Temple would one day stand accompanied by two other men for the purpose of sacrificing Isaac. Yet, all Isaac and the two men know is that they are going to make a sacrifice. They are going to worship, but where’s the sacrifice? In the end, after much obscene horror everybody learns “The Lord will provide.” Isaac learned his father would have killed him to stay faithful to his God. He and Abraham both learned that Isaac is the child of God’s promise and God will let no harm come to him. And, in the very least the way to becoming a great king of a great nation is not sacrificing your children but through faithfulness to God. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s all I got.
Back to my father and me. When I was sixteen, I went to spend a weekend with my father and for some strange reason he decided to talk to me about the Lord. In the midst of that conversation, even though I hadn’t been all that churched he asked me if I had ever considered becoming a minister. Oddly, that was something that had been floating around in the back of my mind but I would rather consider first being a lawyer or doing something in the field of science. He shared that he had once felt that he might have been called to be a minister, but he didn’t think he was smart enough so he didn’t pursue it. But also, he felt his work as an insurance agent was like being in the ministry in that he got to visit a lot of people and help them make sure they were protected against catastrophe and that he believed that the insurance business picked up where the church left off in being able to help people recover from major loss. Dad just wanted to know if maybe I had felt the call. He didn't push me, but that conversation sprouted a seed that a couple of years later took root. Once it did, Dad more than anyone else encouraged me.
I hold my father responsible for instilling in me the notion of pursuing what God was calling me to rather than what I or other people thought I ought to do. He really was the only one in the family that I could talk to about my calling and not feel defensive or inadequate or like I had lost my mind. He was a good father to me and what made him good was that he encouraged me to pursue what Jesus wanted for my life rather than just tell me to go figure out what I wanted to do or what I could do to the best of my ability to be successful.
To reflect upon this a bit, one of the most important life questions parents can discuss with their children and grandparents with their grandchildren is the notion that there is a higher purpose to their lives than just being what they want to be and doing what they want to do. The United States Army years ago had a recruiting slogan that was as effective as Nike’s “Just do it”. It was “Be all that you can be…in the Army”. Military service aside, the idea of being all that you can be is pretty prevalent in our culture. I don’t think it’s at all wrong to aspire to be all you can be as so many seem to lack that aspiration or are just to hopeless about the future to step up. I just offer the question who or what defines what that all is. This question is especially pertinent in a culture whose primary source of what it calls Truth (capital T) is what feels true to me from what I gather from social media. Feeling is not fact. We, the disciples of Jesus, have a calling incumbent to us that we offer Jesus and his way of the cross as the definition of what that all is. This requires that we live accordingly so that the Truth we offer as Jesus is credible.
Young people today are growing up in a world that seems hopeless. They are saddled with problems as big and as complex as this planet and its weather systems getting out of hand because we are addicted to fossil fuels. They live in a world for which a fitting metaphor of the way things are is that of the kings of Canaan sacrificing their children so that they themselves, not their children, can have all that they can have. We want our children to be able to be all that they can be but the world we are saddling them with is ready to implode because we have gone about being all that we can be in very self-serving and might I add hedonistic ways. (Hedonism is just doing what feels pleasurable to me.) We haven’t been pursuing happiness. We’ve been pursuing pleasure. There’s a big difference.
Anyway, what my father did in pointing me in the direction of seeking what it was that God wanted me to be and do is, I think, a paramount task in parenthood and grandparenthood today. That there is a peace and a love that surpasses understanding yet heals when it touches us is something we need to encourage our young people to seek. We can’t force it upon them. We can’t coerce them into following Jesus. We just need to share the one we have found, testify to his love and faithfulness, and live accordingly. The way of the cross leads home. Amen.
