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Home , Binding of Isaac

PENTECOST 314

The story of the Binding of is one of the most terrible of the many terrible stories in the , and one that has always stood my hair on end. It ends with a kind of comfort from the terror of the rest of it: On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. After all the fear, all the suspense, the end of the story is simply that provides what is needed – a ram, a son, a sacrifice – and ’s trust in God’s providence is completely justified. Those are good words for this parish – ‘God provides’ is practically a cliché around here, of course. But what happened 3 years ago, in the very same week in which we read this Isaac-story in , was so vivid an example of this that it gave me a whole new outlook on the Biblical story itself. I know that I told this story in my sermon that year, and in the newsletter, but it’s a great story, and we have all these visitors here today who might not have heard it; so I have to tell it again. Here’s what happened.

Three years ago was the year we were collecting money for an Ark from Heifer Project, partly because the children – Lizzie and Tori, the only kids we had on deck then – were studying with me that summer and liked the story of so much. They were instrumental in our deciding to donate the Ark, and they wanted to help raise the $5000 it cost. So one of our projects in our summer-Saturday lessons was to build a sales-booth for them so they could sell lemonade on Sunday mornings and earn money. So Lizzie and Tori and I are having our time together, and decide to build the booth from one of the big boxes that our new round tables had come in. We are sitting in the window of the parish hall and talking about what they would need for it. First thing: how will they handle the money? I look out the window; a car is pulling up outside the church. I say, ‘Well, here’s Anne Bardol’ (money-person extraordinaire) – ‘why don’t you discuss that with her?’ They do that while I go and get a box from my garage. Then they wonder how they can decorate the box to make it look appealing. I look out the window again: Debby Seifert, Quilt Queen, pulls up. ‘Why don’t you discuss that with Debby?’ I propose. So while I cut a sales-window in the box, Debby and the kids ransack the quilting closet. (Did I mention that on the previous Friday, about 40 beautiful quilt tops, all made up, and 3 boxes of quilting fabric just appeared in the parish hall without comment or attribution?) They pick out one of the tops and some lemon-colored fabric and start ironing it.

Next question: what are we going to put the lemonade in? And here’s where things start to get really weird. All of a sudden we hear this yelp from the closet, where Debby is still rummaging; then she staggers out carrying a huge box attractively labeled ‘Lemonade Dispenser’. It turns out to be a big plastic jug with a spigot, on a stand, very nice, very professional. Nobody has ever seen it before; nobody has any idea where it came from or why it is in there – but there it is: a lemonade dispenser, right on cue, right at the moment it was requested, just like the personnel, just like all the other stuff we needed. You hardly know whether to laugh or cry. ‘God provides’ somehow acquires a whole new dimension when what is provided is a lemonade dispenser. You can hardly tell whether this event is more or less real or revelatory than the appearance of a full-grown out there on Mt. .

The contraption turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation: Deb Huck had bought it the previous winter and put it in the closet for us to use when she didn’t need it. But its being there unnoticed for all those months and then appearing at the precise moment it was asked for, was just uncanny. So I said at the time that maybe we ought to hang a little gold plaque on its gracefully curving bosom that says ‘Lemonade Dispenser: 6/24/11’, to remind us later on of how things were in this blessed place at that blessed time.

The sequel to the story is just as good: on the kids’ first business day they made $52.50. Adding in the $2 that someone left for them at a funeral the next week, that averages out to about $3 per cup of lemonade sold. McDonald’s should have it so good. Which made me wonder in print that month: ‘Are we someday just going to get dropped on our heads? Is God going to just suddenly stop handing us everything we need just when we need it; or can this sort of thing go on indefinitely?’

Well, 3 years down the road, the providence doesn’t seem to have dried up. Since then we’ve paid for the Ark, and a bunch of other animals from Episcopal Relief and Development for the diocese’s Ark – Omar, our Ox, is here to remind us all of that. For ourselves, we’ve done up the parish hall windows and boiler, and the heating system in the church, and I can’t even remember what all else, culminating in the wall beside Baker Creek and the whole new back and side yards – not to mention all the money we’ve given away, near and far, for other people’s needs as well as our own. The story of how God has provided for us is so amazing that the Bishop’s Committee and I are actually writing a book about it. We don’t want to forget this blessed time, these blessed gifts.

Which brings me to the question that keeps coming up in our readings from Paul’s letter to the at Rome this summer, the question we need to be asking ourselves in the face of all that God has done for us: what are we supposed to do about God’s providence? How shall we live so as to be constantly acknowledging it, constantly giving credit to the source of all our blessings? Paul is adamant that good behavior is not what saves us, not what makes God love us. God has delivered us from the power of sin, death, evil, as a pure gift, pure grace. He stresses this over and over. But, darn it, such a gift has to have some consequences. The Christians at Corinth – whom we are studying on Friday nights – think that they have one of those consequences all figured out: since our sins have been wiped out, maybe it would be a good idea to sin a whole more, to give God more opportunity to exercise all that grace.

It’s probably that experience that makes Paul so anxious that the Roman Christians don’t draw the same dumb conclusion. So after all that talk about gifts and grace, and God’s saving us totally apart from anything we might have done to deserve it, he ends up talking a lot about things we are supposed to do – not so we can somehow deserve the gift, just in sheer gratitude for it. Good behavior isn’t what makes God love us – he loves us even when we are as bad as we often are – but if we have actually accepted such a gift, and inwardly assimilated the notion that God is willing to look upon as righteous even though we sin, wouldn’t we want to live up to that kind of confidence by conforming our lives to what we know of righteousness?

It strikes me that the story of the is largely a story about whether or not Abraham trusts God enough to rely on him absolutely to fulfill his promises. The promise has been that Abraham will become the father of a great multitude, like the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky. As of the date of our story, these promised descendants total one, one young boy, born when his parents were 90 and 100 years old – not exactly a promising beginning – and now God wants the kid back. The question looming over Abraham is how much he’s willing to trust, not just this boy whom he loves, but his entire future, everything he ever hoped for, to this God who seems so capricious, so vindictive, so bloodthirsty.

But the other question looming over the story is: how far can God trust Abraham? Has the gift of this boy impressed him enough to make him hand himself and the boy over, entirely subject to God’s disposition? Has the providence he has already known persuaded him that God will provide? The only way to know the answers to those questions is to put this totally obedient parent to the ultimate test – and he comes through it with flying colors. The answer to his trust in God is yes; the answer to whether or not God can trust him is also yes.

The questions all of us face every day as we live surrounded by God’s providence are the same ones: Do we dare to trust God enough to commit all our lives and all our resources to him, whatever risks that may represent? And: Can God trust us to do the work he has redeemed and saved and commissioned us to do? Maybe those two are the same question – at least trust seems to lead to obedience, just about as much as obedience seems to lead to trust. I would be hard-pressed to choose one of those over the other to describe the processes that animate this church – they seem to be almost the same thing. All I hope and pray is that we don’t forget, that we don’t somehow miss the lessons of our own history. God may be preparing to ask of us too some kind of ultimate sacrifice – I can’t imagine what it could be, but it could be – and in any case he asks of us every day the kind of obedience that can lead to sacrifice. My prayer for all of us is that we will be able to hear and heed whatever we are being summoned to do, and that we will be able to undertake it with willingness and – yes, even joy – as well as whatever anxiety we may feel abour it.