Sermon: Grace, Giving, Letting Go

Grace, Giving, Letting Go

By Charles Rush

November 22, 1998

ll Cosby says that he and his father came to an understanding when he was quite young. "My father came to me and said 'I brought you into this world and I can take you out.'" Teenagers provoke this in most of us.

A friend of mine called to relate a conversation that he had with his daughter. One Friday night, she wanted to take his car to go 'like visit a friend, for like you know, half an hour' That was at 5 p.m. She returned around 1 a.m. It was his new BMW and he really didn't want her to drive it. More annoying was the fact that he and his wife had a date at 6 p.m. and when his daughter never arrived home they had to call people across town they didn't know very well for a ride to a fund raiser because he didn't know when he said 'yes' to his daughter that his wife's car was in the shop. His daughter, however, did know.

More annoying still was noontime the next day when he was out in the driveway and out of the corner of his eye, he spots a very long scratch down the side of his car. Little princess is still in bed. After being dragged down to the drive, she says 'like I don't know what that's all about Daddy. There's no way anyone at the party could have done this to the car because of where I was parked' He is looking at a $995 scratch on a car with a $1000 deductible. He keeps referring to her as his 'ex-daughter'. Teenagers can bring out in us emotions we didn't know we could feel.

I have always pictured Isaac as a teenager. Yet, there is nothing to quite prepare us for the anxiety and horror of this story. It raises some really profound questions for us. Is it possible that God who is consistently portrayed as the God of life, love, and promise actually assume an anti-persona and test Abraham with death, alienation, and hopelessness? More than that, would God actually require something like that of us?

And Abraham, what does it mean to be obedient? Does it mean following God uncritically? Or is Abraham really something of a model in that the real God is pretty far beyond the tame images of God that we have been given of God? One way or the other, could you really sacrifice your child under any circumstances, divine or demonic?

As George Hunsinger has noted, we want to be rid of the anxiety that this text produces in us and we principally do it in two different ways, the skeptical or the pious approach.

The pious approach moves pretty quickly through the details of the story because the real story is the sacrifice that God made in giving up his own Son Jesus on the cross. And since that illustrates a level of love and compassion for us that we would never express towards others, this story stands as a contrast of sorts. It contrasts our limited love and our limited faithfulness with the unlimited love and unlimited faithfulness of God made known to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This story rapidly becomes a proto-story about Christ and the anxiety deflates from it because we know that the end of the story about Jesus is ultimately good and done for our good.

And then there is the skeptical approach. There are others who desperately hope that Abraham misheard God, that Abraham thought he heard the voice of God telling him to take his son and the knife and the wood, but that was not God.

We know that child sacrifice was practiced in the Ancient Near East during the time of Abraham. As far as I can tell some form of it was practiced by most every culture to some degree all around the Mediterranean sea, and in most other cultures in India and Southeast Asia that I have been able to read about. I am willing to bet that something like it was nearly universally understood 10,000 years ago. And I don't think the logic of it is altogether impossible to get. There was a regular assumption among primitive people that the gods were to be feared, that the gods were angry at them for different things that they had done wrong. The notion of sacrifice is a religious way to put the world back in order for things that had gotten out of control. Human sacrifice in general and child sacrifice in particular is maybe the biggest sacrifice that we can make, short of ourselves. Really big problems mean that the gods must be really angry which requires a really big sacrifice.

We just got through with Hurricane Mitch. Imagine for a moment that these were primitive people with no communication from the outside world regarding that event. Here is a whole generation that has never known any serious flooding, certainly not on that scale, never seen a hurricane hit land in their region. One day, they wake up and relentless rain begins to fall, the winds flatten all of the crops in the region and devastate all of the homes. Finally, the mudslides pour over the village and kill 97% of the people. For the few who are left, they have to spiritually interpret the significance of that event with only the limited history of the elders of their tribe and without any contact with the wider world. It is understandable that they would assume a nearly ultimate wrath from the gods. Like most of us, if we probed a bit in our personal lives, if we actually took an honest moral inventory, we could find ample justification for severe divine judgment. So they considered making a nearly ultimate sacrifice in order to appease the wrath of the gods. One must die that the whole village would live.

Maybe Abraham just misheard God. Maybe he just looked around at his neighbors and concluded that they were more religious than he was because they were willing to engage in child sacrifice. Maybe he just said to himself, God has been so good to me that the only way I can think of to express my nearly infinite gratitude towards God is to be willing to sacrifice my child. Maybe he thought so hard about it, slept so hard on it, that he actually came to believe that God was talking to him.

When in fact, the only real words that God speaks to Abraham was 'do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him.' People hear all kinds of wrong-headed stuff about God when they are really divinely focused. I say this, having been to religious camps for teenagers and you will hear kids sincerely tell you that they think God wants them to date so and so The heart of God is being overlaid with the loins and longing of Brad. I remember an acquaintance telling me one time years ago that they thought God wanted them to marry someone after just a couple of dates. My response, of course, was 'stop right now I know you are lonely and God is concerned about that but you don't even really know this person. I think you need to do some counseling, just date for a while, explore this in friendship, etc., etc. All of this was reasonable advice and all of it was never heard. Normally, that would be right but God had made this selection and ordinary measures would not be necessary. It was a frightening level of conviction and they were about to go out and make life long decisions based on what appeared to be some pretty flimsy grounds and I was panicked.

See, how would you know you are really hearing the voice of God rather than your own unconscious desires? How would you know that God is not just your moral code or half-baked religious ideas projected upon the heavens?

The frustrating thing about our story today is that it gives us no help on this question. We are simply informed that "after these things, God tested Abraham, and said to Abraham 'Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love and offer him there upon a mountain which I will show you.'" It is just there, without explanation, without the conversation that he might have had with Sarah that began, 'guess what I heard today?' We are not privy to how he attempted to verify this voice or whether it ever occurred to him to get a second opinion from anybody. It is just there.

We will have to come back to this text a couple more times at least to begin to address these dimensions because there is so much here for reflection. But I will not resolve this tension for you prematurely. I want to focus on only one theme for today, that of "Letting Go" from verse 2.

God says 'Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love and go.' The Hebrew has a wonderful, threefold repetition here to really make the point:

Your son -- the one that you have been privileged to look at since he was a little kid and see your reflection in his face and see the way that he has picked up some of your wife's mannerisms, the kid that followed you around the farm, half undoing what you have done at every turn, that kid.

Your only son -- the kid that God gave you in your old age when you had already resigned yourself that you and your wife would never have children; the kid that came to you like a miracle and when you were standing there at the delivery, you felt a shiver all over your body at the sheer gracious, miraculous, wonderful mystery of life. And you were thinking to yourself how good life really is that you got to see this moment and what a blessing this child had been to you and your wife. Your only son, the one that holds all the promises for the future, through whom, God will bless you with grandchildren, great grandchildren.

The Son whom you love -- the one that took your fly rod and wrapped your car in 70 ft. of fishing line and proudly asked you to come see his Cristo reproduction; the one that dragged all of the covers off your bed and made a fort with them using part of the pool table and a collection of bar stools, the same kid that convinced you that the two of you should sleep in the fort and you did; that kid you were so proud of when she invited the one child in her class that no one liked over to play and really let them blossom; the one who stood up there so poised in the school play and sang so sassy and brassy and all grown up. Yeah, that one, lest there be any mistake.

What is profound and important is that we become graciously aware all of our lives about learning how to 'let go'. Ultimately, we are headed towards 'letting go' of the things we hold most precious, the things we love most dear. Life itself will require that from us. Let's bracket the question of God's particular involvement for today and just think about the spiritual demands of our life.

From the moment, we become adults, we return at important, poignant moments to 'let go' of things that were important to us. No sooner have you graduated from high school than you have to let go of your friends, your experiences. Sure, you will still see them but it will never quite be the same. And there is a nostalgia that pours over us right around graduation, we are giving thanks (and in some cases we are mourning regrets) for what has been and letting go of it too.

Fast Forward: I love to watch parents drop off their kids the first day of school, a ritual I get to see every year at the Co-op. I particularly love the little guys like Jon Schmidt on his first day of nursery school, jumps out of Mom's arms, waves, and says 'see ya Mom', and runs over to the blocks. There are always a few parents that linger for a time after the bell rings. They talk with each other for a while, and finally Marian Breene, the director of the school, will begin walking them out to their car. After a while, maybe she will need to open the door, and get them inside. They are just sad about having to let their kids go.

Fast Forward Again: And then your kids in their twenties, make these big decisions, and they don't even consult you. Or maybe you offer your opinion and they politely listen but then they go on and do what they were going to do anyway, and you feel this sudden, inexplicable sadness. You have to let them go. They are already gone, more gone than you realized and it just sort of snuck up on you.

Relationships that end. You realize that this person whom you love deeply is just growing in a way that is different than you are. I don't care whether you are in high school or whether you have been married 35 years with children. I don't care whether there has been a lot of pain or whether you have just been dating for a while and it has been mostly just fun. Almost everyone will keep coming back to the relationship for one more time After it is really over, even really, really over, once in a while the two of you find yourself still talking like it is still alive. It is hard sometimes and sad to 'let it go'.

Fast Forward Again: Your career, your control. You put so much time, so much creativity, so much sweat and frustration into your job. You took the place from nothing to being right on top. And now, whether you are retiring, whether market forces are encouraging a whole level of people like to retire early, or whether a recent merger means that your future in this firm is finished, it is a deeply sad time. You don't know what you will do? You worry about who you will be without the responsibility, without contributing on the level you have become accustomed to. You're scared and sad. It is hard to let go.

SideSpin: Your health and your youth. Your sex appeal, your ability to go anywhere, do almost anything, the loss of autonomy, your vigor. Someone I know with multiple sclerosis once said to me 'I would give anything to be healthy enough for one day to be able to ride my horse again'. The older we get, or the more ill that we get, there are dozens of small losses that remind us in a powerful way how hard it is to let go.

They are preparing us for the letting go when we will have to say to someone we love 'goodbye dear'. This week, I went to see someone from my church in Princeton. As I sat by his bed, at one point, I said to him, 'I want to say a couple of things because I may not see you again.' He is in the last stages of a battle with a terminal cancer and he knows it. At some point in our life, we all have to go through this and let go. And if we are lucky, we will have some of our loved ones around us to bless us when we have to let go of our own life. What we want around us is precisely that which we love. We have to let go, ultimately, of that which we most love. And that part of dying is hard.

So in this Thanksgiving season, I hope that you give. First of all, I hope that you give thanks to God for life is precious. I hope as you gather this week with your family- even dopey and embarrassing relatives, I hope you pray together. Give God thanks. In the midst of your limitation and dysfunction, life is good.

And give love. Not in an overwrought emotional display, but don't forget to tell the people that you love that you love them. Don't forget to show them you love them by the way you live. Don't forget to bless them.

And give away your time, talent, and your stuff. I think that is one of the important spiritual reasons we have to begin teaching little kids to give things away from an early age. It is a life long process for us to learn how to 'let go'. I love to watch two-year-olds throwing a screaming fit because they don't want anyone else to play with their toys; as though in letting go of them will require that they let go of life itself. They are clinging to that toy like clinging to the security blanket of life. We have to gently prod them and show them that it is a good thing to 'let go' for others. It is a hard lesson to learn and it has to be taught from youth if we are to be any good at it as adults. Share some of your stuff, you'll be okay. And as you share it to bless others, don't be afraid to let go. Infuse spiritual energy in your life this holiday season. Learn to let go.

Amen