Sermon: Fear and Trembling

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Fear and Trembling

By Charles Rush

February 20, 2005

have just entered the season of Lent. I've never appreciated the idea of giving something up for Lent as a kind of test of your self-discipline. It is fine, as far as it goes, but just not very profound spiritually. But the concept of Lent is actually quite important because it helps us develop some of the spiritual skills we will need to negotiate the flash floods and torrential currents that will happen to us at some point in our life.

I've picked a very difficult text this morning. When Soren Kierkegaard wrote a reflection on this text and on the flash floods of our lives, he titled it "Fear and Trembling". He starts the book with 5 different reflections on what was going through Abraham's mind when this event took place that he very nearly killed his son. He says that heard this story ever since he was a little boy and the older he got the more horrifying and impenetrable the story came to be. That would be my interpretation as well.

Especially after you have children, you have to ask yourself, what was he thinking that he thought that sacrificing his child would be a good idea, an idea that he could in any way embrace at all. I think it was Bill Cosby who noted that it is not accidental that Abraham was old and Isaac was a teenage boy when this trip took place. Cosby's father was fond of reminding him, "I brought you into the world… I can take you out." There is probably not a father anywhere who hasn't thought this to himself.

But ironic humor aside, it is helpful to know that in the surrounding cultures, the practice of child sacrifice was regular. This is hard to interiorize spiritually. When I was on sabbatical, I took the short ride from the southern shores of Sicily to the island of Motya. It was a colony of Carthage. These are the same people that lived all around Abraham. The bible calls them Canaanites, but they are ethnically, socially, and politically the same people. They were the first advanced sea people, so this colony off Sicily was on a small island off shore, to maximize their naval superiority.

The ruins have been half way excavated. Of particular note is the graveyard which I had come to visit. We have unearthed a pediatric graveyard there. It is full of urns, some 400 of them. They are filled with the remains of children that were sacrificed to the god Molech. In the small museum at the site, they have a few of the urns and the remains from inside. I had come from a fairly long way away just to see this, partly to try to make some sense of this story. They were mostly infants. It is one of those moments standing in that museum over the graveyard, when you stop being just an archeologist, stop being an impassive observer of history, and you stand in tragic silence, wondering… just how this came to pass.

There is the suffering of the children… the loss of their innocent life… And a certain pathos for the community too. You just wonder what horror happened to the people that they thought that this is so bad, that the only way to appease the wrath of the gods is to make this supreme sacrifice. And make no mistake, it was as difficult for them as it would be for us.

We have also discovered in some of the urns, the remains of cats or dogs. At the last minute, the parents in their primal protection of their children, drew back and surreptitiously replaced their child with the family pet, probably sending their child away, perhaps not to see for years, maybe ever, so that they might live.

There is one comment on our text by a Rabbi from several hundred years ago, who asked the question, what the Angel said to Abraham. He has the Angel adding a couple words "Stop killing your children". That would make this text a polemic against the religions around Israel and perhaps it is, but we cannot know for sure.

So as a pastor, standing at that grave site in Motya, saying some prayers because it was the thing to do, I was just overcome at how tragic and sad it has been that people could actually believe that God could be so angry with them that such a drastic and horrible thing would be contemplated, let alone acted on.

I would like to exonerate God right now but that is another sermon. We might have legitimate questions about whether or not God would test us in this way. But this text is still important and we cannot flee from it too quickly because life does test us in this way and that is the profound spiritual reality that Lent tries to prepare us to deal with.

When Ancient people saw hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, they said quite simply, "God did that". When we see them, we say that nature caused them but that doesn't much change the experience of fear and trembling.

We do all we can in our lives to plan, to structure, to produce the outcomes that we desire and insure ourselves physically and spiritually in the case something goes wrong. And this is well and good. But life does not let us entirely dictate. Stuff happens and sometimes we only get to respond. And these events are so critical spiritually that they become the most important junctures of our lives.

One of our neighbors has described for me several different times how he was in building #7 at the World Trade Center having coffee. Like the rest of us, he was having coffee during a morning meeting watching the smoke come out of a nearby building, wondering what was going on, but still not seeing what he was looking at because of the insularity of his routine. What was actually happening was not really possible in his mind, it just wasn't really happening. Looking back and retelling this story, he says that the insularity of the routine had him sort of glazed over so that he was seeing but not seeing, his control filters just not processing information accurately. It was all an idle curiosity… until people fell past his window. This is when he wishes he'd cut off the viewing because those tapes still haunt him. It was during that moment that he was awakening and shortly had a stunning realization of 'what are we doing here? We need to go'- but not before he had taken in images that time has not yet softened, let alone erased. And then he was jogging down the staircase, not feeling as such, not interpreting, just moving towards safety.

It is not fair. It doesn't make sense. It is just happening. Former plans all out the door, gone in just a couple hours. There would be no office to go back to the next day. Life is occasionally like that. It is like that often enough that we need to spiritually strengthen ourselves in advance, lest we be swept away by despair, meaninglessness, and anger.

And there is another dimension to this story, not different from the primal sense of having our planned present washed away, but the transcendent future that is held in the promise of the precious son Isaac that adds gravitas to the fear and trembling.

God had promised Abraham descendents that would make up a great nation. In his old age, Abraham miraculously had his first child. You can only imagine for a moment, the joy that older childless parents had that night, the primal blessing of new life in their arms, new life when they thought would pass them by. How good is God. How blessed is this life. How wonderful the mystery of this world. He is living a life of promise, expectation, grace, hope. It is life in the ascendancy.

Then this narrative that slowly, deliberately, deadeningly unfolds before us. Abraham saddled his horse. He organizes his servants. He wakens the boy and gives the boy the wood to carry. He looks up and sees the mountains. It is still three days more walk.

With each step, he is being drawn toward the edge of the abyss. He lets the servants stay. He hands his son the wood. The son looks at him innocently, naively, "Father, where is the lamb to sacrifice?"

All of these turns are little deaths, slow small deaths. And what is dying before him is not just his son but the future and that adds compounds the spiritual gravitas of the situation.

We have these small deaths regularly. Some of these you stop and notice. I surprised myself the day my youngest daughter went to first grade. She is the last of 4. Walking away from Franklin school, I was briefly overwhelmed with a sense that this ritual that I had been through so many times was now done. I would never pass this way again. I suddenly wanted it back and I was anxious and worried at the same time wondering if I was really taking it all in around me. Did I appreciate the simple blessings that I had been living…?

Most of us have these scripts written in our subconscious, if not our consciousness. We think that when we get to this place in our life, we are going to look like this and our children are going to be like that. And these scripts are fairly definite. Most of them we can't describe but every teacher in Summit can tell you what the parents of their students want for their children. They have expectations.

I know one pre-school teacher who was having her first parent-teacher conference with young parents. They went over socialization, abstract concepts, language skills, and gross motor coordination. The parents asked a lot of earnest questions. Finally, they leaned forward to the teacher and in rather hushed tones said, "Do you think he is really on an Ivy track?" "Is he Yale material?"

The teacher smiled back incredulous and wanted to say, "I don't know but he's great with clay."

No, we have these unwritten scripts and hopes and expectations. We live in the face of a promise unto the future. And a lot of the time, we don't even know it, we can't even really articulate this until it doesn't come to pass. How many fathers have I known that couldn't really even explain why they were so frustrated and disappointed when their children turned out not to have any interest in competitive sports. Their boys played in youth leagues like everyone else but as they grew into their own, they just wanted to play, didn't care about being All-state, not even all-Conference… Just wasn't their thing. Dad is fuming inside, can't articulate what he is really angry about, just fuming… Until, he realizes that unconsciously, all these years he had just assumed that when he got to mid-life, he would be able adorn his own fading athletic career with the patina of the next generation's exuberant athletic prowess. He'd be able to brag on his son. They would practice together, share advice and reminiscences together. They would share the glory and the glory would live on. This is what would bring them together.

And suddenly, without any preparation, one morning you wake up, have a series of conversations with your son, and you realize that this isn't going to ever happen. What we had assumed up to this point is never going to happen and you don't really have a plan B for how to relate to him.

It is really the future disappearing before your eyes that gives those moments their spiritual gravitas. These are just small deaths that prepare us for more profound spiritual deaths.

I remember a conversation with another father, a few years after his son had tragically died too young. He was reflecting on how much a bog his life had been since that time, having a hard time articulating what he wanted to say. He loved his other kids and his wife but… But this kid had been the spark. He had the humor. He was the fun that got them all going and kept everything on the right plane… And now, it just wasn't fun anymore in the same way. I want my old family back, he said. It was so overwhelmingly sad and fearful for him realizing that his future family wasn't going to be. And in that moment, it is not helpful to point out that the family can be re-made into something else.

That moment is simply a moment of anxiety, of dread, of fear. We come face to face with our own coming-apart. The center may not hold. It is a day of fear and trembling. That is what Abraham saw that day, when, for whatever reason, he took the knife…

We don't ever want to go through that moment. I wish for you that you will avoid it… but you won't. That is the reminder of Lent. We will all face, ultimately our own death. In all likelihood, we will face our own coming-apart before that moment actually arrives. We will see the future disappear before us and have to come to grips with our own non-Being.

I can't give you any steps for getting through that. I can't tell you that it will be all right. I can't make that easy for you. It won't be. And if it was, you wouldn't be fully living. You wouldn't be really human.

All I can tell you is what Abraham discovered. All I can tell you is what the Christ discovered. That somewhere in that process of facing the death of your future, somewhere in the process of experiencing your own existential moment of coming apart, God can cover you and you can be changed.

I don't know that you will be surrounded by any warm presence. I don't know that you won't be shaken to the core. I can't say that it will all suddenly be okay. I don't know that it will suddenly all make sense. I doubt very seriously that it will be warm gushy butter. I have no idea if you will find comfort in any normal sense of that term.

The only thing we are told is that in some fundamental sense, you will be blessed, whatever that means. I do not mean that lightly but too much religious language is hopelessly sentimental and one thing I am fairly sure of at this stage of my life, it is that a profound spiritual life is not a sentimental experience. "We get driven as hard as we can be rode" as an old Country song puts it.

We don't go out of our way seeking this experience. It will come to us one way or the other. The actual profundity of Lent is to remember that, to reflect on it a moment ahead of time, and to do the things spiritually to prepare ourselves in light of that reality.

My brothers and sisters, among other things I hope for you courage, strength, and faith… You will need them. Amen.