I just got back from a week’s vacation.  I went home to West Virginia where I got my accent back so I hope you all can still understand me. I’m just teasing.

As most of you know, I hung out with a bunch of Presbyterians when I was at my last church. By the way, I hang out with a bunch of Presbyterians here too, but that’s a whole other story.  I won’t get into that. I use to tease them all the time that there really wasn’t that much difference between Presbyterians and Methodists anymore because we have convinced the Presbyterians to believe in free will. I do believe that but I don’t want to push that on them too hard because I want to keep my Presbyterian friends. But the irony was that when I was in Seminary I had a Catholic Nun, who was a world expert on John Calvin, teach me church history. I use to tell them that I probably knew more about John Calvin and his theology than most of them.

One of the issues that I struggled with was Wesley’s point that we have the ability to make moral choices.  And about how we had to take responsibility for those choices. Other people think we are nuts about some of this stuff, but it’s important. The more Calvinist view emphasized that God’s will would always be done. That view is often so locked into place that there is no room for us to make moral choices as human beings. And that is where the tension is. Now, of course, things aren’t totally on opposite ends, and there are truths on both sides of that camp.

I’ve always been hesitant when people say, “Well, everything that happens is God’s will.” God forbid that that is true because we know some things that are so awful that we would never want to think that God would will them to be that way. But it is good to know that, at least in the general sense, God’s will is carried out in spite of our arrogance as human beings. And to Calvin and our Presbyterian friends I say 'thank you'. It’s interesting.

Several months ago I put together my sermon preaching schedule.  When I did, I picked this passage of scripture that Carol has read to us on Abraham and Isaac for this Sunday. My Presbyterian friends would say it was preordained.

Many of us read a horrible story in the paper this week about something that happened in Iraq. A father ended up murdering his son.  I am going to get into later in my sermon. I thought the coincidence was pretty profound. I will come back to that later.  Right now I want to step back from this text a little and give you some understanding of what surrounds it as far as its meaning to the ancient Hebrew faith.

One of the things that is at the heart of the Hebrew belief, and their relationship with God, is that life is sacred to God because He created it. And that human life has a certain sacredness that even went beyond the general sacredness of creation because human beings have been created in God’s image. Preservation of human life became a high mark of the Hebrew faith.  We are heirs of that legacy right at this moment. There is a sense of high value and sacredness of human life.

We all remember the story of Cain and Able and that Cain was banished for murdering his brother. It’s a profound story that reminds us that from the very beginning there were struggles of life and death. There was internal violence from the very beginning and there was a clear signal from God that it must be avoided. If one were to look at the 700 and some laws in the Torah, the first 5 books of Hebrew scripture, we see that many of them revolve around the worship of God.   And that many of them, almost half and half, deal with human relationships and the sacredness of human life and how that has to be preserved.  If it is not, then things have to happen to balance that out. The ancient Hebrews never separated that sense of worshiping God from that sense of honoring the sacredness of human life. To them it was all one and the same, and that’s important to remember.

Now when we see that Hebrew faith against the backdrop of the culture around them it’s pretty profound. The ancient Middle East was a violent world where human life was seen as less than something to be that concerned about. In relationship to the story that Carol has read to you today, anthropologists know many sites in that land of Canaan where child sacrifice was a regular and routine practice. Now you’re uncomfortable because I said that, I hope. Because there is something so innate to the values that we live with in our Biblical heritage, that that very thought is appalling to us. I’ve kind of set the stage for you for this text and for you to see the tension that the ancient Hebrews saw in it.

 One other interesting kind of factual note is that in Jewish congregations there is a lectionary and every week a certain part of the Torah is read so that within the period of a year the entire Torah is read. If you go to Synagogue every week you have heard the entire Torah in a year.  Because of that cycle, you know in a given week in a year a certain text will be read. The lowest attendance rate in Jewish congregations is on the Saturday that text the Carol read to you today is read. And the reason is the tension within the text itself about some basic values about a Biblical faith that are being struggled with here.

What is clear in the whole narrative of Abraham and Sarah is that Abraham is, for us, the example. He is a person who is always faithful to God. There are some interesting plays on words in Hebrew that I just have to point out to you. Remember when Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit? Remember God said, “Where are you?” What was their answer? They didn’t have one because they were hiding. They were ashamed and hid away. When God says, “Abraham where are you?” Abraham says, “Here am I.” Interesting also when Abraham asked for his son. What does his son say? Isaac says, “Here am I.” The writer of Genesis wants to make clear to us that Abraham’s openness and vulnerability to God is also reflected in the relationship Isaac with his father. “Here am I.”  And in many ways it is that same openness and vulnerability to God that Abraham knew and is reflected in a natural relationship between the father and the son in Isaac and Abraham that God is calling us to in our lives.

 The disturbing part of the story is to think that God would ever ask for a parent to sacrifice their child. I’m not going to give you a real easy out with this one. I don’t think the text intends for you to have an easy out. I could tell you that God knew the rest of the story, but the truth is that that text remains in tension so that we have to be uncomfortable with what it’s saying and what it’s doing. I will give you my interpretation of it. We see Abraham as this one who remains faithful to God because Abraham knows that God will come though for him in the end. Always! Abraham is always faithful to that. Right at the moment that the knife is raised for his son to die, God steps in and intervenes and gives Abraham an option. And from that point on the Hebrews understood, in a profound way, that human sacrifice was abominable to a faith that they had in the God that saw human life as precious. To this day the taboo of taking human life is central to any kind of

Biblical faith.

Now I want to go back to the news story this week. Whether or not we saw the war in Iraq as something we should have done or something we shouldn’t have done is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that war occurred, and that we now have a settling period in Iraq. I’m going to be honest with you. One of the problems that I have with people on the far right and the far left, equally, is that usually they have very simplistic answers to life and easy answers about what’s going to fix life. Life just doesn’t work that way. If there is to be a democracy in Iraq it won’t come in a day or two or a week or two or a year or two. It is something that takes time. Democracy is not something that happens overnight. And as we see the tension in that country, part of what we see that scares us is that maybe we see a fledgling democracy trying to take off. Or maybe what we see is a country returning to barbarianism and that scares us.  We don’t know the answer to which of those two things are going to play out. This is why we are so nervous.  We know that there are young American lives in danger as we speak, on a daily basis in that country. This is, by the way, the reason that we put up this banner for the war.   And it will remain there until there is true peace in Iraq.  Who knows when that will be?

The human story that played itself out this week in Iraq is one that horrifies us all. It seems from reading the accounts of what happened that there was a young man in a village in a part of Iraq that is still very loyal to Saddam Hussein, because it was a part of his tribe. He was informing Americans as to where there were people who were attacking American forces. Someone recognized him and the village elders went to the father and said “either you murder your son or we will murder your entire family.” Now I want to ask you a question: how would you like to be put in that position? I could not imagine a more intangible position for anyone. The Guardian newspaper carried the detailed reports about what happened later. The father went along literally trying to murder his son but at a point he couldn’t handle it any more and his other son finished the deed. We stand here horrified at that because we know that somehow that is something that goes against anything that our faith teaches us.

I’ve often reminded you that in the early 1900’s the optimists thought that the Kingdom of God was coming here on earth within the next 100 years. That with the advance of medicine and science and technology our humanity would be saved and the world would be a perfect place. As we look back at the year 2003, with the last 100 years of genocides, we see that right now we live in a world in which the difference between the ‘haves and the have-nots’ is incredible. That much of the world lives under brutal dictators in places like Iraq.  Those people live with such chaos, on a daily basis, that a father would even be put in a position that this father was put in.

Now I’m going to say something to you that doesn’t make me entirely a pessimist but what I think is a realist. Technology changes throughout human history. Human nature never changes. It just doesn’t. There are these parts of us that can be incredibly wonderful. But we struggle against those parts of us that are violent and can be demonic. Part of what we see in the story of Abraham and Isaac is that struggle between those things. That is why every major theologian throughout the history of the church has tried to make us understand why it is that we need to live in God's grace.  We human beings need that grace because of our own brokenness. So what is the story of Abraham and Isaac? What is the story from Iraq that mirrors it?  It’s that we still need to remember that the sacredness of human life is central to what it is to have a Biblical faith and we must do all that we can to preserve that human life. It is a faith commitment. It is not some secular option. We must understand the tension in our humanity. The good and the bad part of us. We pray by the grace of God that we may learn to live better as human beings.

As we come to the Lord’s Table today, we come to accept the grace that was revealed to us through Jesus Christ, that it may help us live as those who have preserved the sacredness of life. Let us bow our heads for a word of prayer.