June 28, Proper 8: The Binding of Isaac

Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 13, Matthew 10:40-42

I love the story of the Binding of Isaac, and I was happy that it showed up in the lectionary for my last Sunday with you. It’s one of the great stories in all religious literature. In its artful simplicity it captures the greatest issues of the human experience of God.

But on Tuesday Melody told me she hates the story. She said not because the human experience is not true, for we often sacrifice our children, like when we go to war, and we claim God’s blessing. But it’s rather how capricious God is, like God plays with us. And there’s no getting around that part of it.

“God tested Abraham.” Why? Why should God do that? Why the set-up—why did God play this trick on him, deceiving him? Does God test us this way? We know we are being tested all the time, by life, and we pray “lead us not into temptation,” but should we believe that God tests us like this?


God said, “Abraham,” and he said, “Here I am.” In Hebrew, Avraham, and Hinneini. A first time. And then, “I want you to sacrifice and roast your son on a mountain I will show you.” Well, not “roast,” but that would be the result. The gods of Abraham’s neighbors, the Canaanites, required them to roast their children in sacrifice. And all the gods and goddesses of the empires were capricious, and tricked and played with human beings like toys, but wasn’t this God supposed to be different?

Early in the morning, like Hagar had had to, Abraham sets out with Isaac and the servants. Again he does the servants’ work, and saddles the donkey and cuts the firewood. He heads north, 43 miles. What was he thinking those three days? The story keeps silence, but here’s a hint: “On the third day he looked up and saw the place far off.” Yes, “he looked up and saw,” a first time. What did he see? Just the place?

What God had been seeing all along. I think, because when he tells the servants to stay there and wait, he says, “we will return to you”—not “I” but “we.” Maybe he is tricking them in turn, but I think he has seen something, with maybe prophetic vision. After all, in a previous story he was called a prophet (with Abimelech).


He loads the firewood on Isaac’s back and carries the knife and fire himself. “So the two of them walked on together.” A picture of quiet affection. Isaac says, “Poppa,” and he says, “Here I am, my son.” In Hebrew, “Avi,” and, “Hinneini b’ni,” an echo of God with Abraham, but affectionate. And then the tragic question: Where is the lamb? 

 And the answer, “God will see to it, my son.” The verb is the verb “to see” (ראה) again, but in a conjugation that means “provide”. God will see to it. So yes, I think Abraham has seen something—not all that God sees, but enough of what God sees for Abraham to come to his resolution. His answer to Isaac is the hinge of the story, that “God will see to it.” And “the two of them walked on together,” a second time; that intimate affection.

Then he dutifully carries out his part in the drama, and he’s not just acting, so a part of him must be raging inside that God will not provide, and he’ll have to kill his son, and this God really is no different than the other gods. Do you see what I see going on? This testing of Abraham is now Abraham testing God. Yes, Abraham is testing God, and how wonderful of the Torah to bring us here. This is the climax of the whole life of Abraham, everything else has led up to this.

And God says, “Avraham, Avraham,” and a third time he answers, “Hinneini,” “Here I am.” God says, “Don’t lay your hand on the boy, for now I see that you fear God.” That verb “to see” again, but this time in the sense of “to recognize” or “to know,” like, I see! But didn’t God already know? Doesn’t God know everything, doesn’t God see the future before it happens? The story doesn’t answer that, and we who fear God have to work it out. You can’t work it out unless you also say, “Hinneini, here I am,” and put yourself into the presence of this God, this sometimes troubling God.

Then Abraham “looked up and saw.” A second time he sees what God saw, the ram in the bushes, and that is what he sacrifices. But it's a bit anticlimactic. The tension’s already been resolved, and now it’s reconciliation. Which of course is the whole purpose of the substitutionary sacrifice, an atonement, a reconciliation, and right here is the root of the difficult doctrine of the Substitutionary Atonement, which is another thing that takes a lot to work out, and also requires, “Here I am.”

So Abraham names that place, “the Lord will see to it.” Again the verb “to see,” and again with the meaning of “provide”. Do you hear in the words “provide” and “provision” the roots of “video” and “vision”? This story is all about vision, and Abraham has seen what God sees, at least enough of what God sees. He passed the test of seeing that God will see to it, of seeing the vision that God provides. And so to this day, says the story, it is said of that place, “On the mount of the Lord is vision.”

Both God and Abraham have passed the test. Abraham is proven by the test as fearing God, and the idea that fearing God is something positive is one more thing you can work out only if you start from “Here I am.” And Abraham’s been proven faithful, just as God has been proven faithful, and not capricious, even if the times of trial of our lives might tempt us to think otherwise.


I invite you to believe this even with our troubling questions: Is God always faithful? Why doesn’t God always provide? Why does God expect our sacrifice? Is God ever cruel? Does God ever trick us? Does God have the right to ask whatever God wants of us? Does God still test us? You can wrestle with such questions whenever you say, Here I am.

So now I have three messages for you, my three last messages for Old First. The first is that you will be tested, you will be tested as a congregation in the times ahead. I don’t say that you will be tested by God directly, as in the story, because God does not test us that way, at least not since after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. But God does test you indirectly, by the interaction of what God has given you to believe against the circumstances that you face. How you apply what you believe to the circumstances that come at you is your testing. And because your belief is your vision of God’s promises, you will have to test God as well. If you answer “here we are” whenever God speaks to you, you will be testing God as much as God is testing you.

But in your testing God will provide, and that’s my second message for Old First, that God will see to it. And in order for you to see what God sees you have to look up. Look up and see how God has provided for you already. In the circumstances that come at you there will be much that you can’t see, but you can look up and see some of what God sees. You can be prophetic as a people, a congregation. The vision has been given to you by the Gospel of Christ, and your power of sight by the Holy Spirit. But you have to look up! And whenever you remember and believe that God will see to it, you will pass the test.

Before I get to my final message I need to mention the subsequent interpretations of our story. The Jewish sages have seen in Isaac the whole identity of their people, who are bound to the covenant as both a privilege and a burden, a people living out their whole long history with all the risk of God. Christians have seen in Isaac a type of Christ, with God the Father being both God and Abraham, and the ram is Jesus too, whose substitutionary sacrifice frees us from our own being bound.

That interpretation is why this story shows up on Christmas Eve, in our liturgy, as the second lesson. For fifteen years we’ve been having that second lesson chanted in Hebrew by someone from Congregation Beth Elohim, some of whom are here with us today. One year Rabbi Andy Bachman said to me, “What is it with you guys and sacrifice?” Even on Christmas Eve!

If you attend that service, maybe you noticed that what’s chanted there was not in the First Lesson that we read today. The lectionary has left out the last three verses of the story, the verses that are the last words of God to Abraham in Genesis. I’m not going to read them now, or quote them, but I will paraphrase them now, as my very last message to you.

In the name of the Lord Jesus, because of how you, Old First, have so welcomed me and my family, and have welcomed me as a prophet, and you have not withheld your souls from me-- your souls that you love--that in God’s blessing you I bless you, that God multiply your seeds that you sow as the stars of the heaven, and God prosper the works you do as the sand upon the sea shore, that the works you do bear fruit beyond your gates, and in your works and your witness, Old First, shall the all the people be blessed  by you, because you have obeyed God’s voice. You precious people of Old First, I bless you from my soul, and from my heart I love you as you have loved me.

Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. 

June 21, Proper 7: The Weeping of Hagar

Genesis 21:8-21, Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39

Is Hagar a character from The Handmaid’s Tale? Hagar was a slave who had been made use of to bear a son for Abraham, because Sarah could not. Hagar had had no say in the matter. And now fifteen years later, when Sarah gives birth to a boy of her own, as we saw last week, Hagar’s boy is inconvenient, and gets disinherited, which Abraham has the right to do.

Abraham has all the rights here, including the right to free his slaves, which he does to Hagar, but her freedom does not give her any rights. Her freedom is dangerous to her. Every woman has to be under the protection of some man. Every village will be dangerous for Hagar and her boy, so she takes her chances in the desert.

Abraham does Hagar no favor by setting her free. And the story depicts him as shameful, for all his distress over his son, his only son for fifteen years. He sends them out before dawn, by himself, surreptitiously, and he packs their provisions, which is a servant’s job, and he does it on the cheap, with just some bread and water, after the lavish feast to honor little Isaac. He puts the skin of water on her shoulder, that once he had embraced in something like love. She has to yield to him one more time. This is how he treats the mother of his firstborn son—dishonorably and shamefully.

How can good people treat other people so poorly? Well, the system allowed it and everyone accepted it. The system allowed good people to treat certain other kinds of people poorly with impunity. Back then it wasn’t skin color, but economic class, the haves and the have-nots, and Hagar was allowed no economic power of her own, nor any social power. And now she is getting punished for having obeyed her mistress by yielding her body to her master. As long as she was a slave her life had value, but now that she has her freedom, to Abraham her life and her son’s life do not matter.

We are troubled by God’s complicity. God tells Abraham to do what Sarah said. True, God was not complicit in their having used Hagar to begin with, which they had done because they doubted God. True, God promises Abraham that Hagar and her son will survive and someday flourish, but imagine him telling her that as he casts her out in the dark. True, God rescues them, but we are troubled by God letting them suffer first. True, God answers their cry, but not hers, only the boy’s.

The story ends well enough for all, but let’s not skip over her wailing and weeping. It’s crucial to the story, as the opposite of Sarah’s laughing. And what so angered Sarah was to see her slave’s son laughing too; in grammatical terms, his jesting is an intensification of her laughing. But a day later his mother is wailing and weeping, with him under a bush, a bowshot away, lifting her voice in fear and grief and anger. “I just did what they made me do, and all is lost, and my child will die.”

It’s wonderful to me that the Book of Genesis is not afraid to show us the underside of God’s great plan. Yes, there is the official story of the great covenantal history developing from Abraham to Israel, the providence and promises of God to these patriarchs who live by faith and walk with God. But the Bible also shows us the underside, like in the misery of Hagar that resulted from the joy of Sarah.

I wonder if it’s also suggesting the weeping that Abraham should have been doing for his firstborn son. And is it also the weeping that Abraham should be doing in our story next Sunday when he’ll be asked to sacrifice Isaac, but shows no visible emotion? Or, maybe—why not sacrifice Isaac, since he’s already given up his firstborn son and exposed him to death in the desert!

In these Genesis stories, the lives of the children are so close to death. And the fear of that is always lurking in the back of every parent’s mind. We make our kids wear helmets just to ride their scooters. I’m not big on helmets, but when I was caring for my granddaughter I used to have these terrible images of us crossing the street and her getting hit by a car, before my eyes. Do those kinds of things come into your brain? And I’d imagine myself screaming at the driver and doing whatever damage I could manage to punish him, even though it would do no good for my granddaughter.

So I can well imagine the violence and destruction in the demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. I think it’s partly about children. It’s not just that store windows are symbols of an economic system that serves others well but treats us poorly, it’s also fear and anger for the future of our children, and, watching from a bowshot, we know they could die, simply by exclusion from the benefits of the system, good people or no. I can imagine our lashing out, doing what damage we can manage, with the only power available to us, even if it does no good.

Every great story has an underside, and the story of America is no exception. We who treasure our great stories prefer to keep the underside covered. But to honor the world-significant greatness of America is also to expose and bewail its cruel and shameful underside, for “nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.” I thank God that the Bible story shows us its own underside, and it invites us to weep for it and for our part in it.

But she persisted! Go Hagar. She made honor out of their dishonor. Abraham acted shamefully, but her son will have reasons to be proud of her. She reveals her strength and determination. She determines to keep her freedom. She does not submit to some other man to be their protection. She determines freedom for her son, and that he be expert with the bow, which frees him from the culture of his rejecting father. She gets him a wife from Egypt, which frees him from obligation to some local chieftain. This woman is mother and father to her son. She’s a fugitive slave with nothing but her own determination, and then God’s blessing. So thank you, O God, for the story of Hagar.

I am not discrediting the official story of Abraham. I am not disavowing the sovereign choice of God to draw the line of the covenant through Sarah and Isaac and not through Hagar and Ishmael. But even the Lord Jesus in our Gospel exposes salvation’s underside. To find your life, you must lose it. If you follow him, you can expect resistance and even suffering. If you stand for peace, you will face the sword. If you follow him, your foes will be from your own family. To follow him, you must take up your cross, and in the Roman Empire, that means to take on the punishment of a slave condemned to die. Not unlike Hagar and her son being cast out by Abraham.

Abraham walked with God and lived by his faith. And yet his old and shameful self lived on him, to use the language of St. Paul in our second lesson. We all of us have our own undersides, we who are baptized into God’s people and the communion of saints. We have our body of sin that we must daily put to death, the sin to which we are enslaved. And to carry your cross is to expose this and bewail ourselves and grieve our fallen natures that live on in us.

But you are also invited to not live there, down in your underside. From your enslavement you are called to freedom, albeit a freedom that the Lord Jesus has told you can be dangerous. Yet he calls you to not be afraid, because you share in his resurrection, which means you are living already in your future, already beyond your death. And you are able to walk in your newness of life, when you walk by faith, as we will see Abraham do next week.

And in your freedom from servitude you are called to a freedom for service, to weep with those who weep, to bear their anger, to lift up their voices in your voice. Shout from the rooftops what you hear whispered—whatever grievous whispers from the underside’s experience—lift up your voice and proclaim it. Because the final salvation is for the underside, that it be brought into the light.

I love it that the Torah gives us Hagar, and I love it that the Bible is so written that it lets you be her voice. In your remembering her you give voice to her fear and grief and anger, and also to her final vindication as the mother of her own nation. I love it that the story speaks to our own situation, that light from Hagar shines upon America today.

And I don’t mind how troubling God can be to our own sensibilities, because if God is worthy of being God, then God should trouble us. God is free from us, and sovereign, and not accountable to us. But yet it is God who inspired this story, with Hagar’s inclusion, and in that I read the inspirer’s ultimate morality, for the story itself loves Hagar and her son. In our very reading and repeating this story is the expression of the love of God for her, and her son, and in your remembering them, God’s love for you as well.

Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. 

June 14, Proper 6: The Laughing of Sarah

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7, Psalm 116:1, 10-17, Romans 5:1-8, Matthew 9:35-10:23

I have three more sermons to give you. My gift is not topical sermons on the issues of the day. My gift is these ancient Bible stories that have formed God’s people for 3000 years. But I don’t pick the stories. I accept whatever stories the ecumenical Lectionary has chosen for all the churches. That means I have to wrestle with them too, on your behalf, and I believe that is my gift to you.

Our three next stories are about Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and then Hagar, their slave, and then Isaac, their son. The Laughing of Sarah, the Crying of Hagar, and the Binding of Isaac.

The two constant characters are God and Abraham. God is treated as a character who acts in ways we might not like. Abraham varies. In the final story, he is tragic. In the middle story, he is shameful. Today Abraham is comical, with his rushing about and his exaggerated hospitality, even though he offers his guest “a little bread.” How much can three men eat? Eight pounds of flour makes how many hotcakes, and how long will that take Sarah? The three men have to wait and wait for their little bit of bread while the calf is selected and slaughtered and dressed and seasoned and roasted.

When does Abraham figure out that this is the Lord, and how can three persons be God? They play with him a little, and there’s the back-and-forth with Sarah in the tent. But even though it’s she who laughs, she isn’t comic. She hears what God predicts as a cruel joke, and her laughter inside the tent is bitter–we call it sardonic laughter. And yet she’s ashamed, so she denies that she laughed.

She carries shame. Her childlessness is blamed on her, as Abraham had been able to impregnate his slave-girl. What use to having been beautiful. When she was younger and Pharaoh saw her, he took her from Abraham, but God made him give her back. Over the years of her disappointment, when Abraham told her that God had promised them many descendants, did she laugh at him?

My two grandmothers both carried shame, sexual shame, body shame, for what they were innocent of. They lived in the Dutch immigrant community of North Jersey, which was very religious and very judgmental, which they both had to endure.

My mom’s mother, my Grandma Hartog, had that inside laugh. She could be sardonic. She was smart and funny and a cut-up. She was a devout believer but she rarely went to church, and that was from her shame. Her husband, my Grandpa, was an adulterer. For forty years he had a girlfriend, a married woman, and people knew. I’m sure the good people of this conservative community suspected that it must be partly my grandma’s fault.

She had been attractive in her youth. Back in the Netherlands, at the age of fifteen, she was sent out as a housemaid for a pastor, and in just months she was sent back in a hush, and she never trusted ministers again. If that story came up, her eyes froze and her face hardened. But she told us many other stories and sang songs and cooked great food and entertained us and teased us and giggled with us, and our Christmas presents she always made by hand. My mom says Grandma would take the bus downtown, study a dress in the store window, and then make the dress without a pattern.

Just before I was born my grandpa left my grandma to move in with his girlfriend, which didn’t work out, so he moved in with us. He repented and my grandma somewhat reluctantly took him back. But in his last year she cared for him like a professional nurse, even at the hospital. She could do anything. I adored my Grandma Hartog. But her laughter was always an inside laugh.

My dad’s mother, my Grandma Meeter, carried double shame. The first was my grandfather’s disability. He was crippled, and so he was never put up for deacon or elder. He didn’t marry till he was 37, and then to my Grandma, who was not a prize, as she was illegitimate, born out-of-wedlock. That was her deeper shame, a sexual sin of which she was innocent but yet the proof of.

When she was three months old her mother fled with her to America, and never told who the father was. Her step-father beat her. Her mother eventually lost her mind and ended her days in a mental hospital. My Grandma Meeter was always self-conscious, and never broke the rules. She loved to go church, twice on Sunday, and was in the Ladies Aid and did good works.

She bore her shame with dignity, and not only because she was blameless in the causes of her shame. I think it was more the depth of her faith and her love of God. I am proud of how relatively progressive she was on racial matters. She was proud of my dad as a pastor in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and she had no fear of taking the subway on her own, and she made friends in our congregation. She didn’t do handicrafts, and she didn’t tell jokes and stories, but she enjoyed them, and she had a loud and hearty laugh, with a high hoot. She had an outside laugh.

And so did Sarah, at the end, after the birth of Isaac in her old age. Her inside laugh became an outside laugh, and she invited others to laugh along with her. There is redemption in this story, even though there is misery to come. I see in these three women the cycle that St. Paul writes of in our second lesson, from suffering to endurance to character to hope. Of course the cycle so often runs the other way, from suffering to breaking to bitterness to despair. So what makes the difference?

Well, this passage from Romans is personal to our own Michael Cairl, and I call him as my witness, that what makes the difference is love, especially the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is the presence and power of love that helps you to endure your suffering, and the presence and power of love that converts your endurance into character, and from your character it’s love that generates your hope, and your hope allows you to laugh out loud, even in your suffering. I invite you to believe this. I have four witnesses: Michael, my two grandmothers, and Sarah.

In 1982 we hosted an African Dutch Reformed domine who pastored a church in Soweto. He was doing graduate study in America, and during the Soweto Riots his congregants were suffering for fighting Apartheid. It pained him terribly, but his hope did not disappoint him. He told me, “We will be free, soon, and it’s up to us when, it just depends on how many of us are willing to die for it.” The great thing about this Domine was his laughter, despite the suffering, how frequent and buoyant his laughter was. God’s love had been poured into his heart, and that love could laugh out loud.

It’s not that suffering is good. Suffering in itself is never good. But if God’s love has given us hope that does not disappoint us, and character, and endurance, then from out of our own suffering we can voluntarily enter and endure the suffering of others. Of course I’m speaking about Black Lives Matter.

It has not been difficult for us to share the suffering of people from the coronavirus, where there is no shame, nor rage, nor years of guilt of which people may be innocent but yet the proof of. And we are right to honor our doctors and health-care workers and those who put their lives at risk. But it is proving difficult and challenging for people to share the suffering of generations of Black Lives, for whom our happy lives and our prosperity have been mostly a cruel joke.

To share their suffering is not to preach about their need for hope, nor to encourage yet more endurance, nor judge their characters, but humbly to ask how to share their suffering on their terms. And with their words, not our own, as our consistory had to remind me of last week. It will cost us, and we don’t look forward to it. We will have to question ourselves, and start all over. We will get it wrong, and when we’re told we’re getting it wrong it will hurt, but we will endure it, and adjust our characters one more bit, and whatever hope we hold out is for ourselves, if we believe God’s love.

In sharing this suffering, even if you cry—and you must cry—you are not to have a long face nor act as if you’re a martyr or in pain, for we’ve only just begun to feel the pain. You are rather to keep joyful and keep on laughing. That’s how I interpret what Paul says about “boasting in our suffering”—laughing within it. Not sardonically, not derisively, and not self-righteously, because the joke’s on us, but with relief. The joke is our obstinate foolishness and the laughter is of judgment recognized. The joke is the riddle of God’s undeserved grace and the laughter is the joy of God’s love.

Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.