Cup of Cold Water

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and  St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 22: 1-14

Psalm 13

Rom 6: 12-23

Matthew 10: 40-42

 

Every three years lectionary-based preachers are faced with a most chilling task. How do we read Genesis 22 when we are no longer a society a society that thinks traumatising children is a good idea? No longer do we endorse Hans Christian Andersen’s dark tales about naughty girls and their punishment, or children lost in a wood and threatened with cannibalism, or old women who spank their starving children and put them to bed.

Some think – I don’t as it happens – that we’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way. Certainly we don’t want idyllic tales in which no trial is ever faced and all existence is sweetness and light, or tales of entitlement that make every child think that like a despotic leader they can anything and everything they want. I want Ukraine and I want it now is not a great mantra, nor a great reality.

But what do we do with the sheer psychological abuse God and Abraham impose on the teenaged Isaac? I had quite a nice dad. I’d be a little troubled if he had taken me up a hill with a big knife in very dubious circumstances. Sadly many children, and even more step children, continue to be traumatised by parents, usually but not exclusively male parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, wielding if not a knife then the brutality of sexual predation.

Yet here is this tale of Isaac’s trauma right at the heart of Judaism, and, especially when morphed into a story about a God who sends his son to be killed, the centre of  Christianity.

What we don’t do is chuck it out. There are dangers in deciding which bits of scripture suit our tastes and fashions which do not. Scripture guides and judges us, and though in reality we will always to some extent apply our judgement to scripture, we are called as a People of the Book to do so in the expectation that we, not our forbears in faith or our God, are the ones needing a little bit or a lot of pruning and redemption.

So let’s not read Abraham and God as evil tormenters, but let’s read them. And let’s read them wearing the right lens. Rabbi Sacks writes,

What God was doing when he asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents.

Children were no more than property in the ancient times of Abraham. Children were sacrificed, too, to appease angry or ravenous gods. Children were sacrificed in much the same way as they were sacrificed by institutions, state and church, that turned their backs on rumours of abuse. Children were sacrificed on the altar of power abuse.

Let’s not read Abraham’s binding of Isaac as history. To do so is potentially demonic. The church has done demonic too often. But in this powerful parable, fable, call it what we will we find the ancient world’s record of abuse is challenged and broken by God. 

The point of the story is that, in a world where children were given up to abuse and even sacrifice, Abraham is prepared to trust God’s loving intervention. And of course we know that there are far too many cases of broken lives where neither God nor human has intervened, but that is precisely our role: God empowers us to speak up and to intervene in the face of all forms of evil.

And, believe it our not, that us where our cup of cold water comes in. Remember our cup of cold water? Jesus said Wheresoever we give a cup of cold water, wheresoever we speak out, wheresoever we intervene – and otherwise act – in the interests of the vulnerable, so we do the work of God. So we are called to do – for the disadvantaged, the lonely (not always poor, sometimes poor in the spirit) the vulnerable.

So may God help us to do.