Genesis 22, Hebrews 11:11-19, 12:1-3 "By Faith Abraham . . ." Scott Hoezee

Abraham asked no questions in Genesis 22. We ask a bevy of questions about Genesis 22. Abraham walked resolutely and without stumbling on his way to Mount Moriah. We walk hesitantly, tripping again and again over the multiple theological scandals we encounter as we try to follow Abraham. The language of Genesis 22 is crisp and unwaveringly direct. We cry out for escape hatches, for something to explain this.

Apparently ours is a different world than the one from which this story emerged. After traveling to the Holy Land, some people return home to report how much closer they now feel to the Bible. But sometime back I read a report from someone who had the opposite reaction: "walking where Jesus walked" drove home for this person the vast gulf that yawns open between the biblical culture and our own.

What is striking about Genesis 22 is how wholly unconcerned it appears to be with the kinds of questions we want to raise. The author is not unaware of how difficult this test is for Abraham, but far from trying to nuance God's command the author has crafted the text so as to heighten the very difficulties we find nearly unacceptable. The hammering phrase "your son, your only son, whom you love," makes this story heartbreaking to read. Similarly the oft-repeated verbal picture of Abraham and Isaac trotting along "together" in verses 6 and 8 presents a Norman Rockwell-like portrait of father and son. This is Sheriff Taylor and his boy Opie walking together in the opening sequence to the old Andy Griffith Show: a classic portrait of father-son togetherness. But this time the father bears the knowledge that he will return from this outing alone.

Curiously, the text of Genesis 22 is not principally concerned with the emotional side of Abraham's losing a son. Instead its focus seems to be that this particular sacrifice would jeopardize the future of the covenant. Isaac was the "laughter" of Abraham and Sarah's old age, but he was also to be the cosmic laughter of all nations because from him sprang the promise of redemption. If Laughter died, then what would become of the covenant?

These questions of covenant and salvation loom much larger for the author of Genesis 22 than they typically do for us. But perhaps that is because what lies behind this hard text is the equally difficult notion that salvation is going to be a costly enterprise purchased in blood. The binding and near-death of Laughter--and the foreshadowing phrase that "God himself will provide" for the sacrifice--give early biblical clues that eliminating evil is going to require enormous effort and sacrifice. Salvation is going to be the ultimate galactic exercise in faithfulness. Faithfulness, the Bible tells us early on, can be the most difficult, the most costly, of all the fruit of the Spirit.

Indeed, as Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis has noted, the Bible takes a great risk putting a story like this one so near the beginning of Scripture. If, naturally enough, you were to begin reading Scripture in Genesis 1, you would go a scant twenty-one chapters before encountering this story, replete with its potentially off-putting portrait of a God who commands so horrid a thing as child sacrifice. So why would the Bible run the risk of offending readers with a story so grim as to tempt a reader to close this book and never open it again? Perhaps because we need to learn something about the nature of faithfulness.

Because this story in Genesis 22 does not drop out of a clear blue sky. Instead verse 1 tells us that God's command to Abraham comes "some time later" or a better translation would be "after these things." After what things? Presumably all that had gone on earlier in the Abraham stories, chief among which are a bevy of tales detailing Abraham's failures of trust. Twice Abraham passed Sarah off as his sister because he feared for their lives. Then Abraham and Sarah laughed at God's promise of a son. Because of this doubt Abraham and Sarah sought a way around God's promise of the two of them producing a child by having Abraham rush God's plan through his liaison with Hagar.

"After these things" God tests to see where Abraham was at. But not just after "these things" in the life of Abraham but this story also follows the first twelve chapters of Genesis which detail humanity's steady moving away from God the Creator. God and humanity had become alienated. But with Abraham the world was to begin again. This had to go just right because on this man's faithfulness all depended.

In short, this was a unique test for a unique figure in salvation history. It was also an event that foreshadowed the death of the beloved son as the way to seal the covenant. Yet we tend to resist the notion of an evil so deeply entrenched that it requires even God to go to dangerous and shocking lengths of sacrifice to root it out.

But Genesis 22 confronts us unstintingly with God's view of sin and salvation--a point of view that is uncompromising on how dearly salvation will end up costing God. Apparently saving us is going to require Herculean faithfulness on the part of God. God himself is going to have to provide the sacrifice but that means that God himself is going to have to be faithful until it hurts--faithful until Someone is dead.

If the Bible takes a bit of a risk putting this story at the Bible's beginning, I am also taking something of a risk by using this as an example of faithfulness. This story maybe seems too remote from our own experience to be helpful. Wouldn't it be enough this evening simply to ponder more common, pedestrian forms of fidelity like keeping a marriage vow, fulfilling the promises you make to your kids, or tips on how to be a faithful employee?

Well, yes, in some ways we do need to think about those everyday examples of what faithful living means. But if we're going to frame this fruit correctly, then we need to see the tethers that connect all those more typical kinds of faithfulness to what Abraham did. If we are going to appreciate the weight, the sheer punch, of Christ-like, Spirit-induced faithfulness, then we need to see it in the context of God's faithfulness.

What is faithfulness? It is the ability, in all of life, to stay true to your word, to keep your promises, to be reliable, and to be loyal to the God who alone defines your life. Again, that makes God the ultimate faithful one. If Genesis 22 introduces a scary element early on in the biblical picture of reality, Genesis introduces even earlier the notion of God as the giver and keeper of promises. It started in Eden. The dust from the first sin had not settled yet before God promised to send someone to crush the serpent's head and bring a better day.

Then comes the story of the Flood, which concludes with more promises. Then comes Abraham and the opening of the covenant and that grand promise of being a God to Abraham and to his descendants forever. The Israelites were a people of the promise. They headed for centuries toward the Promised Land. They lived for centuries more with the hope of the messianic promise that God would send his Anointed One, his Christ.

If you had asked the average Israelite which God he worshiped, you would have heard the reply, "I worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." That way of referring to God built a cumulative case for faithfulness. God was associated with a string of past persons to whom God had been faithful, which generated hope that God would continue to be faithful. His proper name is "Yahweh," which simply means "I Am What I Am."

God just is faithfulness. Along with grace and love, faithfulness is his most salient personality trait. It needs to be the same for us. We said in our first sermon in this series that the fruit of the Spirit are not emotions that come and go but characteristics that define us, traits that accompany us in all of life. So with faithfulness: bearing this fruit does not mean that here and there, now and again, we keep a promise but rather that we keep all our promises, all the time. It means that we define ourselves by our faithful relationship first of all with God and then with all of the other people in our lives.

At the very least this trait would make us better spouses, friends, parents, children, siblings, church members, and citizens. Life depends on people exercising faithfulness in a bevy of tasks. If we cannot depend on other people keeping their promises and being faithful to their callings, life begins to fall apart. As it is, court dockets are clogged with divorce papers bearing one word to explain the dissolution of the marriage: "Infidelity." Twice in the last thirty years we've seen our nation torn apart by presidents who didn't stay true to the high ideal of the office, lied about it, and so set the wheels of impeachment into motion. The church is rocked by pastors who are not faithful to their calling but who use their office for sexual abuse, exploiting vulnerable women.

Life gets ugly when we cannot depend on others. As Lewis Smedes once wrote, just imagine a world where you could not rely on anyone. If the garage promised to have your car fixed by Wednesday noon only for you to discover come Wednesday noon that they'd not even gotten started yet, you'd be frustrated. If you could not trust the pharmacist to be careful in dispensing your prescription, would you even dare to swallow the pills he gives? If you cannot trust the police to protect you, how secure would you feel in society? (Indeed, many minorities in this country do not trust the police and the result in many inner cities is tragic.) If children could never trust their parents to pick them up when promised, how long before those little ones would become cynical? In a faithless world we would all quickly become self-protective, independent, deeply suspicious people determined to build a walled-in little world in which you have only yourself to rely on.

All people depend on the faithfulness of others. But Christians have a vastly higher reason to foster this trait: namely, what we see displayed through our God in Christ. Faithfulness, as it turns out, is not just the grease that lubes up the sprockets of civic life, it is the heartbeat of the cosmos. It is God's way with a fallen creation. We are called to imitate God. And though few of us will ever be called to exercise faithfulness in the dire way Abraham did in Genesis 22, something of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice does need to carry over. God did a hard thing in redeeming this world. It killed the beloved Son. "God himself will provide the sacrifice, my son," Abraham reassured a nervous Isaac. In the end God himself did provide what was needed and in the long run it turned out to be God himself. It is not easy for even God to be true to his own promises in this world. It's costly! So we should not expect it will be a cinch for us to stay faithful, either.

Being faithful to God, and within the church to also one another, sometimes hurts. It requires sacrifice, a willingness to suffer at least the criticisms of others and sometimes, as happens every day somewhere in this world, faithfulness requires physical suffering and even death within the context of the persecuted church. Faithfulness means that we want to stick with the God who, through death and hell, has stuck with us.

But as with Abraham, so with us: such major league faithfulness is learned through a bevy of smaller acts of faithfulness--little promises we keep, routine ways by which we show ourselves to be reliable people. Abraham's story did not begin on Mount Moriah, it ended there. "After these things" the big test came. Many of "those things" were part of a longer pattern of faithfulness that God was nurturing in Abraham.

These little deeds build up in us like a holy residue, slowly but surely mounting up to a more God-like level of faithful living. So we keep our little promises to our children lest they become shell-shocked early on in life. We work on carrying out faithfully even the smallest of tasks we have to do on the job. Of course, the so-called "little things" of our jobs are not so little. How differently might the O.J. Simpson case have gone years ago had the LAPD's crime lab personnel not repeatedly broken "little" rules on how to collect and handle evidence? A series of inattentive acts by less-than-reliable people added up to a huge question mark as to the overall reliability of the evidence in that case. Faithfulness matters.

We also nurture our faithfulness in marriage, both by avoiding obvious breaches of our vows such as in adultery and by positively keeping the flurry of little promises we make to each other. Within the church we learn faithfulness by sticking with one another. This relates to what we said a few weeks ago about the fruit of patience (which is a powerful ally for faithfulness): we need to be faithful to one another in a congregation despite the foibles and faults that could keep us apart. And we show our loyalty to God by being faithful to his ways not just when other church people are looking on but also when we maybe are the only Christian in the board room, break room, or on the basketball court. Faithfulness out in the larger world means being a little example of the kingdom's lifestyle in the midst of a faithless world which sometimes looks like it has plum forgotten all about God.

As the author of Hebrews 11 summed up the lives of the saints, he wrote that they all admitted to being strangers and aliens on the earth. Their citizenship was in a country not of this world, and it showed in their lives. It's not easy to be faithful. That's why we need the Holy Spirit. That's why we need also one another.

We need that "great cloud of witnesses" to inspire us and to encourage us. That is even more necessary in this society of amnesiacs. American memory is short, our sense for history is rapidly becoming non-existent. Instead people think they need to re-invent themselves every generation. And so many younger people have no use for hearing stories of faithfulness from those with gray hair. Once upon a time people were shaped by hearing the stories of how grandparents muddled through hard times, kept their marriage afloat over rocky shoals. Once upon a time we had time to tell and listen to such familial tales.

But now life goes too fast. Grandparents no longer live close to the grandkids (much less under the same roof as was once the case) and anyway some among the Gen X generation seem to think that the world has changed so fast there is not much an older person could say that would be relevant. If grandpa tries to encourage faithfulness in a young grandson, the boy may respond, "Hey, Gramps, gotta fly. Just email it to me!" If grandpa says he doesn't know how to do email, that merely confirms what the lad suspected anyway.

Hebrews 11 surrounds us with a cloud of past witnesses to tell us that we can and must take cues from the faithful who have gone before. They are girders for our own commitments as we make faithfulness a lifestyle. Faithfulness defines us, leading us to hard choices and maybe even to counter-cultural patterns if that's what it takes to stay true to the God who let his beloved Son be killed in order to stay true to us.

The story of Genesis 22 sets the tone for Scripture. Faithfulness is serious business. It leads the way back home. The story in Genesis 22 ends more or less happily. The covenant is re-affirmed, and one has the sense that with Abraham the cosmos has turned a corner. The tale concludes in verse 19 when, in a reprise of the image we received in verses 6 and 8, Abraham and Isaac leave the mountain "together" after all.

In a sense it's a "happy ending," but not unalloyedly so. Laughter is returned to Abraham and Sarah, but now it's a hard laughter--a laughter tempered by suffering and sacrifice. It's a hard laughter because now Abraham knows what God seems to have known all along: namely, the faithful fulfillment of the covenant cannot come painlessly. But it does come. God will provide. God does provide. You can count on it. Christians do count on it. The least we can do in response to so great a salvation is to be people who can likewise be counted on. Always. Amen.