"The Sacrifice of Isaac"

 

Genesis 22:1-14

June 28, 2026

 

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."  He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you."  So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.  On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.  Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."

Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them walked on together.  Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"  Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.

But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."  He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."  And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide," as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."

 

 

            Let me just jump into the middle of this passage by saying that I have a problem with it.  If someone killed their son and said it was because God told them to do it, I would say they are criminally insane.  I’m not alone in struggling with what I read.  Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God says,

“…to modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity.”[1]

Before doing that, though, look at it more closely.  Hold it also in mind beside other parts of the Bible that raise similar questions, like Joshua, for instance, or where one of the judges leads an army that massacres the Canaanites or other tribes living in the land, saying it is by divine command.  Is that really who God is?  Is that really what God would want his people to do?

            I don’t believe that it is.  I do believe, though, that it tells us something about who we are, and our sinfulness, and what God does about that.

            First off, we are not so different from the people we are quick to condemn.  Instead of going back thousands of years, just go back three.  Look at the October 7^th massacres, where Palestinian insurgents from Hamas killed hundreds of civilians – men, women, and children – not all of them even Israelis.  We’ve seen the Israelis retaliate against how many thousands of Palestinians – men, women, and children – and their towns reduced to rubble and the people dying in terrible ways.  What justifications are offered by either side?  Plenty of hurt and harm on both sides, all of them equating retribution with justice.  And as much as I can (especially from a distance) condemn everybody’s actions, I will admit that I understand in my gut where their decisions and actions come from.  That itself troubles me.

            These things are part of human life.  They’re part of our own, fallen human nature.  We can look to all sorts of examples where horrible things are done and God’s name is invoked, implicitly if not always spoken outright.  Are we not all ready to do and say things that sentence the next generation to all sorts of trouble, and even death?

            Yet explore this passage closely.  It is not only about our willingness to sacrifice the future, but about God’s intervention.  We are told that this episode in Abraham’s life took place because

“God tested Abraham.” [Genesis 22:1]

We see the test.  But what was the test actually about? 

            I had an American Studies teacher in eleventh grade who gave a quiz about the Great Depression that had the question “True or False: Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the law of supply and demand.”  That was one of his little jokes.  When we got our papers back, somebody raised their hand and said that she couldn’t find anything about that in her lecture notes or in the textbook.  The teacher then said, “Can you tell me what the law of supply and demand is?” She said, “No,” and he asked her, “Then why didn’t you ask that when you saw the question?  That’s the real lesson here.”

So if the command to sacrifice Isaac was a test, what was it testing?  Certainly it was a test of Abraham’s obedience, and he passed that with a high mark of approval but beyond that, the lesson was that God did allow him to follow through.

“He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’" [Genesis 22:12]

So maybe we are being tested, too, when we hear about the whole event.  We want to know what kind of God would want to see Isaac killed.  The answer is, “Not the God Abraham worshiped.”

When we are also tested and tried by extreme motives that drive us.  Those are not always the will of God.  Even when we are absolutely sure that we are justified, God may step in and say, “Enough!  Stop right there!”  Part of the test Abraham faced, a test that we all face more often than we like to admit, is to obey that voice, the one that says to put the knife down. The real God is the one who says to drop our angry claims to righteous wrath, to stop justifying things that both attract and repulse us at the same moment, and to back off instead – even to offer mercy.  That is the real sacrifice to make.

Honestly, it can be much more costly to give up resentment and bitterness and hatred than to offer any material gift.  That act of obedience is the worship that is welcomed and touches God’s heart.

Again, we have an advantage in that we have heard the promise that

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” [Matthew 5:7]

Those are the words of the one and only person who ever had no need to justify himself because he was the one and only person who has gone through this world without sin.  In fact, he would take on all that the world could aim at anyone, and he did it not on his own account but on ours.  That is the ultimate sacrifice.  We call him the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.  That ram caught in the thicket took Isaac’s place, but Jesus has taken ours, and our enemies’.  And that makes him exactly the one worthy of worship and gratitude and emulation.   His sacrifice puts every one of us back on an even ground with one another, and restores us to our place as beloved children of God. 

 

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[1] Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballentine Books, 1993) 18.

Father Abraham

 

Genesis 21:8-21

June 21, 2026

 

The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac." The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring." So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him." Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

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            There’s some background to today’s reading from Genesis.  Last week we heard about the birth of Isaac to Sarah and Abraham when he was a hundred years old, and the passage for this morning refers to that.  However, this episode involves two other people affected by Isaac’s birth.  They are Sarah’s slave-woman Hagar and Hagar’s young son Ishmael.

            Now, after Abram and Sarai had left their settled life in Haran on the strength of God’s promise that he would make them the ancestors of a great nation that would fill the land God showed them, there came a time when it became clear that nothing was happening for them in the obstetrics department.  Sarah was no longer of child-bearing age.  After considerable agonizing over the prospects, she developed a plan and convinced Abraham to go with it.  He fathered a child with her maid, Hagar, with the understanding that if she had a son (as she did), he would be treated as Abraham’s legitimate heir.

            There’s a whole lot here that is questionable, but in that setting, where polygamy was accepted, this at least meant there was some level of consent involved.  But it also raised the issue afterward of the relative status of Sarah and Hagar, one the acknowledged wife and the other the mother of his child.  After the birth of Ishmael, Hagar began to get “uppity”.  Looking ahead, it was becoming clear that there would be an eventual conflict when either Abraham or Sarah died – remember, they are both north of eighty at this point.  How would Isaac be protected?  And hadn’t God’s miraculous intervention to bring about his birth shown that Isaac, not Ishmael, was the chosen one? 

            I want to put in a good word here for monogamy and for marital fidelity.  I want to put in a good word for adoption.  I want to put in a good word for not ending up in these situations to begin with.  Don’t think they don’t happen.  Slavery, whether in the ancient world or in the U.S., made these matters more complicated.  Thomas Jefferson is by now mostly acknowledged to have had a longtime extramarital arrangement with a black woman named Sally Hemmings – who may have been his deceased wife’s half-sister by her father.  Even without slavery, in our own day you might know Lyle Lovett’s song “Friend of the Devil” that has the words,

“I’ve got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee.

The first one says she has my child, but it don’t look like me.”

 

            So, getting back to the Bible, you can see Sarai’s worries were not totally unreasonable.  Her solution, though, was unjust to Ishmael and possibly punitive to Hagar who had not really had a choice in any of this to begin with.

"Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."  [Genesis 21:10]

Abraham was caught in the middle. (And, yes, it was as much his fault as anyone else’s.)

“The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.” [Genesis 21:11]

Notice the wording here: “his son.” Which son was that?  No matter which path he took, he would endanger a son.

“But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.’" [Genesis 21:12-13]

But what about Hagar?

            How can her story not rip your heart out? Abraham tried to salve his conscience a little bit by sending her off with some bread and water.  That’s pretty meagre child support, and ran out quickly. 

“Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child.’ And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.” [Genesis 21:14-16]

God intervened.  God extended the promises made to Abraham to her and to Ishmael, though they would play out in a different way.  Isaac and his own descendants would still inherit the blessing, but Ishmael was also under God’s care.

            Part of that care, I believe, is that once they were grown up neither Isaac nor Ishmael let the enmity between their mothers define their relationship to their father or to one another.  That doesn’t always happen.  Relationships among half-siblings can be complicated, and you can count on it that Isaac and Ishmael her different versions of the same events as they grew up.  But there seems to have been communication between them and some sort of understanding and respect.  Genesis 25:8-10 says:

“Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.  His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites.  There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah.”

That last bit must have been hard on Ishmael.  Where was his own mother buried?  We don’t know – but it was not with his father.

            These are emotionally complicated matters, and one thing that we see is that they don’t all resolve easily and that they leave us with the awareness to be careful about putting anybody on a pedestal or tearing them down too quickly.  Our lives may send ripples across generations. That’s true in both good and bad ways.  There are times that God steps in and helps the helpless but it’s on us not to create those situations.  There are more lessons in this incident than I’ve touched on, and that’s one of the wonders of these accounts.

            The Bible has much more to tell us about Abraham’s life, and the life of his family, and we’ll be looking at that in upcoming weeks but, that said, this piece of it is probably enough to think about on Fathers’ Day.

Yes, You Did Laugh

Genesis 18:1-15

June 14, 2026

 

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.  He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them and bowed down to the ground.  He said, "My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.  Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree.  Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on--since you have come to your servant."  So they said, "Do as you have said."

And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said, "Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes."  Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it.  Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set it before them, and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

They said to him, "Where is your wife Sarah?" And he said, "There, in the tent."

Then one said, "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son." And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him.  Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.  So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I be fruitful?"

The Lord said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?' Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son."

But Sarah denied, saying, "I did not laugh," for she was afraid.

He said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

 

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            There are solemn moments when for some reason somebody starts giggling.  The more they try, the harder it is to stop.  That has even influenced how the Bible has been translated.  There’s a part of II Corinthians where Paul writes about the trials he has come through and the physical punishments that were inflicted on him. He tells of being given thirty-nine lashes five different times and being beaten with rods three times.  In the Revised Standard Version, published in 1946, he goes on to say how he had survived the same kind of brutality that had killed Stephen, the first Christian martyr.  Says Paul:

“One time I was stoned.”  [II Corinthians 11:25]

That made enough teenagers giggle in the 1960’s and 1970’s that when the New Revised Standard Version was published in 1989, the words had turned into

“Once I received a stoning.” 

Sarah found herself in one of those situations because she overheard the promise, solemnly propagated to Abraham, that they would soon have a son, and she found even the thought so silly that it was laughable.  The Bible politely puts it,

“Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” [Genesis 18:11]

Sarah was a little bit earthier than that.

“Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I be fruitful?’" [Genesis 18:12]

Of course, the mysterious visitor called her out on that.  And, of course,

“Sarah denied, saying, "I did not laugh," for she was afraid. He said, ‘Yes, you did laugh.’" [Genesis 18:15]

It was a “gotcha” moment.  She wouldn’t want to offend a guest by implying he must be crazy – but come on!  Still, she got ahold of herself and must have stifled the chuckling somehow.

It wasn’t forgotten, though.  In a section of the story that we didn’t hear this morning, we learn the outcome:

“The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised.  Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him.  Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him.” [Genesis 21:1-3]

The word “Isaac” means “laughter”.  So you could say that God let her have the last laugh.

            It is alright, in fact it is more than alright, to find joy in what God does.  If that joy bursts out in laughter, that’s fine.  Yes, laughter can sometimes be bitter.  Sometimes it can be meanspirited.  I’m not talking about those.  I’m talking about the times when it arises as an aspect of gratitude and of surprise at just how wonderful God can be.  Laughter, like song, can be a genuine, heartfelt expression of praise – and no genuine expression of wonder at God’s goodness and care (let’s use the word “praise”) should never be undervalued.

            We have to learn that, though – at least some of us.  Sarah was living in a world where women were supposed to keep their thoughts to themselves.  We live in a world with its own rules of decorum that find their way even into our spiritual lives.  C.S. Lewis wrote,

“When I first began to draw near to belief in God, and even for some time after it had been given to me, I found a stumbling block in the demand so clamorously made by all religious people that we should ‘praise’ God; still more in the suggestion that God himself demanded it. We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratifies that demand. Thus a picture, at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and of his worshipers, threatened to appear in my mind. The psalms were specially troublesome in this way – ‘praise the Lord’, ‘O praise the Lord with me’, ‘O praise him.’ (And why, incidentally, did praising God so often consist of telling other people to praise him? Even in telling whales, snowstorms, etc. to go on doing what they would certainly do whether we told them or not?)” …

He continued,

“But the most obvious fact about praise – whether of God or anything – strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I have never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness with the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game – praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical percentages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time, most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least.”[1]

            Sarah laughed.  Maybe it was inappropriate but it was real.  Maybe it was out of line from someone whose place was to wait silently behind the tent flap until it was time to serve dinner.  God was challenging her reality, announcing that her troubles would be over in an unlikely way.  It was funny.  But it was even funnier that it was true.  She would give birth – at her age! – to a son and his name itself would be a reminder of God’s faithfulness to her and to everyone.

Praise the Lord, then, however you do it, for his unexpected miracles of grace.  Praise God for the shade of an oak tree on a hot day.  Praise him for strangers passing by and for those who offer hospitality.  Praise God for solemn messages of joy or oddly deadpan delivery of good news.  Praise him for late-life pregnancies.  Praise him for safe deliveries.

While we’re at it, praise God for his own Son, born in a yet more miraculous way than Isaac was, and for the rebirth that was his resurrection.  Praise him for the chance he gives us all to be born of his Spirit and to know the freedom that lets us laugh and the joy that makes us sing and clap because we’ve seen for ourselves that “His steadfast love endures forever.” 

Amen.

 

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[1] C.S. Lewis, “Reflections on the Psalms: ‘A Word about Praising’” in The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1987), pp. 177 and 179. 

A Complicated Prologue

 

Genesis 12:1-9

June 7, 2026

 

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot and all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan,

Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.

And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

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            Genesis is largely a family epic.  Beginning with what we’ve heard today, it tells us about the ups and downs of an extended family that moved around the Middle East, from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast to Syria to Egypt, over a period of generations during the Bronze Age.  We cannot put solid dates on any of it, but we’re talking about somewhere from 2000 B.C. to 1300 B.C., give or take.

            There’s a lot in their lives that is strange to us.  Slavery and polygamy play a big part.  There are examples of fortune-telling and idol worship and echoes of child sacrifice.  We hear about desert chieftans and absolute monarchs.  There are horses, but camels had not yet been domesticated.  Many events hinge on finding enough water and pasture for the sheep and goats.

            Much of the tension comes from situations that are familiar, though.  There are marital arguments.  Parents play favorites.  Teenagers fall in love.  People try to scam each other on business deals.  Some of them become refugees from natural disasters or get caught between warring neighbors.  Disagreements over inheritance turn ugly.  Babies are born and people get themselves cushy jobs.  They worry about aging.  Life goes on.

            That life that continues from generation to generation is defined by the underlying guidance and protection of the Lord who singles out a seventy-five-year-old man named Abram who is living in Haran, in what’s now southeastern Turkey, and living (apparently) quite comfortably, and tells him to leave it all.

"Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." [Genesis 12:1-3]

There is so much missing from this statement.  Was Abram used to hearing from God?  Did he question his sanity?  Did Sarai, his wife, have a word or two to say about this?  They had a nephew who seems to be a part of their household.  What led them to take him with them and what led him to go along?  They had so much going for them:

“all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran,” [Genesis 12:5]

and the trip was taking them through some decent land along the eastern Mediterranean, and as they passed through there

“the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring [which he did not have] I will give this land.’" [Genesis 12:7]

Instead, Abram and Sarai and Lot and the crew kept traveling south toward the Negeb, that is the desert. [Genesis 12:9]

            Everything that happened to them, and to the family that they unexpectedly continued, had the same divine presence and divine promise in the background.  God spoke to some of them, but maybe not to all of them, across the centuries.  At times they are intimately aware of him and at other points they just wonder whether he has been at work without their knowledge behind the scenes, so that when you take not just the lives of Abram and Sarai but also the lives of their descendants all together, what we end up seeing is that rather than God being part of their story, they are part of God’s story.

            Their world was one filled with petty kings who considered themselves mighty warriors and overlapped with an age when the first large empires on earth were taking shape.  Yet it was into the seemingly insignificant and often messed-up family that looked back to Abram and Sarai and in the middle of that particularly chaotic part of the world that the God who had called Abram and Sarai to make some strange choices would himself, through a similarly inexplicable, miraculous birth, take on human form.  At that moment, another descendant of theirs would write,

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” [John 1:14]

The blessing God gave that family made the way for all people of the earth to be blessed, to be redeemed, to be one family, fully his own.

"An Elemental Spirit"

 

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost

May 24, 2026

 

            Tom Lehrer graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor’s degree at the age of 18 and his Master’s degree one year later.  He taught math at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and UC Santa Cruz but he’s mostly remembered for his comedy songs.  Learning one of those songs could earn some extra credit points from my high school physics teacher.  I never got past the first few lines, unfortunately, and can’t do even those without notes, but here’s part of it:

“There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum, and osmium, and astatine, and radium
And gold, protactinium, and indium, and gallium,
And iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium…”

Then he runs through the rest of the periodic table and finishes:

“These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard

And there may be many others but they have not been discovered.”

 

            I definitely would have earned the extra credit if this song had cited the elements as they were identified by classical Greek philosophy of the sort familiar to a Greek physician by the name of Luke who traveled with an early Christian convert and missionary by the name of Paul.  Luke, who wrote a gospel that carries his name and a book about the Acts of the Apostles, would have known this list, too: “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”.

 

            Luke tells us how, shortly after Jesus ascended to heaven on the fortieth day from his resurrection, Jesus’ disciples had gathered together

 

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” [Acts 2:2-4]

 

The Holy Spirit had come like wind and like fire.  When Peter tried to explain what was going on, he reached for the words of the prophet Joel, who had said,

 

“In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even on the male and female slaves,

in those days I will pour out my spirit.” [Joel 2:28-29, Acts 2:17-18]”

 

“Pour out” – there’s the water to go with the air and fire, the wind and flame.  And the earth?  That is humankind. That is you and me. 

 

            Way back at the beginning, in Genesis, there are two descriptions of creation.  There is the grand, sweeping one, where it all begins with water and the Spirit when

 

“the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” [Genesis 1:2]

 

Then there is the intimate, hands-on version in the next chapter, where

 

“the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” [Genesis 2:7]

 

God calls the universe into being through his Spirit like a wind on the ocean.  God brings us to life by breathing into us, sort of like a rescuer giving mouth-to-mouth respiration.

 

            In John’s telling, when the disappointed and terrified disciples, exhausted and lost after Jesus’ crucifixion, were huddled behind a locked door for safety, Jesus appeared among them.

 

“Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.  As the father has sent me, so I send you.’  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” [John 20:23]

 

And, Jesus being Jesus, he complicated it by telling them that now that they had received the Holy Spirit through him, they had to forgive people the way he does, and the whole business of building up and sustaining and the occasional miracle-working would happen through the very human, dust-of-the-earth bunch like them and like us.

 

            Somehow, in fact, it even adds to the wonder that is God that his works are done by people who are mindful of their limitations.  The miracle on the day of Pentecost was not that the disciples could speak in foreign languages, but that people understood what they were saying.  The miracle is never what we do, but what God does, either with or without us, sometimes through us, sometimes for us, and sometimes despite us.  Luke’s friend Paul observed,

 

“For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.  For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

 

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” [II Corinthians 4:5-7]

 

            Consider this little nugget of trivia: Sir Arthur Sullivan, the man who wrote the music to The Pirates of Penzance, including the tune that Tom Lehrer stole for “The Elements”, also wrote the music for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”.  That may mean something.  It may not mean anything.  But it’s worth pondering, and I had to fit it in somewhere.

 

 

 

"A Mothers' Day Job Posting"

 

Proverbs 31:10-31

May 10, 2026

Mothers’ Day

 

¹⁰A capable wife who can find?

She is far more precious than jewels.

¹¹The heart of her husband trusts in her,

and he will have no lack of gain.

¹²She does him good, and not harm,

all the days of her life.

¹³She seeks wool and flax,

and works with willing hands.

¹⁴She is like the ships of the merchant,

she brings her food from far away.

¹⁵She rises while it is still night

and provides food for her household

and tasks for her servant-girls.

¹⁶She considers a field and buys it;

with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

¹⁷She girds herself with strength,

and makes her arms strong.

¹⁸She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.

Her lamp does not go out at night.

¹⁹She puts her hands to the distaff,

and her hands hold the spindle.

²⁰She opens her hand to the poor,

and reaches out her hands to the needy.

²¹She is not afraid for her household when it snows,

for all her household are clothed in crimson.

²²She makes herself coverings;

her clothing is fine linen and purple.

²³Her husband is known in the city gates,

taking his seat among the elders of the land.

²⁴She makes linen garments and sells them;

she supplies the merchant with sashes.

²⁵Strength and dignity are her clothing,

and she laughs at the time to come.

²⁶She opens her mouth with wisdom,

and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

²⁷She looks well to the ways of her household,

and does not eat the bread of idleness.

²⁸Her children rise up and call her happy;

her husband too, and he praises her:

²⁹‘Many women have done excellently,

but you surpass them all.’

³⁰Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,

but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

³¹Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,

and let her works praise her in the city gates.

 

       ***********************************

                College friends of mine formed a band back in the day and tried to produce an introductory tape, as one did then, with an original song in just about every category of music.  There was a punk song, a reggae song, some techno, some heavy metal, a breakup song, and random dance music.  But when I read or hear this section of Proverbs, I think of the country song they came up with.  It was called, “I Need a Southern Fried Woman in This Shake and Bake World”.

            The book of Proverbs is a collection of advice for living, apparently drawn from several sources.  The final section is identified as words spoken to someone named King Lemuel (whom we don’t hear about anywhere else) by his mother. After telling him to avoid womanizing and getting drunk, she tells him to find a wife who fits her criteria, which are demanding.  It’s assumed that she has serving-girls to help her, but managing them is one of the many expectations laid on her.

            She is supposed to provide food, both from the market and from a garden that she should find, buy, and plant.  Part of that is supposed to be a vineyard.  Beyond subsistence, there should be enough produce to sell some off at a profit.  She should stay up late and get up early, always spinning thread to make cloth and clothing for the household and become yet another income stream.    

            This is not the “little lady” who stays home and arranges flowers all day.  This woman is managing her own business as well as the household while her husband is off somewhere else looking impressive in the suit she tailored for him.

            She must be wise, kind, and generous, and teach those virtues to the children.  To draw things together, she should have a healthy spiritual life.  Not everybody will win a beauty contest, but that is the least of it.

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,

but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

[Proverbs 31:30]

Honestly, I get exhausted just reading this list. The job description doesn’t mention her cooking, either.  I guess the meals and the cleaning and taking care of sick children and feeding animals and so forth falls to the servants.  She can only do so much, after all.

That, I believe, is the point of this text.  The superwoman is an ideal, probably; sure, we all know women whose energy and breadth of skills are astounding, but it points out how much is expected of the average, ordinary woman and reminds the husband and the family not to take any of that for granted.  Give her the credit she deserves.

“Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,

and let her works praise her in the city gates.” [Proverbs 31:31]

            There’s a story (totally unsubstantiated and probably not true) about how one day Winston and Clementine Churchill were crossing the street in London when a streetsweeper recognized her and called her name.  They talked to each other for awhile, then she took Churchill’s arm and they walked on.  She explained that she had known him when they were a lot younger and he had had a serious crush on her.  Winston laughed and said something about how she might have been a streetsweeper’s wife.  She laughed, too, and said, “No, by now he would have become Prime Minister.”

            This passage throws into confusion the whole notion of a “trad wife”.  I cannot imagine this woman quietly and meekly going along with whatever she is told to do without comment.  I cannot imagine her, living in our day, submitting her judgment entirely to her husband.  If he’s smart, he’ll listen to her.

“The heart of her husband trusts in her,

and he will have no lack of gain.

She does him good, and not harm,

all the days of her life.” [Proverbs 31:11-12]

            The danger of Mothers’ Day is that it can sometimes sentimentalize the effort that goes into family life.  The beauty of Mothers’ Day is that it recognizes the grace of God inherent in relationships of caring, even when they come under great strain.  All the tasks that are listed in Proverbs and all the many others that are parallel to them – jobs like forcing the kids (if necessary) to go to Sunday School; making them eat their vegetables or not eat the M&Ms; driving them all over the place; saying, “No,” sometimes even when every other parent (supposedly) says, “Yes” – are part of the work that goes not only unrecognized but also can be resented until the kids get over it and maybe eventually hear the same words come out of their own mouths.  Those moments surely also deserve recognition.  Again, this job description says,

“She girds herself with strength,

and makes her arms strong” [Proverbs 31:17]

 

which takes a lot of forms. 

            So for all aspects of the calling, and for all who assist in the work, and for all the women who have done or are doing their best,

“Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,

and let her works praise her in the city gates.”

A shout-out online doesn’t hurt either, and a word of appreciation even when it isn’t Mothers’ Day, just because.