"Here Come the Brides"

 

Genesis 29:15-28

July 26, 2026

 

Then Laban said to Jacob, "Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?"  Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.  Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was graceful and beautiful.  Jacob loved Rachel, so he said, "I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel."  Laban said, "It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me."  So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.

 

Then Jacob said to Laban, "Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed."

So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast.  But in the evening he  took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in to her.  (Laban gave his maid Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her maid.)

 

When morning came, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, "What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?"  Laban said, "This is not done in our country--giving the younger before the firstborn. Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years."

 

Jacob did so and completed her week; then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife.

 

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

 

 

            I’m going to ask David Bryant to play through a piece of music I downloaded this past week. It was recorded in 1968 by everyone’s favorite rapper: Perry Como.  The title is “Seattle”.

 

            So what does this have to do with Jacob and Laban and Rachel and Leah (and Zilpah, not to forget her)?  This music was the theme song for a TV series set in the early days of Seattle that ran for two seasons.  The series was called “Here Come the Brides”.  That would be a good title for this further incident in Jacob’s life.

 

            Having gone on the run for having scammed his brother one time too many, he reached his uncle Laban’s house, where his mother had assured him he would be safe.  Well… yes and no.  He was safe from his brother’s threats to kill him but he was not safe, as it turned out, from Laban taking advantage of Jacob’s affection for his daughter Rachel.  Jacob worked seven years for Laban as the bride-price to marry her, only to discover after it was too late that it had been her older sister Leah beneath the bridal veil and that he would have to work another seven years for Laban to rectify the situation.  During that seven years, Jacob (and not Laban) would be supporting Leah, his unexpected second wife, so that would have been a bonus for his now father-in-law.  Laban may have softened any hard feelings that Leah had by giving her her own slave, Zilpah, to take care of her.  Jacob would have to support Zilpah, too. 

 

This marriage had become a windfall for Laban and a serious financial burden for Jacob.  It made Jacob’s trickery toward Esau look like the work of an amateur.  If you read on, as I hope you will, you’ll see that Jacob’s response was, “Game on!”  He had seven years to break even at Laban’s expense, and he set about it right away.

 

Now, I am not endorsing the practice of fraud or deceit.  We have all seen the harm they do.  Everybody has a story about the relative or neighbor who was taken to the cleaners, or almost, by a fake letter from the IRS or a phone call from a non-existent credit bureau.  Last year I had to deal with a check stolen from a mailbox at the Exton Post Office that somebody altered and tried to deposit at a bank in Delaware.  It is not possible to guard against every single bad actor.  Laban and Jacob’s back-and-forth contest ultimately hurt both of them and depended (in the part of the story we heard today) on the exploitation of women who were treated as property or at best as financial investments.

 

Nevertheless, this story illustrates a couple of observation that Jesus made.  He saw that

 

“The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” [Luke 16:8]

 

So he warned his disciples,

 

“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” [Matthew 10:16]

 

Which is to say, “You have been given great gifts.  Use them always for good and never for evil.”

Street smarts are not necessarily a bad thing.  They can do some good.  In fact, you may need them.

 

            Jesus had to handle some delicate situations and there were people who wanted him out of the way, Luke tells us.

 

“So they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be honest, in order to trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor.  So they asked him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are right in what you say and teach, and you show deference to no one, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth.  Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’  But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, ‘Show me a denarius.  Whose head and whose title does it bear?’  They said, ‘The emperor’s.’  He said to them, ‘Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’” [Luke 20:20-25]

 

Know the people you’re dealing with.  Laban did.  Soon Jacob did, too.  Others have used the same ability, too, and for better ends than theirs.

 

Paul wanted to get the attention of the Greek philosophers when he visited Athens, so he went where they gathered, and he spoke in their terms.  In the synagogues he would begin with the scriptures, but here he began with a quotations about an overarching god taken from a Stoic philosopher and another Greek playwright.

 

“‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’” [Acts 17:28]

 

He didn’t win many over, but they did listen, which was more than most outsiders got.  It was worth a try.  Again, as Jesus said when he was using parables to teach,

 

“Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” [Matthew 52]

 

            If only Jesus’ followers used all of our creativity and ingenuity to share the good news – the way he did, looking around him at how people behaved in the marketplace or at a wedding or noting how seeds grow or which houses hold up when there is a flood. He took bread and wine left over after the Passover meal and turned them into a pledge of his ongoing presence. 

 

Surely he’s given us plenty of examples of how to understand and experience God’s love, which is all around us to be known and shared.  Maybe even an old Perry Como tune from an unsuccessful TV show could somehow be repurposed.  Who knows?  God is a real artist at that.

 

 

 

 

“God the Artist”   (Tune: Seattle)

 

There’s a rhythm to this world

the Lord has given.

There’s a timing to the whirlwind

that we live in.

When we listen we hear

through each laugh and each tear

how God’s love is breaking through

with a symphony that’s new –

maybe jazz, or even blues –

songs of heaven,

songs of heaven.

 

There’s a story God will tell

if we let him.

There’s a poetry as well

            rhyming heaven.

When we’d spoiled the plot,

            graceful language forgot,

Then the Word came down to earth

            and his love restored our worth.

Now he offers us new birth and

            resurrection,

            resurrection.

 

There’s a texture to the way

            God’s hand shapes us.

From the basic dust and clay

            he awakes us.

Then his brush decorates

            our lives with a glaze

that will shimmer and will shine

            and reflect his light divine;

God’s own glory in his time

            overtakes us,

            overtakes us.

 

"With God's Help"

 

Genesis 25:19-34

July 12, 2026

 

These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.

The children struggled together within her, and she said, "If it is to be this way, why do I live?" So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other; the elder shall serve the younger." When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb.

The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle, so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!" (Therefore he was called Edom.)

Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright."

Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?"

Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

 

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

 

            I ran into an awkward spot planning the service for this week.  We were going to have a handbell rendition of “O Beautiful, For Spacious Skies” last week, but it was bumped to this week.  That posed a problem because after hearing about how Jacob treated Esau from the moment of their birth and how he tricked him out of his place of honor it seemed out of line to ask God to “crown the good with brotherhood” if that is how brothers treat one another.

            Again, this is one of those spots in the Bible where you can tell it wasn’t all meant to be read in the short chunks we are used to.  Something like the Proverbs, yes.  Genesis, no.  In Genesis we watch Jacob – and to a lesser extent Esau – grow up and mature and escape the patterns of their early life.  Esau had been born first, which gave him precedence in the family and social order, but Jacob had grabbed him by the heel as they were being born, and that was taken as descriptive of their later relationship.

            You expect that toddlers will be self-centered.  You try to make sure that does not grow into becoming selfish.  When parents play favorites, that gets in the way, and Genesis tells us that the differences of temperament between the twins were allowed to go sour in part because of their parents’ attitudes.

“When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.  Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.”  [Genesis 25:27-28]

This story tells of how Jacob tricked Esau out of his privileges as the firstborn, and the way the story is told blames Esau for falling for it.

“Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’  (Therefore he was called Edom.)

Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’

Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’

Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’  So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob.  Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way.  Thus Esau despised his birthright.”  [Genesis 25:29-34]

Again, though, this wasn’t going to be the end of the tale.   The lentil stew incident would be exactly that – one incident, worth remembering, but not the whole story.  

There was another aspect to the boys’ situation in the family.  There was this aspect of their social standing, where Esau had in fact shown poor judgment.  But there was also the question of who would receive their father’s blessing as the one whose descendants would be seen as being in full succession to their grandfather Abraham, to whom God had promised the entire land.  Since Esau was Isaac’s favorite, he was the leading contender.

            Rebekah’s favorite was Jacob, though, and when Isaac was bedfast and blind, she set things up with Jacob’s cooperation (or connivance, depending on how you see it) so that Isaac would bless Jacob, thinking that he was blessing Esau.  Now, Esau may have been big and hairy but he was not stupid and he figured out what had happened right away.  He was so angry that he swore to kill Jacob.  Jacob had to go on the run because he knew that Esau would do it if he could.

            That throws everything into a different light. Esau couldn’t be blamed the way he could the first time.  It all gets complicated.  Reading on, as we will over the next couple of weeks, those complications begin to come together – with God’s help.  All of this is the background for that.  Spoiler alert: Jacob will meet his match in the person of his (and Esau’s) uncle Laban.  Esau will go his own way and put this all behind him.  Jacob will have to struggle with his flaws eventually – with God’s help.  He will find the courage to face his brother years later and they will reconcile – with God’s help.  Their descendants will repeat the cycle in one way or another in later books of the Bible and will work things out for better or for worse, depending on their willingness to accept God’s help.

            Despite how much later generations may want to tell the story as if it were all black and white, they don’t ever manage to do that.  The only way that it ever works out for the best is when they reach the point where they stop trying to assign blame and set aside judgment, leaving it in God’s hands – with his help.

            This is not just about two brothers, or their descendants, or the nations that they formed and lost and re-founded and lost again across the ages.  This is about humankind itself.  We fail as people.  Maybe I should say, “As people, we fail.”  We sin.  We let God down, we let each other down, we let ourselves down.  But God’s help abides, as God abides.

            The first letter of John says:

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  [I John 1:5-9]

We are children of God, still and always growing in grace.

 

"Bethel" - July 19, 2026

 

Genesis 28:10-19a

July 19, 2026

 

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.

He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.

And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

And the Lord stood beside him and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.

Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!" And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.

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

 

            Jacob was on the run from his brother, who had sworn to hunt him down and kill him.  If he could reach Haran, the town in the north where his family first came from, and where his uncle Laban lived, he would be safe.  Until he got there his life would be in danger.  Remember how, not long ago, there was a man who escaped from the county prison?  Remember how he was hunted for almost a week and hid out while the police were combing the woods and fields from Longwood to Nantmeal, from Chadds Ford to Warwick?  Picture Jacob in that sort of situation.  But there comes a time when exhaustion overcomes fear, and that is where Jacob was.

“He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.”  [Genesis 28:11]

Imagine being so tired that you can use a stone for a pillow and still nod off.

            Would you sleep well?  As much as your body would shut down, do you think your mind would do that?  I’ll just speak for myself here.  I’m one of those people who falls asleep easily.  I can sleep on a train or a plane with no problem.  Generally, 10:00 or so comes around and no matter where I am, my eyes droop.  Once I’ve had some kind of rest, though, whatever the previous day has held or whatever I expect for the coming day will filter its way into my thoughts and I start dreaming.  It doesn’t have to make sense, as long as there’s some kind of connection.  If I’ve had a flat tire I might dream about donuts.  If I got stuck on a crossword puzzle hours before I might dream about playing scrabble or about being in a room with black and white tiles on the floor.  Sometimes I will wake up with a to-do list on my mind and ten minutes to go before the alarm clock, which I really resent because it feels too soon to get up but too late to go back to sleep.

            So, yes, I am projecting my own stuff onto Jacob, but I don’t see how he could have slept and dreamt without turning his situation round and round in his head no matter how tired he was.  What lay behind?  What lay ahead?  Would he survive the middle?

            One word of caution here: not every dream has a deep significance.  A man I knew was a psychiatrist who worked at a Veterans’ Administration clinic where it would not be unusual for a patient to walk up to him, describe a dream, and ask, “What does that mean?”  His standard answer was, “It means don’t eat ice cream right before you go to bed.”

            At times of severe stress, though, it may be that only when that the physical necessity to sleep are we able to make any kind of assessment of our own situation.  It may be, as I think it’s safe to say about Jacob, that only when he had to slow down whether he wanted to or not, would he be paying enough attention to anything other than his fear to hear what God was saying to him over the noise of his thoughts.

“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’" [Genesis 28:15]

In the midst of external danger and internally a potential nightmare of fears, God found the one opening he had and used it, telling Jacob, “Get a grip.  You’re safe with me.”

            Apparently, Jacob had never fully realized that God is God not just of the beginning and the destination, but the God of the entire journey.  When that light dawned on him, he was amazed.

“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!’  And he was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’" [Genesis 28:16-17]

That’s a far cry from, “Oh, no!  I’m going to be caught and killed!”  Jacob named the place where he had his dream-vision “Beth-El”, which means “the House of God”.   

It’s not an accident, by the way, that a lot of AME churches, at least the older ones in this part of the country, are named Bethel.  In the decades just before the Civil War, fugitives from slavery, running for safety and refuge in Canada, could generally find a protected place to rest, as had Jacob, at a place called Bethel.  Such a place is not the destination, but a gateway, and a place where it becomes visible that there are others traveling the path so that no one heading in the right direction would travel alone.

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, tells of a time when she was mourning the loss of a close friend.  She and her son, then two-and-a-half years old, had a chance to take a brief vacation in a Mexican beach town where there was a circus school.  (As Bishop Peggy Johnson used to say, “You can’t make this stuff up.”)  Anyway, here’s what Ann Lamott wrote about that trip:

“There was a man here this time with just one leg.  I’d seen his prosthetic leg lying around him by the pool a few times before I actually saw him, and when I did, he was climbing up a trapeze ladder in the circus grounds. …

He climbed the ladder with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung, focused and steady and slow.  Then he reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze, swinging back and forth, and finally letting go.  A teacher on the other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on, and they swung back and forth for a while.  Then he dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in victory.  ‘Yes,’ he said, and lay there on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.

I approached him shyly at lunch the next day and said, ‘You were great on the trapeze.  Are you going to do it again?’  And I had this idea that he might so that I could do some serious writing about spirit and guts and triumph.  But all he said was, ‘Honey?  I got much bigger mountains to climb.’”[1]

By the way, the chapter where Ann Lamott tells this story is called “Ladders”.

---

[1] Ann Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2000) 74-75.

"Be Jubilant"

 

Leviticus 25:8-17

July 5, 2026

 

You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. ⁹Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. ¹⁰And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. ¹¹That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. ¹²For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.

¹³In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property. ¹⁴When you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one another. ¹⁵When you buy from your neighbor, you shall pay only for the number of years since the jubilee; the seller shall charge you only for the remaining crop-years. ¹⁶If the years are more, you shall increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price; for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you. ¹⁷You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.

 

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

 

            I’m interrupting my scheduled sermon series on Abraham and his family because I really don’t want to let the 250^th anniversary of the United States go by like a half-hearted parade without a marching band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever”.  This year the country is a quarter-millenium old, and the church is only fifty years behind that.  Those are achievements!

            So my text is one that is a solid part of the founding of both our country and our faith: written on the pages of the Bible, cast in bronze on the body of a bell that once hung in the Pennsylvania Statehouse that we now call Independence Hall: the Liberty Bell.  It cracked irreparably 200 years ago yesterday, July 4^th, 1826 – the day that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.  There around the top of the Liberty Bell, thousands of people every year can read the inscription

“Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” [Leviticus 25:10]

Liberty!  Liberation! 

            Those are gifts.  That is more than being born free, a citizen rather than a subject.  Someone is set at liberty after they have been detained.  A prisoner of war is liberated when he is rescued.  The allies landed in Normandy and began the liberation of Europe.  Liberation is the moment when things are reset and wrongs are put right.

            We don’t hear much from the book of Leviticus.  Much of it spells out standard operating procedures for priests overseeing sacrificial worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.  Within it, though, is this passage that lays out a vision for what that worship is to achieve, which is a living communion of God and his people where not only individual sin can find pardon, but the sins of a nation also can be expiated.  It envisions a regular reset every fifty years, called a “year of jubilee”.

            In that year, people who have become alienated or separated from their roots, who have been forced off the land by financial exploitation or perhaps by natural disasters or maybe just by the changes that generations bring – whatever it might be – are given a deliberate moment of renewal.  Inherited debts are set aside.   Even the land itself is given a rest and the fields go fallow to recover their strength.  It’s a time when roots of all sorts are refreshed.  And it’s meant to be holy.

“And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.” [Leviticus 25:10-12]

There are disputes about whether this law was ever fully observed.  The fact that the second part of this passage spells out ways somebody could get around the provisions of the first part says a great deal.  “Whatever you do, Mr. Revere, don’t make a ruckus; people are sleeping.”

            That isn’t really as important as the principle that it sets out, though.  There will be (and must be) God-given times of revival that are both personal and social.  When they come, they are to be celebrated wholeheartedly.  It’s a jubilee!  Even when the call for justice and equality that should be so plain and simple results in tribulation and conflict, when they are rooted in the Lord, they bring a fresh start.  The Lord himself is shaking things up.

“He has sounded forth the trumpet that will never call retreat. 

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. 

O be swift, my soul, to answer him.  

Be jubilant, my feet: our God is marching on!”

 

Listen for the clicking that says the gates are unlocked and the door is opened.  Listen for the bell that rings when the cancer patient leaves the clinic with a clear diagnosis.  Listen for the buzzer on your phone announcing that the stormfront has passed and the tornado watch is over.  Those sounds bring good news.  They bring liberation. 

More than even these, listen for the trumpet-voice that God speaks to your soul.  Listen for the declaration of life that comes from Jesus’ victory over death and liberty from sin that his Spirit brings us and begin the pursuit of real happiness that comes with living a new life in him.  Live it out in personal holiness and live it out on earth as citizens of the kingdom of God.  “For,” Paul reminds us,

“you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” [Romans 8:15-17]

We have been set free! Be jubilant!  Don’t keep it to yourself.  Don’t wait another fifty years. 

“Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” [Leviticus 25:10]

 

"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.