God Is Bigger…

 “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go the land of Moriah, and offer him there as burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  - Genesis 22:2

 As a young person I remember this story being taught in Sunday school, and my Sunday school teacher said, “Didn’t Abraham have amazing faith?”   Quite frankly I didn’t think so.  In fact, I remember sitting in my seat quietly thinking that Abraham was a fool to obey such an absurd command.  If he had faith it was misguided.  Even more significantly I wondered, “What kind of God would ever ask one of his people to do such a hideous thing and make such a revolting sacrifice?  And even if God didn’t intend to allow Abraham to go through with it, what kind of sadistic baiting was this?”  

 I said something about my thoughts to my Sunday school teacher, and all I remember is my teacher suddenly appearing uncomfortable and even upset with my question.  After that, unfortunately I kept my questions and my doubts to myself, not wanting to risk being shot down before my classmates.  But it didn’t make my questions and doubts go away.  It didn’t make me stop wondering; stop thinking; stop inquiring; stop probing.

 It took many years before I understood and realized that my teacher’s negative reaction was not about me and my questions, but was about him, and that my questions threatened to fracture his fragile conception of God.  He was threatened by my questions and doubts.  So one way to handle it is to discourage the questioner, and then maybe the questions will never be asked; perhaps the questioner might even go away and not come back. 

 It’s always been fascinating to me how we take some of these, what seem to me to be, rather dark and disturbing stories and turn them into cute children stories.  Perhaps it’s the only way we as adults have found to deal with their darkness and disturbance by softening them and making them into palatable stories for young children.   If we look at them for what they really are, perhaps they would be too threatening, too raw, too cutting and too overwhelming for us to handle.

 You might ask, “Have I changed my mind about this story since my days of youth?”   I suppose my answer would be “yes” and “no.”  No, in that it still comes across to me as a poignant story that cuts like a jagged edged saw-blade and offends my modern sensibilities.  Yes I’ve changed my mind in the sense that I now understand more about the story, and I understand more about the story’s context.

 There are a couple of things we must understand.  The first is that this is an ancient story and we must be very careful not to exclusively frame it with our 21^st century mindset and sensibilities.  

 Stories played a very different and significant role in the ancient culture and mindset than in our day and age. In fact, it is a little similar to what I experienced among the Alaskan native peoples when we lived in Anchorage.  The native Alaskan peoples are story-tellers.  If you ask an Alaskan shaman or holy person a question about truth, or life, or faith, or ethics, or morality, they will rarely give you a modern western answer that comes in the form of a sermon, or advice, or logic, or doctrine, or moralizing.  Rather they will most often tell a story.   Whether the story is factually and empirically true is not the issue.  That doesn't matter.  What matters is the truth that the story brings and delivers with it.  Stories functioned in a similar way for the ancient Hebrew people.  This story was remembered by the Hebrew people and told and retold again and again down through the generations because of something the story proclaimed about God.  The story delivered a truth about the nature of God and what is foundational about God.  That takes me to the second thing.

 Abraham and his people were surrounded by cultures that sometimes practiced child sacrifice.  It was believed that their gods needed to be appeased in various ways so that they might act favorably toward them, and child sacrifice was one of the most radical expressions of that practice.  I believe the earliest meaning of this story for those ancient peoples was that the God of Israel did not require that.  In fact, in the story God provided the sacrifice in the form of a ram caught in the thicket.  The God of Israel was unique and his people were to be unique among the peoples of the earth. One of the early things that made them distinctive from the surrounding ancient cultures and their pagan gods was that their God had no such requirement – even forbade it – their God was bigger than that!  

 A part of what this story is about is that God is bigger.  God was bigger than the gods who required child sacrifice.  God was bigger than perhaps even Abraham perceived God to be.  Perhaps the “test” language is story’s dramatic way of declaring that God was not going to be about that kind of heinous, torturous baiting.  God was bigger than that.

 I believe God is always bigger.  It is we, who name ourselves as followers and disciples, who seem to be so hard-headedly adamant in the pursuit of making God only as big as us.  We reduce God down to the size of a verse of scripture, or a creed, or a doctrine, or a formula, or to the minuscule size of our personal understanding, experience and agenda.  The result is that God is no bigger than our arrogance and exclusivity; fears and prejudices.    God is bigger.

 Years ago, I had the funeral of a middle aged woman who died quite suddenly. Her son discovered afterward, by looking through his mother’s personal letters and papers, that apparently she was having an affair at the time of her death. Her son came to me very angry and also doubtful about his mother’s salvation – after all, he insisted, “This was an unconfessed sin.”

 I asked him if he had children. He said he did.  I asked him when one of his children did something they were not supposed to do, something naughty or bad, if his heart only softened with forgiveness when the child said he was sorry.  At that moment the man burst into tears and wept.  You see, what was really bothering him was his disappointment in his mom.  He realized that he had reduced God  to the size of his anger and disappointment. 

 We then talked about something really BIG Jesus spoke from the cross on behalf of all those before him, including the executioners, those who plotted his death, those who betrayed and denied him, those who took sick pleasure in his brutal execution, and to those who couldn’t have cared less: “Father, forgive them!” 

 Ann Lamott says, “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”   God is always bigger.  God is always bigger that we make God out to be.  God’s intent was that we are created in God’s image, but we turn that around everyday and recreate God in ours.

 The world is a place of incredible diversity and pluralism.  The world is in short supply of a whole lot of things, but one of them is toleration. There is a toleration shortage in this world that makes most other shortages look like abundance.   And, I find that some of the least tolerant are those who, in whatever way, attach God to their name and identity.  God is bigger!

 “And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket… and Abraham offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide.’”    “The Lord will provide.”   Perhaps that’s another way to say, “God is bigger?” 

 The bottom line is that Abraham, in the face of all the voices that would have made God smaller, trusted that God was bigger.   Perhaps that was the real test and the truth this story delivers.   In the face of all the voices from within and without, all the temptations, all the tendencies to make God smaller, can you trust that God is bigger?    Look into your own soul and begin to identify all the ways you reduce God to the size of you.  Then begin to trust and live and love like God is bigger.