Sermon preached by Sophie Morse

26 June, 2011

Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

Genesis 22:1-18

Matthew 10:37-42

“For the Love of God”

When does our love of worldly things interfere with our love for God?  When does our love for what we cherish most get in the way of our love for God? When does our falling out with God prevent us from loving one another?

A couple of years ago the media was buzzing with the story of how actress Selma Hayek stepped in to breastfeed a hungry baby in Sierra Leon, because that child’s mother did not have enough milk herself.  Not only did this get the Western world buzzing because of the “newness” of breastfeeding, it also highlighted the plight of so many women around the world.

Just before this story in Genesis we hear about how Hagar, cast out in the wilderness, puts her son Ishmael down and walks a certain distance off because she could not bear to see him breathe his last breath.  Our history is likely riddled with untold stories of women who had had to hand over their child to God, to fate, to strangers, because they themselves could not help them.  These are stories that tell of tragedy; this tells of a world where God has not been allowed to lead. 

Perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, a friend of mine recently shared with me an article she had seen in the Atlantic Monthly. It was entitled “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”  I think we just heard a story from the Bible on how to do that…

The author of the article, a therapist, was not writing about the neglect and abuse of children – which obviously can and does land children in therapy later in life – but about the opposite.  She was writing about parents, who in their efforts to avoid making the mistakes of their forbears were trying to keep their children from experiencing any kind of discomfort at all.  The child might trip and they swoop in before the child has had a chance to realize that they’re ok.  They don’t get invited to a birthday party or they experience a bully at school and the parent swoops in to help them before they’ve figured out how to help themselves.  This continues until their child leaves home, completely incapable of coping with the slightest misfortune because they’ve never been given an opportunity to learn how to.  They wash up at this therapists door, bright, charming, articulate individuals who are miserable and don’t understand what is wrong with them.  

This is a story of parenting where God has not been allowed to lead, where hearts were closed to allowing God in.  My friend Karen who shared the article (on Facebook) confessed that it was hard to resist the urge to “swoop” in and protect her child from discomfort, but also shared a joy which I think many parents can relate to, which is that being a mom was a daily invitation to live with her heart wide open.

Many hear the two readings today from Genesis and from the Gospel of Matthew as some kind of admonishment against opening our hearts: a kind of divinely ordained guilt trip about how much we do love our children (or parents, pets, lovers).  And now therapeutic evidence is piling up that we can “love” them too much.  What are we to think?  We wonder about loving our children too much as though God isn’t there when we avoid losing patience with a small child, as though God isn’t present when we struggle with our reticent teenagers.  As though God isn’t there when we lie awake at night wondering if we can provide them enough, or if we have done enough, or when we might lose them.

God is the reason we do all these things, the reason we continue, when logic defies it, to crack our hearts open even more.  God lies awake with us, God weeps with us, God loves with us, be we privileged parents or parents of starving children.

It is clear that both of these stories have something to say about love, and I believe that despite the packaging, it is a message that we still need to hear. 

There is more to this story about Isaac and Abraham than a Biblical statement against child sacrifice, partly because neither party seems as opposed to it as they should be.  And there is more to the story than a statement about God’s providence in tragic situations, particularly because God was responsible for this near-tragedy to begin with.

There is also more to this story than a lesson about how much faith we should have in God .  We have been led to understand from this story that if we are not willing to go to the lengths that Abraham went to that our faith is deficient, that it somehow doesn’t measure up.  But I’m sure I’m not the only one who will take issue with this.  For one, I would wager that Sarah would not have responded as Abraham did to such a request, and I believe God would have learned some new vocabulary if God had proposed such a test of faith to her. Does this make Sarah or any mother or father today who cannot identify with Abraham less faithful than Abraham?  If faith were a team sport we may as well just have sidelined the whole team.  And personally I want mothers and fathers who deeply love their children to be on my team.

So what are we supposed to hear?

No matter how well we love, God will always find a way that we can love better.  For Abraham, Isaac may have become just a little too important.  Just think, you’re a hundred years old with an ancient wife and no children and suddenly you are told you are going to be a father of a new nation. The idea that either of you could pull this off is so far-fetched it’s funny; we know this because Sarah laughed, and it’s practically the only place in the Bible that anyone does. It’s that preposterous.  And now they do have a son, Isaac – a living breathing miracle.  And suddenly these promises of a new nation are not that far-fetched at all.  What Isaac has come to represent to Abraham may have become larger than Isaac, and indeed it could have become larger than, more sacred than, God.  And God’s answer to this is that nothing is more sacred than God, not even our relationship with our flesh and blood. 

We certainly have heard this message from the story of Isaac and Abraham:  that nothing is more sacred than God.  What we don’t hear as often is that when we allow God in, when we place God at the center as more sacred than all else that we hold dear, we are actually able to love more completely, freely, deeply.

Think about it:  if we love anyone as a means to an end that serves our own ego, what kind of love will we have for them?  A genuine, unconditional love, or a narrow, self-serving love?  God may not have been testing Abraham’s allegiance to God so much as freeing Abraham to love his son Isaac for Isaac’s sake, for God’s sake, and thus love his son more.  If he let God into his heart first, not his ego, pride, or logical mind, he will be able to love Isaac more, as well as remember where Isaac came from.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…”

Here we are again. Are we not supposed to love our families?

Remember, no matter how well we love, there is always a way that we can learn to love better, and for Jesus that meant to embrace the lost sheep.  Jesus’ concern was the well-being and liberation of those on the margins, so that they might receive the same blessings from this life as anyone else.  And in Jesus’ time there were many obstacles standing in the way of people caring for those on the margins.   Jesus resisted the brutality of the Roman empire, and resisted the inequities of the religious institutions of the day, and, we learn in this passage, the institution of family.

Families were the building block of society that for centuries had been – and continue to be in many parts of the world– very effective in providing for people’s needs.  But like any human institution it was flawed.  It was flawed in the way it concentrated power around a few men at the expense of women, children and slaves, and those outside the family systems such as widows and orphans.  It was flawed in the way that families demanded near-absolute allegiance, even over as Jesus would claim, allegiance to God.

If a person were truly on the side of God he or she would not choose to stay within a system that continued to neglect the poor: they would lose their life as they knew it.  Thus the message from Matthew: if you choose your family over me I know which side you have chosen, and you are not worthy.  You will not find new life with me.  If the disciples were willing to give up these cornerstones of their life, they would find new life in an all-embracing love, in hearts that were not partially open, but wide open. 

These were provocative words then as they are now, because Jesus knew how difficult the message was to receive.  It would have sounded outrageous to the family-bound people of his world.  And of course for us, they still sound outrageous to us.  We know very well there is a lot we are not willing to give up to follow Jesus, including systems that perpetuate suffering.  For us it may be the boundaries of the nuclear family that closes our eyes and hearts to those who are suffering right next to us.  It may be our economic system that allows for entire nations to be impoverished, as well as so many here at home.  It may be a social system that encourages us to care too much what other people think of us.

Is this then, our Isaac?  Unjust systems we are not willing to break from?  Families that mean so much to us that we forget the needs of others?  Ways that our hearts love not for other’s sake but for our own sake?   

For all of us, we are called to love God more than our loved ones precisely because it allows us to open our hearts more to them and to all our fellow humans.  Loving God first allows us to imagine a world where mothers can feed their own children, a world where parenting, and indeed caring for any family member isn’t left up to isolated parents or children but could be shared collectively.

God spoke to Abraham in Genesis: look! Pay attention!  Let me in and you will have new life with your son and future generations.

God said through Jesus in Matthew – Look!  Pay attention.  When you love let me lead – do not constrain your love to some and not constrain your love to some and not others.  Love all my children, and you will find new life

God is saying to us every day for trhe love of God, love others.  For when you do, when we allow God to be the lens through which love, when we allow God to be sacred above all things, then we can learn to love all things.  We will love with our hearts wide open.  We will find our lives.

And that, sisters and brothers, is Good News.

Amen.