Crisis at the Border (Exodus 1:8—2:10; Proper 16A; August 24, 2014)

Crisis at the Border

Exodus 1:8—2:10

Proper 16A
August 24, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

We become the stories we tell. And there’s a good reason for that.

The world is a very complicated place, a place that, just counting what we can see and hear and feel at any given moment, contains tens of thousands of objects. There are too many things and people to keep track of or even to notice all of the time, so we make categories for things and people, niches for everything we see and hear and feel, to make the world easier to navigate.

I suspect that all animals do the same thing. Of course that’s easy for me to say but impossible for me to prove, but it still makes sense. I think that cats, for example, have a few categories that help them sort out the world. Through the eyes of a cat, I imagine that there are 1) things that I can eat, 2) things that can eat me, 3) servants, and 4) everything else.

Categories help cats and us simplify the world into something manageable, something we can deal with. Categories get mixed up in another very powerful way of managing the world: story-telling. A story, a plot, a narrative line, helps us sort out the important things from the unimportant “noise.”  A story connects categories together into a whole that makes sense.

Story-telling is how we make sense of the universe. That’s true even for scientists who may imagine that story-telling and science don’t mix. Paleontologists have constructed a story, called evolution, to tie together the fossil evidence of long-vanished plants and animals. Cosmologists have a story, called the Big Bang, that makes sense of the movement of the galaxies and the universe’s background radiation and all sorts of other evidence.

We call ourselves homo sapiens, “wise or sane human.”  I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to call ourselves homo narrans, “story-telling human,” as John Niles suggests in his book by the same name.[1]  Story-telling is certainly what we do.

We make our stories and then we bend our experiences to fit our stories. If facts don’t fit our narrative, we tend to reject the facts. With our stories, we build a map so we can find our way in the world of hard objects you can bump into. Like all maps, our stories have to fit the world pretty well. If we don’t have a story to explain how to behave around moving cars, our lives are likely to end badly, or at least suddenly. But maps have to simplify the world. A map that shows everything can’t be folded and a story that includes every detail can’t be carried around in our heads and hearts.

I say all this as an introduction to the story in our text from Exodus. Today’s reading is part of the long narrative arc that tells the story of the earliest history of the Jewish people. It’s an origin story. Our origin stories are especially important because they are stories that we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. They are stories that explain who we are and how we came to be. They create a world for us to live in. They tell us what our place in that world is and how we should act.

What I’m going to do this morning is to trace this part of the larger story.

I’ll start with a warning. Our story this morning is told from the perspective of the Israelites, an oppressed people, the underdogs in their struggle with Egypt, an established and oppressive regime. It strips bare the lies and pretenses of power in the interest of justice and liberation. To the extent that we have embraced false stories—and how could we have avoided that, since the false stories are part of what we call common sense?—in order to live comfortably with the events of, say, the Texas border or Ferguson, Missouri, we will find this story uncomfortable.

Our story begins by telling us that there was a new pharaoh, one for whom Joseph and his family were nobody special. The Israelites were strangers to this pharaoh, they were Others. This was foreshadowed when Jacob’s family came to settle in Egypt. Joseph arranged for a visit with Pharaoh, the one who knew him, in order to find a place where his family and their livestock could settle. He instructed his brothers that when Pharaoh asked what they did for a living, they should reply that they were shepherds as their ancestors had been, for—and this is important—“all shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians.”  They are given the land of Goshen, empty land that is useless to Egyptian farmers, so that the Egyptians don’t actually have to live right with them, because “shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians.”  I suppose it didn’t hurt that the Israelites would serve as a buffer between the fertile Nile valley and the wandering desert tribes.

In this way Israel became a foreign and despised, if useful, presence in the midst of Egypt. They remained unassimilated; they didn’t blend in. They were resented.  I’m sure the nice people said, “Those people are Egyptians now, they should act like Egyptians! They should learn our language, dress like us, and make their living as farmers like decent people?  Why do they insist on their own ways?”

As all empires do, the Egyptian Empire put power before people. Joseph—remember what a jerk he was?—used the years of famine in order to increase the empire at the expense of the people of Egypt. When the people needed grain, he sold it to them. When they ran out of money, they sold themselves into slavery to Pharaoh. When the famines were over, Pharaoh owned not just the land of Egypt, but the very bodies of the people of Egypt, the Israelites included.

It is a peculiar thing, but it’s true, that masters fear their slaves, the strong fear the weak, oppressors fear the oppressed, in spite of the fact that anyone from the outside can see clearly that the masters, the strong, the oppressors have most of the power. Nonetheless they are afraid of their victims. Masters fear a slave rebellion above everything.

The Israelites had numbered only seventy when they went to Egypt.  When they began to grow, that growth was perceived as a threat. They were forced to labor as slaves. The Empire that claimed to own their bodies used those bodies to build the warehouse cities of Pithom and Rameses. But those bodies continued to multiply. And so did Pharaoh’s anxiety. He blamed the Israelites and began a policy of genocide. The newborn baby Israelite boys were to be killed at birth.

But this policy is frustrated by the Israelite midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who it turns out, have some power after all. But behind their acts of resistance, Pharaoh’s policy is frustrated by the character who does not figure into Pharaoh’s plans. Pharaoh has his priests and his religion, the United Church of Egypt. The gods of that religion all support the Empire because the Empire honors them. But there is a God who is not part of that or any imperial system and this God does not side with Pharaoh, or his underlings, or any of the nice people. Oddly, this God sides with the weak, the oppressed, the enslaved, in short, with those abhorrent shepherds the Israelites.

Eventually, this story will lead us to the great deliverance of the Israelites, to the covenant, to the land of promise and all the rest. These are remarkable events, but to me even more remarkable is that in spite of this oppressive system, the pervasive presence of Pharaoh’s security apparatus, and a policy of genocide, there is Moses. Born to a Levite couple, Moses’ mother hid him for three months and then found a loophole in Pharaoh’s orders. Every baby boy was to be thrown into the Nile. So Moses’ mother made him a basket that she water-proofed. Then she put Moses in the basket and put the basket in the river, fulfilling the letter of Pharaoh’s order while ignoring Pharaoh’s intent. Then, in a wonderfully subversive turn of events, Moses’ sister who isn’t named in this passage, but whom we know to be Miriam, prods Pharaoh’s daughter into rescuing her brother and then arranges for her mother to be paid for raising her own son!  Well done, Miriam! 

And behind and in and through all of these events the barely glimpsed figure of God stands with the oppressed and exploited slaves, the resisting victims of a genocide in progress. Later on in the story we will learn more about this God who has a strange but passionate commitment to justice. Later on in the story we will witness this God who lives in solidarity with the weak. But to those like us who know the story, there are already hints enough. The power of oppression will be broken. The empire will lose. The weak will win.

In ancient Egypt, at the southern border of the United States, in Ferguson, Missouri, God stands with the enslaved, the weak, the oppressed, the despised, the Other.  God’s decision is already made.  All that lies with us is to choose to stand with God or not.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] John D. Niles, Homo Narrans. The poetics and anthropology of oral literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

Joseph and His Brothers (Proper 15A; Genesis 45:1-15; August 17, 2014)

Joseph and His Brothers

Proper 15A
Genesis 45:1-15
August 17, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

It was one of those funerals that every pastor dreads.  It was bad enough that the deceased was only seventeen.  Death is never easy even when children are burying parents in their old age.  There is something perverse about parents burying their children.  In the days before good obstetric care it wasn’t at all unusual to lose children at birth, in infancy or earlier childhood.  But Joseph was no longer a child—he was seventeen and past those dangers.  But not past all dangers, apparently.

This was a “blended” family.  This was common.  It was even usual that Jacob had two wives, Leah and Rachel.  They and their respective children—eleven sons and one daughter—were gathered together and it was clear that they had blended in the same way that oil and water don’t.  Joseph was the son of Rachel.  Rachel was clear deeply stricken.  Leah could barely suppress a smirk, as if a long score had been at least partly settled.  There was even something strange about the names—the youngest son was Benjamin, which means “son of the right hand.”  His name implied that he was a favorite and would be Jacob’s principal heir, even though that place should have been occupied by Rueben, Jacob’s first-born.

There was something else, too.  The story about how Joseph had died didn’t really hold together.  There was only a coat covered with blood and a vague story about Joseph having been killed by a wild animal.  When the brothers who claimed to have discovered the coat told the story they averted their eyes and Rueben looked like he was biting back an angry rebuttal.  It all looked very suspicious.

The family in fact had a culture of rivalry and treachery.  Leah and Rachel, Jacob’s two wives, were sisters.  Jacob fell in love with Rachel, not Leah, and arranged with their father Laban to marry her.  Laban wasn’t about to marry off the younger of the two sisters and get stuck with the older who had, as Jane Austen might have put it, “lost her bloom.”  So he made sure that the wedding reception did not lack for wine and substituted Leah for Rachel in the honeymoon suite.  Jacob figured it out in the morning, but done was done, so Jacob, if he wanted Rachel, would have to take Leah, too.

This was no bargain for Leah who for Jacob doubtless always represented Laban’s treachery.  It was for this reason, says our text, that God favored her with sons—four of them in rapid succession: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah.  Rachel, Jacob’s favorite or not, lost status with every birth.  So she offered her slave Bilhah as a surrogate.  Bilhah bore Dan and Naphtali.  Not be outdone, Leah substituted her own slave, Zilpah, who bore two more sons, Gad and Ashar.  Leah herself wasn’t finished, though, and gave birth to two more sons—Issachar and Zebulun—and a daughter, Dinah.  Finally, Rachel had two sons of her own body, Joseph and Benjamin.

The children inherited Leah and Rachel’s rivalry.  Jacob had waited a lifetime for Joseph’s birth.  By the time it happened it was a surprise.  Like a lot of long-awaited and unexpected children, Joseph was spoiled.  In fact, by the time he was a teenager he was, well, let’s be honest, a jerk.  While his brothers were out tending their flocks, putting up with the heat and the danger, Joseph was preening himself back at the tents.  Joseph gave him a special coat.  The Hebrew isn’t very clear.  It might have been a coat with long sleeves or it might have been, as traditionally understood, a coat of many colors.  In any event, while Reuben, Simeon and the others were wearing clothes from Wal-Mart, Joseph was strutting around in his coat from Hart Schaffner Marx.

Joseph was a dreamer, but it seemed that his dreams were always about himself.  He was never slow to tell these dreams to his brothers.  He had a dream in which all of the brothers were binding sheaves at harvest time.  Joseph’s sheaf stood upright and the sheaves of his brothers bowed down to his.  In another dream he claimed that the sun and moon and eleven stars came to bow down to him.  He loved to rub his brothers’ noses in this stuff.

Like I say, he was jerk.  With the possible exception of Benjamin, his brothers hated him.  So when they were out in countryside with the sheep and goats and saw him walking toward them, wearing his Hart Schaffner Marx coat, they decided to be done with him.  “Let’s kill him and throw him into a pit,” they said.  Reuben resisted this idea, “Let’s not kill him; let’s just throw him into a pit.”  This may not have been inspired by any mercy or love for Joseph.  The particular pit had no water in it.  Left alone, perhaps Joseph would have died of thirst, but the brothers would not have actively killed him.  So perhaps Reuben was simply being fastidious.

Joseph, stripped of his coat, was in the pit.  Was he weeping, was he crying for mercy, was he begging?  We don’t know.  We know that, whatever he was doing, it didn’t prevent his brothers from sitting down and having lunch.

Now it happened that a caravan was passing by, so Judah got the bright idea of selling Joseph into slavery.  They would get some money.  The caravan would take care of disposing of their jerk of a brother.  And so the other brothers agreed.  They killed a goat and dipped the Hart Schaffner Marx coat into it.  They concocted their cover story and they went home.

Sometimes grief brings out the best in us and sometimes it brings out the worst.  Families in grief tend to show their fault lines.  The brothers may have been rid of Joseph, but if they thought their stars would rise in Jacob’s eyes, they were sadly mistaken.  If it was hard to compete with Joseph while he was alive, when he was dead it was impossible.   Jacob’s other sons receded into the mist of Jacob's grief and his world became flat and gray.

In the meantime, Joseph’s life had taken an amazing turn.  His dreams it turned out were true glimpses into the world’s unfolding reality.  That is, they foretold events.  This was a useful skill.  His Egyptian owner, Potiphar, recognized Joseph’s managerial abilities and put him in charge of his household.  That is, until the whole thing with Potiphar’s wife.  The text says that she attempted to seduce him and when he refused her advances she accused him of attempted rape.  I won’t pretend to know what happened in this classic case of “he said, she said.” Potiphar threw him into prison where his dreaming continued.  He foresaw the release and return of honor to Pharaoh’s cup-bearer and the execution of Pharaoh’s chief baker,both fellow prisoners.

When Pharaoh himself had dreams that baffled him, his cup-bearer remembered Joseph the dreamer.  Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams—there would be a great famine all through the region.  Careful planning would prevent the destruction of the kingdom.  Pharaoh wisely put Joseph in charge of everything to store surplus grain and prepare for the lean years to come.

The famine wasn’t confined to Egypt.  Palestine, too, was stricken and Jacob’s family as well.  So Jacob sent all of his sons, all except Benjamin, down to Egypt to buy grain, so that his family could eat and live.

Joseph was receiving the petitioners come from all over the region to buy grain from Pharaoh when whom should he see in line but his brothers.  There they were, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun, the very ones who had thrown him into the pit and sold him into slavery.  He was the last person they would have expected to see and so, naturally, they didn’t see him.  And, too, he spoke through an interpreter.  But he recognized them and he saw his chance. 

He had them in his power and he intended to make them squirm, to make them pay for the way that they had treated him. 

“Who are you?  Where do you come from?  Prove that you aren’t spies!”  They tried to offer an account of themselves, that they were twelve brothers.The youngest had stayed behind One of them was, in their words, “no more.”

“Well, then, to prove that you are who you say you are, all but one of you will stay in prison until the one brings the last son.” And he had them arrested and let them stew in jail for three days.  Then he summoned them and told them that only one need remain as hostage—the others must go and return with the youngest son.

The brothers conferred among themselves.  “We had this coming,” said Reuben. “Didn’t I warn you not to harm Joseph?  You wouldn’t listen and now we have to pay the price.”  Joseph picked Simeon as the hostage and let the others go, filling their bags with grain and placing each brother’s money back in their sack.

When the brothers discovered the money they were terrified: somehow their payment had not been made and they were therefore thieves.  How could they return to recover Simeon with this hanging over their heads? 

Jacob was freshly grieved—in effect he had lost another son, for there was no way he would risk Benjamin, the only other son of his favorite wife, the “son of his right hand.”  Going back to Egypt was out of the question.

Except that the famine continued and it was return to Egypt or lose all of his sons and their families as well. So the nine brothers and Benjamin took the original money and more besides and made their way down to Egypt once again to face the wrath of Pharaoh’s governor.

In front of Joseph they tried to explain about the money.  Joseph brushed their excuses aside, “Do not be afraid.  God must have put it there.”  And Joseph had Simeon brought out to them.  Joseph asked about his father and had Benjamin introduced to him. 

Now all this time Joseph’s charade was getting harder and harder to maintain. But maintain it he did.  He had the brothers’ sacks filled and the money replaced.  He had his own silver cup placed in Benjamin’s sack.  All this, of course, was unknown to his brothers.   He sent them on their way but sent his own steward to accuse them of stealing his silver cup.

When the steward caught up with the caravan, he made the accusation.  The brothers answered that, if the cup were found among them, the possessor of it would become Joseph’s slave.  Sure enough, it was Benjamin’s sack that held the cup.  The brothers were beside themselves: this would certainly kill their father with grief.

They went back once again to Joseph and Judah offered himself and his brothers as Joseph’s slaves.  Joseph said, “No. I am a fair man.  Only the thief will suffer.  The rest of you may go.”

Then Judah told the story of his father’s loss and his own promise to bear the guilt if he failed to come home without Benjamin.  Judah offered himself in Benjamin’s place.  Judah who had sold his own brother into slavery offered to buy his brother out of slavery with his own freedom.

In that moment something happened to Joseph.  He had devised a plot line for himself and his brothers, a plot line of sweet revenge,but he could no longer play the role that he had assigned for himself.  It was clear that, whoever his brothers had been years before, they were no longer those people.  And he was not who he had been either.  His heart, bound in iron to the past and all its resentments, could no longer contain the man that he had become.So his heart was broken open.

“I am Joseph, your brother!” he cried.  “Is it really true that my father is still alive?”  His brothers were terrified into silence, but Joseph’s turn was complete. “God’s hand has been in all of this—how else would I have been in a position to save the lives of all of our family?  Do not trouble yourself with the guilt that you have incurred.  Instead, go quickly and bring my father and all your family, for this famine has just begun.”

So it was that these brothers, once bitter enemies, were reconciled.  Joseph’s dreams came true, but not in ways that any of them could have imagined. 

This is the story that you and I have fallen into, my brothers and sisters.  We can, none of us, see the outcome of what we do, nor the outcome of what others may do to us.  What others intend for evil may turn to good.  Such is the power of God’s grace.  That is what the cross tells us.

Joseph burdened his brothers with gifts—his brother Benjamin most of all—and sent wagons to bring their families.  He sent them back to Palestine, back to their father.  Jacob could not believe his ears.  Joseph alive?  Joseph the governor of Egypt?  All that he had lost had been restored and more, if the brothers’ story could be believed.  “But when they told him all the words of Joseph that he had said to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived.  Israel said, ‘Enough! My son Joseph is still alive.  I must go and see him before I die.’” And that’s what he did.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

A Blood-Thirsty God (2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A); Genesis 22:1-14; June 26, 2011)

A Blood-Thirsty God

2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A)
Genesis 22:1-14
June 26, 2011

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Like a lot of congregations, we give Bibles to our third-graders.  It’s a highly questionable practice.  The only thing that lets us get away with it is the assurance that our children won’t read them.  Otherwise, what are we doing giving an R-rated book to eight year olds? 

We want our children revere the Bible, but we’d rather they not actually read it.  Oh, some of it is okay.  They can read some of the psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount, the Love Chapter from 1 Corinthians, and maybe the creation stories.  Those are okay.  Other parts are sleep-inducing and harmless enough.  But then there are what Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” This is one of them.

We’d like to dodge stories like this one, but I won’t let us do that.  This is our book.  These are our stories.  We don’t have to like them, but we do have to reckon with them.  So reckon with them we will.  And we’re not going to permit ourselves the sugar-coating and evasions that usually go with the story.  No, let’s look it straight in the eye.

So let’s begin by setting aside the notion that, since God was only testing Abraham, somehow that makes everything okay.  The narrator tells us that God set out to test Abraham, but Abraham knew nothing of this.  All Abraham knew was that he was summoned: “Abraham!”  And he had to answer.

So that’s how this story begins.  God has the upper hand.  And Abraham knows it.

“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,” God said.  

Abraham was new in the covenant people business and did not have a tradition to draw on for understanding the sorts of things God would ask.  There were no seminaries filled with scholars writing books of systematic theology that would help Abraham sort things out.  There was only the Voice who had promised an inheritance and a son to inherit it, the miracle son born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.

Abraham did not know and could not know whether this demand was in or out of character for God.  There was only the Voice and its demand.  We do not know, but we can imagine, what went through Abraham’s mind as he gathered what would be necessary for the sacrifice and for the journey.  What did he tell Sarah?  

What blackness was in his heart as they trudged to Moriah, Isaac carrying the wood, and he the fire and the knife?

What was in Abraham’s heart as Isaac innocently asked, “Where is the lamb?” and he replied with an answer with a double meaning, “God will provide”?  He avoided saying the obvious—“You are the lamb for sacrifice that God has already provided.”  Was his use of the future tense—God will provide—a sort of prayer, a reminder to God that there was still time to make a substitute?  But God was silent as Abraham walked with his son, his only son Isaac, the son whom he loved.

Abraham went about the preparation of the altar, piling the stones, laying the wood, binding his son and readying the knife.  And still God was silent.

What was in God’s heart as Abraham obeyed God’s summons?  We do not know.  Did God expect that Abraham would resist this insanity, this inhumane demand?  After all, Abraham had resisted God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s argument then had been precisely that innocent blood should not be spilled—even by God—not even in the name of justice.  But if God was surprised, there is no hint of it in the story.

So there they were—a stubborn old man and his stubborn God—at the edge of a moral abyss. 

Abraham reached out his hand to kill his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loved, and God blinked.  Someone had to.  Someone had to call off this terrible game of chicken.  This, after all, was not simply a test of Abraham.  It was also a test of God, of God’s nature and character.  What sort of God is God?  Is God a God of justice and mercy?  Or is God a God of violence and bloodshed?  Does God value life?  Or does God value death?  

Abraham passed the test, but God struggled with his part,at least at first.

Sometimes our lives take us through very hard places.  We don’t need for God to play games with us by setting up any other tests than what reality throws at us.  Reality is already hard enough.  God seems to get this.  He doesn’t do this again.  Not after the fiasco at Moriah.

I will pass over what this episode must have cost Isaac who is thrown into a story of madness and menace as God and his father play a game of chicken with his life at stake.  I’ll also pass over the hapless ram who had been minding its own business, doing whatever it is that rams do when they’re not being sacrificed—maybe he was on his way to see that cute ewe in the next valley—when he found himself hopelessly tangled in brambles, then rescued by Abraham, then tied up and killed as the “happy” ending to someone else’s story.

I’ll pass over these things except to observe that this contest between God and Abraham didn’t stop there.  It cast its shadow over Isaac and over his children and his descendants.  This demand for a child sacrifice echoed through the generations and centuries.

This story is not just a love story about the triangulated relationship between Abraham, Isaac and God.  The shadow of this story still haunts us.  We suffer under a compulsion to repeatedly reenact it. 

We know that a god who demands such a death is not worth our worship.  We know that a father who obeys such a command is not worthy the title.  The very hint that people would offer up their own children as a sacrifice is repugnant to us.  And yet, in spite of all that, we still do it.

Make no mistake, this story is not just a story with which we have to reckon.It is a story that reckons with us; it’s a mirror held up to our own life.  And looking into it we see into our souls.  We are summoned by a voice that demands our children’s lives.  And we send them by their hundreds and by their thousands.  When they come back to us, scarred by what they have seen and done and had done to them, wounded in soul and body, or perhaps even dead, we call their injury or their death a “sacrifice.”  It is as if offering our children to God to be killed or to kill other children whose parents have offered them somehow makes their obscene wounds holy and their tragic deaths sacred.

I want to know, “Who is the god who dares to demand this blood?”  Because it is not the God of Abraham, who stopped Abraham’s hand on that day of contest and terror.  It is not the God of Jesus who taught us that we must love even our enemies.  It is not the God of the martyrs who died rather than lifting a hand to injure another child of God.

When our politicians of whatever party invoke God to justify war, the God whom they invoke is neither the God of this book, nor the God of Jesus our master.  The blood-thirsty God of war who demands that we let our country’s children go hungry and send them to crumbling schools, who demands that we drive on roads and across bridges that are long past needing repair, who demands that those with treatable illnesses go untreated so that we can afford to feed the war machine that feeds the blood-thirsty God, this God is not our God.  He is not the God of the law and prophets, not the God who fed the hungry and healed the sick, not the God who raised Jesus from the dead.  

No, when our God speaks, we hear a different summons,not one to offer our children as sacrifices.  No, our God wants to deliver us from the cycle of violence death.  Our God has no desire to be worshiped with bodies and blood.  Our God’s final word is, “Do not lay your hand on the child.” 

 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.