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A sermon on Romans 6:12-23 & Genesis 22:1-14 by Nathan Nettleton
Bob Dylan once sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’ve gotta serve somebody.” The Apostle Paul, in the reading we heard from his letter to the Romans tonight, says much the same. You’re going to serve either sin or righteousness, law or grace, he says. We will inevitably be the slaves of one or the other.
If Paul had been speaking today, he might not have used the image of slavery, because we no longer take slavery for granted. We now understand it to be a horrible evil. But in Paul’s day, there were both slaves and slave-owners in the churches. In this passage, he’s not asking questions about the legitimacy of slavery, but simply comparing the experience of being enslaved to a good or bad master. Are you enslaved to sin or righteousness, law or grace?
Seeing sin and righteousness as opposites is easy enough to understand. But the fact that Paul sets law and grace in opposition to each other continues to confuse many of us in the churches to this day. We are quite used to talking of the law of God and of the grace of God, aren’t we? So if they are both “of God”, how can they be opposed to one another?
Well, the problem with the law, and the reasons that it can end up operating as a force that opposes the grace of God, lie not so much in the details of its various regulations, but in what we use it for and what we believe about its importance to God. Which brings me to Abraham and Isaac, although it may take a few minutes to see the connections.
The story, usually known as “the binding of Isaac”, that we heard tonight has always been shocking and disturbing. But somewhat like slavery, the reasons it shocks us are completely different from the reasons it shocked its ancient hearers. Until we get our heads around the difference, we won’t be able to make much of it at all.
The thing that shocks us is that Abraham was going to stab and burn his son to death as an offering to God. The thing that shocked ancient hearers was that he didn’t go through with it. To their minds, he should have. It would have been the right thing to do.
It is very difficult for us to imagine our way back into an ancient culture that saw child sacrifice as the right thing to do, but for a few minutes, let’s try to do so.
Some years ago, in a museum in the city of Arequipa in Peru, I tried to imagine that mindset as I gazed on the preserved body of a teenage girl who had been sacrificed on top of a nearby mountain hundreds of years ago. Being in the presence of her body brought home to me something of the reality of such a practice, and of the understandings of God that would not only allow it, but expect it.
In the cultures where Abraham and Sarah lived and where that Peruvian girl died it was completely taken for granted that the gods were dangerous and demanding and prone to demanding the blood of children. Everyone believed that if a powerful god asked for the sacrifice of your child, then you had to do it because to refuse would bring down the wrath of the gods on the whole community.
If you refuse the demands of a dangerous god, you imperil not only yourself, but all your neighbours. The ancient scriptures are full of stories of plagues and famines and major disasters that wiped out thousands of people and were understood to have come upon them because one person had withheld something from God. God makes the rules, and we’d better obey them, whether they make any sense to us or not. You don’t mess with an angry, demanding, bloodthirsty god.
So when Abraham believed that God had called him to head up the mountain to sacrifice his son, none of his neighbours would have been saying, “You’re insane, Abraham. You can’t do that.” Instead they would be trembling in their boots and saying, “Well, if God has laid down the law and said do it, you had better go and do it, Abraham, and quickly before disaster comes upon us all.”
If your worldview starts with a dangerous demanding god, and takes it for granted that the only way to keep the community safe is to do whatever this god tells you to do and offer up whatever sacrifices this god demands, then the most horrible violence not only becomes possible, but can come to be seen as the good and right thing to do as a god-fearing person and as a responsible neighbour who cares for the wellbeing of your community.
However, this story came to be understood as the turning point in our understanding of God. It continued to be told to explain why the descendants of Abraham stopped sacrificing their children and began sacrificing animals instead, even though they lived in a world where child sacrifice was totally normal, and a religion without child sacrifice was seen as a strange abnormality.
Fast forward another thousand years or so, and we have Hebrew prophets beginning to say that “God wants mercy, not sacrifice.” Clearly our understanding of God was continuing to evolve and the prophets were beginning to imagine that God might not want ritual sacrifices at all. If all those who count Abraham as their Father really grasped the idea that God wants mercy, not sacrifice, we would live in a very different world, but unfortunately we haven’t.
Perhaps we no longer think that God wants us to kill children or animals to keep him happy, but many of the ways we think of God haven’t actually moved on very far from that. Some Christians still interpret the death of Jesus as a ritual sacrifice without which God’s anger would break out and destroy us all. And, for even more of us, religious rule-keeping is the new sacrifice. This is what Paul was talking about as slavery to the law.
You see, the religious law, especially the bits that don’t just seem like common sense, can easily be imagined as a bit of an arbitrary list of things God imposes on us as a kind of test. The story of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac describes it as God testing Abraham. The text didn’t specify what kind of test it was, but it was very common both then and now, to see sacrifices and other laws as the same thing – things God tells us to do to test our willingness to obey.
It is quite possible, therefore, to believe that God is no longer asking for blood sacrifices, but to still see God as a frightening and threatening figure who makes seemingly unreasonable demands of us in the form of laws about all kinds of random things – what you’re allowed to eat, what you are allowed to wear, what you are allowed to do when you are menstruating, what you must do with the skin on the end of your penis, who you are allowed to sleep with.
And it is also quite possible, and indeed not all that uncommon, to still believe that doing whatever we believe God has told us to do, whether we understand it or not, is essential to avoiding bringing down the wrath of God on us and perhaps on the whole community. If we still have a God who we need to avoid upsetting so he won’t wipe us out, then no matter how arbitrary some of the laws might seem, law-breaking becomes not just a personal moral failure, but a social evil because it puts the whole community at risk – just as it was in Abraham’s day when his neighbours thought he’d better do as he had been told.
No doubt there are religious hardliners in Venezuela this week who are claiming to know exactly which sins God was seeking to punish by sending an earthquake on the country. It happens here too. If there is a pandemic or an apocalyptic bushfire, there will be zealous preachers claiming to speak for God about how we have failed to obey God’s laws.
For people who hold such views, you can see why any teaching that seems to undermine people’s fearful commitment to keeping the laws are going to be seen as a threat. They are potentially putting the whole community at risk. And it seems that those people were accusing the Apostle Paul of doing exactly that. When he says, “Am I saying that we should sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”, he is almost certainly quoting things he has been accused of saying. He is responding to people who think that he is putting the entire community at risk of being wiped out by an earthquake or a fire.
I’m not sure that Paul was convinced that they truly believed it, and weren’t just trying to protect their own status and influence as the authoritative leaders whose hardline teaching kept the community safe, but either way, Paul is not having a bar of their objections. He is adamant that God is not an angry god of laws and punishments and capricious obedience tests, as Abraham and so many others had feared, but a God of love and grace and freedom.
There is a secular version of this that underpins the rapidly rising popularity of the One Nation party and other forms of right-wing populism. It makes the same move of picking up on genuine fears and hardships that are afflicting people, and claiming to know whose fault it is and what can be done about them. In Abraham’s day and Paul’s day, people said the drought or the plague was the fault of those who didn’t live by the right laws. Now they say that the housing crisis is the fault of people who immigrate to this country and don’t live by our values.
Paul would have probably spoken of this as a slavery to national values, just as he spoke of a slavery to the law. both are being employed in ways that provide a perfect rationale for divisive behaviour and hatred and hostility. If those who don’t conform to the right laws or the right values are the cause of all these problems we are facing, then violently opposing them or driving them out of our country begins to look like the right thing to do if we are god-fearing people who love our families and our neighbours.
Nowadays, just as in past times, that is a very exploitable set of beliefs and fears, and we continue to see populist politicians and populist preachers only too willing to exploit it. And you don’t have to look very far to see that children are still being sacrificed in the name of these values. When the public anger is turned on Muslims or homosexuals or asylum seekers, it is always the children who are most at risk. Whether you call it the law or national values, Paul says it becomes an instrument of wickedness, a slave driver that rules over us and leads us to death-dealing.
Jesus’s ethos of grace, on the other hand, emerges from love, not fear, and so sets us free from fearful law-keeping by shaping us to be far more loving and generous and honest and life-giving than anything the law could have ever codified or dictated.
When we are transformed like that, a thousand little things change, and while none of them look that important, together they add up to a whole new culture. What could be smaller than giving a cup of cold water to a little one, like the final image in our gospel reading? It sounds insignificant, but when it happens in a world where children are locked in detention centres, this one little thing becomes a witness to a new world emerging. Those who want to promote fear and hostility won’t be stopped by new laws or contrary political campaigns, but just setting about doing the little things in front of us, like giving the cup of water, will ultimately be the power that frees us from serving fear and brings the new world to birth.