Prophets Are People Too: Can We Break Cycles?

This is the first sermon I delivered at Forefront Church in Brooklyn. If you'd like to hear me deliver the sermon, a recording of the livestream is available here . THANK YOU to the friends that showed up in-person and the many more who tuned in from all around the world. It meant the world to me.

What was your earliest childhood memory? I remember being dressed in stuffy, uncomfortable clothes with a bowtie choking my neck as I was staring down the aisle of a church. I remember the whole congregation standing up in unison in their pews and staring at me. My earliest childhood memory was being unable to comprehend my role as the ring bearer for a family friend's wedding. I’m told I was very, very in-demand as a ring bearer. I was, after all, a disarmingly cute baby boy.

However, as the music started playing, I forgot every instruction I was given and I just started crying.

See, I was a nervous, anxious kid and I cried a lot. I distinctly remember that feeling of weightless off-centeredness, as my body struggled to comprehend a wave of emotion, leading to tears. When I fell and scraped my knees, running to catch the school bell, I would cry. When I was scared of giving a show-and-tell at school, I would cry.

My dad didn't know how to react to a crying child and so he'd get angry at me and ask me: "Is crying useful?" A rhetorical question. Of course it didn't. I had no answer to that question so I'd just cry harder, which would make me feel worse. I'd try my best to stop crying and resented my body for this uncontrollable outward display of my inward emotions.

Over time, I learned to see crying as a sign of weakness and would fight it every time I could sense tears on the horizon. When I lost sadness as a tool for emotional regulation, anger took its place. While I didn't know what was happening to me then, I now am able to name and recognize this as patriarchal socialisation at work.

I don't think I'm alone in this. I don't need a show of hands, but I wonder how many of you are now beginning to recognize the role that patriarchy has played in forming your being.

Now, I have spent the last couple months and years reflecting and I do think scripture has something to say about the cycle of patriarchy. We may find some answers where we least expect them. Today, I'd like to talk about the binding of Isaac. Now I want to begin by giving a content warning. This sermon will involve discussion of violence towards children. If at any point, you feel uncomfortable with any of the material, please feel free to step out and take space if needed. Some of you may not be familiar with this story, so I will summarise it very quickly and then we will read the scripture together.

Abraham and Sarah have struggled to have a child all their lives. God finally grants them a son, Isaac. One day, God calls upon Abraham to take his son up the mountains and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys. When Abraham is about to sacrifice his own son, an angel intervenes and says that the sacrifice of Isaac is not necessary. Abraham sacrifices a nearby ram instead.

Here is the scripture:

Genesis 22: God Tests Abraham

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac.

9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

15 The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring"

Now I want to start by saying that this can be a difficult passage for many of us. It was for me. Growing up, I saw no other way to interpret this story but in this way: "Isaac was what was most important to Abraham and so God wanted to test Abraham. See, God will test your faith by asking for what matters most to you, but don't worry, He doesn't really mean it. See, when God sees Abraham's commitment to Him, he instantly provides a surrogate sacrificial item and as a present for Abraham's obedience, he gets... LAND! So much of it! All this land, ripe for him and his descendants". The moral of the story is that obedience to God will always be rewarded and in a manner we as people living in these United States might call Manifest Destiny.

I just wanted to take a moment and say: This is a really strange story to put in a kid's bible! Why are they doing this? Growing up, as a kid, I read this story and I didn't see the world through the lens of Abraham. I saw it through the lens of Isaac. Viewed through this lens, this story is horrific. Dad is taking you out on a hike. Oh, it's time for a sacrifice. Oh. I'm the sacrifice. Dad, why are you tying me up? I survive, but not before I see my own father, ready to kill me with utter conviction in his eyes. I couldn't help but ask: Is this what God wants?

Indeed, I remember asking my mother one night as I was deconstructing my faith: Mum, if God commanded you to sacrifice me the way that He commanded Abraham, could you follow through with that?

My mother teared up as she even contemplated that possibility. "I don't think I could, my faith isn't perfect", she responded. I left that conversation deeply unsatisfied. God, it seems, could demand that a parent murder their own child, and if we weren't ready to follow through on that, our faith wasn't perfect.

But I've been sitting with this passage and letting it ferment in my head for months and years and I think I've finally arrived at a point where I could feel comfortable with it. Rather than a parable of obedience, I posit that the Binding of Isaac is a call for us to break the patriarchal cycles of harm we are stuck in.

When we read this passage in the year 2024, the source of obvious discomfort is that the scripture chronicles a demand from God for Abraham to sacrifice a child. When we read the Bible, however, we must ground each piece of scripture in the social context it was written in. Obviously out-of-place in our modern-day society, I'd wonder: Was what God was asking of Abraham normal? It would seem so. Biblical scholar Heath D. Dewrell writes in "Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel" that "it is an uncomfortable fact for modern Jewish and Christian faith communities... ...[that] child sacrifice occurred in Ancient Israel". So people of that time would have been utterly unphased by the appearance of the Divine to Abraham to demand the sacrifice of a child.

If the demand was ordinary, the second question I'd ask is: Was obedience what God wanted? When the Angel appears to Abraham to commend him for passing the test, the angel doesn't mention obedience at all. Instead, the Angel says: "Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, I will bless you". Indeed, what God seems to be pleased with is not that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child, but that Abraham did not withhold his child.

But what if giving your child to God has never been about sacrifice? What if unconditional, silent, reverent obedience has never been what God has asked of parents? What if when someone demands something as flagrantly unjust as the sacrifice of our own children we are called to ask: "God, for what purpose do you need my son for? Is there another way I can fulfil it?" Because dedicating a child to God hardly means sacrificing a child to God.

I think it's important to bring this up, because the Bible is not a Big Book of Obedience. It chronicles different peoples theorising and struggling with the Divine. Jonah, Job, even Jesus, were all prophets who actively questioned and openly disagreed with God.

So a Rabbi I really respect, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg asks a really interesting question: Why didn't Abraham protest on behalf of his children?

The answer, [she writes], goes back to Abraham’s own father, Terach. We recall the legend (Genesis Rabbah 38:11) in which Abraham was thrown by his father into a fiery furnace, to be burned alive, surviving only through divine intervention.

I do have to be clear here that what the Rabbi is bringing up is outside of the Christian canon. For centuries, Jewish scholars have read between the lines and filled in the gaps of the Bible. Genesis Rabbah is a Midrash, which is when a Rabbi takes a piece of Biblical text, puts it under a microscope, and writes a whole essay proposing how the text can be read a certain way. This specific text, Genesis Rabbah, proposes a coming of age story where Abraham's father, Terah, gives him over to Nimrod, who questions him until Nimrod gets so annoyed, he throws him into a furnace.

He (Terah) took him (Abraham) and gave him over to Nimrod. (Nimrod) said to him: Let us worship the fire! (Abraham) said to him: Should we not then worship water, which extinguishes fire! (Nimrod) said to him: Then, let us worship the water! (Abraham) said to him: Should we not then worship the clouds, which carry the water? (Nimrod) said to him: Then, let us worship the cloud! (Abraham) said to him: If so, Should we not then worship the wind, which scatters the clouds? (Nimrod) said to him: Then, let us worship the wind! (Abraham) said to him: Should we not then worship the human, who withstands the wind? (Nimrod) said to him: You are merely piling words; we should bow to none other than the fire. I shall therefore cast you in it, and let your God to whom you bow come and save you from it!

I see myself in Abraham in this Midrash. See, I was a kid who loved to question things. I think most Forefronters were. I grew up in an environment where questioning authority was allowed, even encouraged. I was the kid who kept asking why? Why? Why? Until the adults had to stretch the boundaries of truth so I could stop talking.

How did the Abraham of Genesis Rabbah, the curious, inquisitive, thoughtful mind become the unquestioningly obedient father in the Binding?

Well, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes this:

This is the abusive model of parenting that Abraham learned—children are disposable, not to be protected. A child who behaves in a way the parent does not like is not engaged, corrected, or taught. Justice and mercy don't apply to them. As such, their death may be inevitable.

I needed to pause and take a deep breath when I first read this. What if Abraham's unquestioning obedience isn't holy, desired or wanted? What if it's a trauma response? Abraham grew up in a world where the lives of children were disposable and could be taken away at any moment in time by patriarchal figures who demanded their sacrifice. When I read Genesis 22, I'm astounded by the silence. I'm astounded by the lack of protest. God says: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and Sacrifice him" and we are told that Abraham just "got up and loaded his donkey". I do wonder, what was Abraham feeling in that moment? Maybe the Binding of Isaac was the only way God could get through to a man who'd been traumatised like this.

The next question I'd like to pose is this: What does it mean for God to test Abraham? The word "test" appears in two locations here: The section heading and the opening sentence: "Some time later, God tested Abraham". As I've spent time reflecting on the meaning of "test", my understanding of Isaac's binding has changed.

I was listening to a podcast I love, "Almost Heretical", recently, and they had on a New Testament Scholar Garrick Alan who made a very interesting point: The original documents that comprise what we now call the Bible did not have chapters or verse numbers, nor did it have any of the little subheadings. Therefore, the subheading: "God tests Abraham" was a reading that we have ascribed to the text and not something that was present in the original Bible.

The Hebrew word translated as"test" is נִסָּה [nisa], which is a word that translates to English with some degree of ambiguity. Indeed, different Bible translations have translated it to "prove", or "try". I don't think there's a definitive word I'd use, but when I looked it up in a Hebrew-English dictionary, I found it interesting that it could mean "attempt", used as "attempt to make believe", or "attempt to break the habit".

I don't think there will ever be a way of definitively translating this text, but I'd like to posit that rather than testing Abraham, God is attempting to convince Abraham. In a world where humans are all-too-willing to sacrifice children, God is saying "this is not what I ask of you".

Growing up, a test for me meant passing a set of challenges, sometimes to a non-existent rubric, in order to get a reward from someone else. Indeed, my first reading of this text would tell me that God gives us land in return for a test of our obedience. However, this interpretation only makes sense if we understand land as something to be freely given or taken and something that belongs to a people. However, understanding land through the lens of Indigenous cultures shatters this understanding. For instance, Ambelin Kwaymullina, an Indigenous Palyku woman from Western Australia, says this regarding Indigenous Australians' relationship to the land:

The health of land and water is central to their culture. Land is their mother, is steeped in their culture, but also gives them the responsibility to care for it. They "feel the pain of the shapes of life in Country as pain to the self".

According to Kwaymullina, land isn't a right, it's a responsibility. Creation is not given to us for us to exploit. Instead, it is given to us to steward. If we approach our relationship to Land from this perspective, it wouldn't make sense that God grants land to the obedient. I would posit that we become responsible for Country when we can show to God an inward transformation that demonstrates that we are ready to take care of God's creation.

God does not want unquestioning obedience. God wants a people who are willing to protect the sanctity of the life of a child. To wrestle with the divine and question the divine when that sanctity is violated. Perhaps the Binding changed Abraham and put him on an inward journey reckoning with this, which is why God feels Abraham can now steward creation.

Another question that sits with me: what is left of the relationship between Isaac and Abraham?

I used to take comfort in the fact that some scholars write that there is no record of Abraham and Isaac ever speaking again and thus they believe that Isaac cuts Abraham out of his life. The Binding was a traumatic event for Isaac and it would make sense that he would never want any business to do with his father for as long as he lived.

But the Bible is full of gaps and the narratives we choose to fill these gaps can sometimes say more about us than they do about God. It is striking to me that the absence of information here means that there is just as much reason to believe that Abraham and Isaac reconciled as there is that they never spoke to each other again and yet we often choose to believe the latter. When I read scripture in this way, I think of Australian author Tim Minton's words in The Guardian. He writes:

Toxic masculinity is a burden to men. I’m not for a moment suggesting men and women suffer equally from misogyny, because that’s clearly and fundamentally not true. And nobody needs to hear me mansplaining on the subject of the patriarchy. But I think we forget or simply don’t notice the ways in which men, too, are shackled by [it]... ...That sort of damage radiates; it travels, just as trauma is embedded and travels and metastasizes in families. Misogyny, like racism, is one of the great engines of intergenerational trauma.

I hazard that it is because we as a society haven't figured out how men and boys can find a way out of patriarchy that we look at this passage and the most generous and progressive interpretation we can come up with is one where father and son are torn apart. I find that profoundly unsatisfying. But if we read this passage through the lens of a God demonstrating that the pain and suffering of a child is never acceptable; if we read it and we see a God trying to lead a traumatised man out of the way that he was raised, what can we imagine?

Given the choice, I'd want to believe Abraham apologised to Isaac. I'd want to believe that this moment, on the altar, was the moment where he realised that he was raising his kid the way he was raised. I'd like to believe that this was the moment that they chose to break this cycle. Maybe it would've been a lifelong covenant of unlearning, but they chose to be on that journey together.

It has taken me many, many years to reckon with the role that patriarchy has played in my life. Even acknowledging its existence took more years than I care to admit. Following that, I spent an even longer period of time in denial of its effects on me and those around me. It is only after I named it and accepted it that I was able to even start looking for a way out. Over time, I was able to even confront my dad and ask him why he parented my sadness the way he did. I learned that he learned this style of parenting from his dad, my short-tempered grandpa. We now speak openly about that cycle. We're developing new ways to share sadness openly that we didn't have when I was a child. We're figuring out a new way to be in relationship with one another. Our bond is still far from perfect, but it started improving as soon as we named the cycle we found ourselves stuck in.

Church, what are we withholding from one another? What cycles can we only break by openly naming them and bringing them out into the open?

When reading the Binding of Isaac, I look to the inward change that God is calling in us. Unfortunately, we do live in a world where the sacrifice of children in the name of what we deem sacred is the norm. We live in a society that believes the right to bear arms is more sacred than a child's right to a safe classroom. We live in a society that views the death of over 15,000 children during Israel's bombardment of Gaza, funded by the United States as necessary. Too many people on this planet are willing to offer up the children of this world as a sacrifice on the altar of their beliefs.

But the Binding of Isaac is about a God who sees this society and tells us to turn inward. To reimagine our relationship with the cycles of patriarchal violence many of us are born into. Every day, we are offered the opportunity to be reborn and engage in the difficult, painful, messy act of reckoning with the violence within us and to turn a new page.

To quote the late, great Rachel Held Evans on Abraham who always seems to have the right words exactly when we need them:

I’ve long been fascinated by the stories of people who defied—or “worked around”—their religion in the name of love, and these stories are plentiful among parents...

These are people of conviction, people whose faith is important to them and who long for the approval of their religious leaders and the favour of God. And yet they risked all of that for love.

I guess I'm just not convinced that such actions reveal a lack of faith, nor am I convinced that these people would be better off if they disengaged their emotions in the name of obedience.

Maybe the real test isn’t in whether you drive the knife through the heart.

Maybe the real test is in whether you refuse.

So Church, may we be a body that reckons with the cycles of patriarchal violence in our weary world together. May we be ready to stare down this mighty, all-consuming force and break that which binds us. May we be ready to give our Holy Refusal.

Amen.