Well, I enjoyed my time in Memphis a week ago, we stayed at the Westin Hotel and it was a real elegant hotel right near Beale Street.  We rode the trolley everywhere we went and we hardly ventured out of downtown.  We did lots of walking around and Evan and Emily got to join us in Memphis for Friday night, so that was great.  The Westin was out of regular rooms, so they did a free upgrade to a king suite for Evan and Emily, and hey, that was really, really nice.  There bathroom alone was 20 feet long, I stepped it off.

            Memphis is one of those towns that you like or don’t like and we happen to be in the “like it” camp.  It is a big city, its shops are a little different from ours, and there is a great zoo and some good museums. There is also Beale Street, and well it is unique to say the least.  I don’t think you hear much of the Blues there anymore, the music is more eclectic.   There are some good eating places on Beale, my favorites being Blues City Café and a place called Dyer’s which is a famous mecca for hamburgers.  They deep fry their hamburgers in grease that is older than John McCain.  It is 90 years old to be exact, which is unique but incredibly bad for you. So when I went to Dyer’s this trip I ordered a fried baloney sandwich which must be way better for you.  It was at least good for my soul.  It was a half inch thick slice of beef baloney fried and placed on a hamburger bun with mustard, pickles, and thick sliced onion.  I ate this slice of heaven at about midnight, so it was especially good. 

            But everyone knows that food in Memphis means one thing: Barbeque.  Memphis style is one of the four basic food groups, along with Carolina, Texas, and Kansas City style que. We ate at the world famous Rendezvous, and frankly it is living off its reputation.  There are several places in this city with better ribs than Charlie Vergos’ pig palace.  But there is at least one barbeque place in Memphis that is the best pork purveyor in the city, and therefore the best in the whole world.  The place is called Central Barbeque, and it is of course on Central near the midtown area, about a block off East Parkway.  I went to the place once before with my friend Eve, but when we went the other night I ordered the ribs. And good grief, bar none, the best ribs ever.  Better than the Rendezvous, better than Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas, better than Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City, better than the Whole Hog, and better than McClard’s in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And better than anything else in Memphis.  They were incredible.  They are worth getting in the car and driving two hours for just to eat. They are that good.  

            The weather was great and the CBF was good, as much as two full days can be.   After about three or four hours of meetings, I am like a caged animal and am clawing to get out.  I would rather shoot myself in the foot than to sit in two days worth of church.  But I did.  Heck, I was even an Usher.  I took up the offering in a section that had no people; my pail had 26 cents in it.  They will not ask me to do that again.  I just don’t have enough hair to raise money.  But all in all it was a good experience. 

            The meeting was a delight for a religious meeting, there was a good spirit in the air, and there were some Baptists there who think sort of like me.  It was good to have a little company on what some believe is the road to perdition.  But there was one small fly in the ointment, one bit of controversy and it came from an icon of the CBF.  Cecil Sherman, the CBF’s first executive, received an award from a book publisher who was there hawking his latest book, and Cecil stepped to the mic and made the following statement:

            “Every once in a while, I meet someone of the younger generation who says, ‘Don’t talk about that anymore.’ Why don’t you tell a Jew not to talk about the Holocaust anymore? You need to remember the events that called us into being and be guided by them as you wisely chart your future.”

            I was flabbergasted by his comments.  I thought buddy, I dislike the fundamentalist takeover as much as the next guy, but hey they won in a free (although highly orchestrated) elections, it is hardly appropriate to trivialize one of history’s great atrocities to accentuate your own plight.  Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics stated the problem with such metaphors when he wrote on June 23rd:

The Holocaust is a singular event of 20th-century social evil that should not be watered down by flawed analogies to other moral wrongs. Defective analogies trivialize genocide and the suffering of survivors. Goodwill Baptists make a grotesque moral error if we compare the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention to the Holocaust. No similarity exists between what the Nazis did to Jews and what fundamentalists did to moderate Baptists. No moderate Baptists were hauled in freight cars to concentration camps. No moderate Baptists were gassed. No moderate survivors of the takeover bear numbered tattoos and memories of loved ones lost forever to industrial-scale genocide.

Now I suppose that Sherman’s comments were to slap us ingrates into appreciating the struggle that some undoubtedly fought to be free and goodwill Baptists.  Maybe we should pay eternal homage to our great liberators, but count me out on that one.  We should not forget where we came from is the argument, and I say why not?  Why not forget?  Why not let go of our pain and bitterness, it is the Christian thing to do, and forge ahead for the Kingdom of God?  Is all that we are, simply not the other guys? I prefer to look forward, to discover afresh the vision of who the CBF is called to be in 2008 and beyond.  And besides, as much as I want to run from it, I have to own my own SBC shadow, it forever follows me around.

I do remember “the beginning of the end,” and I was amazed as Adrian Rogers was the first fundamentalist elected President of the SBC in 1979, my second year at Southwestern.  And you know the rest of the story.  But whatever the heck happened probably happened because the moderates are just that, moderate.  And as good moderates we hardly ever get worked up about anything, it has a parallel state called apathy.  Fundamentalist fight because they are passionately radical – liberals get into action because they are passionately radical.  But the big middle of moderate-dom is just that, fence-straddling-middle-of-the-road-don’t-care-one-way-or-the-other-what-do-you-think- non-feather-rufflers.  And our kindness and complacency caved to fierce and fiery fundamentalism with our desire to keep the peace while the fundamentalist were taking no prisoners until it was past the point of no return.  So yes, we needed the sometimes seemingly supercilious Shermans to speak up and light a fire in our bellies that say enough is enough.  That we can’t play by your rules, they are unjust. So my friends, I say let’s do just that—let’s get on with ministry, because there is much to do.  Let’s look forward not backward.

            Maybe in the end the problem with being moderate is that we are called to radical faith, not moderate belief.  Moderate belief just doesn’t exist in scripture; it is a waste of our time.  No where is that more evident than our lectionary text today from Genesis 22.  And yes, you have figured it out; I am staying with Genesis until the end of the age, and may do the lectionary Exodus texts after this.  I am an Old Testament convert, it is great story, and there is truly nothing new under the sun.

            In Genesis 22 we have one of the best known and most troubling stories in all the Bible.  In fact, it is a centrist text for Judaism and Islam as well.  It is perplexing, it is ancient, it is strange, and it is scary.  It is the story of Abraham climbing Mt. Moriah at God’s command to brutally kill his son Isaac with a big knife and burn his carcass as a sacrifice to God.  You know the story.  God decided to tests Abraham and told him to gather up the wood, he would need to sacrifice his one and only son Isaac on the mountain.  So Abraham cut up all the necessary wood, took his dagger and the fire and he and the boy or probably a young man at this point climbed the mountain to worship.  Now Isaac is a smart kid, and he starts to put two and two together: “dad, we have wood, we have fire, but we have no lamb to kill for an offering.”  And Abe said “the Lord will provide”.  So Abraham built the alter, got the wood ready to burn and then laid Isaac upon the alter and drew the big knife into the air in dramatic fashion to slay his one and only son, but in the nick of time an angel said stop man, and Abraham noticed a ram in the thicket, and let Isaac go.  The Lord provided, but Isaac must have had to change his tunic.  And he had to have had PTSDs for the rest of his life.  Can you imagine the emotion in this scene?  And at the hand of your daddy?

            Now, there are no shortage of people who find a frightful portrait of the Almighty in this passage of scripture, there are others who slough it off by saying that God never intended for this to really happen so the fear factor doesn’t count, still others say that Abraham knew down deep that it wouldn’t happen that he expected both of them to come down the mountain, but there is no indication that Isaac had a clue as to what was going on, other than a passage in Hebrews 11 where the writer gives us a clue to say that Abraham reasoned that God could raise Isaac back from the dead is he had too.  Well, if that is true (and it is nowhere in this story), surely Isaac was still scared, no indication that this was his belief.  Just lay here son, I am going to stab you to death and burn you, but God is going to bring you back.

            And then there are questions concerning human sacrifice, a God who requires blood sacrifices, and the beginning of a history of violence that has faith as it progenitor.   The story of Yahweh in the Old Testament is downright frightful, and that is why people like me stay generally away from it, it often paints a picture of God that is irreconcilable with my Christ. Or does it?

            And what about those who believe that God has told them to do unspeakable acts of violence in his name?  Does not every suicide bomber believe that they are doing the will of Allah?  That they will be greatly rewarded in the afterlife with many virgins?  What the heck are they telling the new wave of women suicide bombers?  What about so called Christians who bomb abortion clinics in the name of God?  OR those who believe that God would want us to make war with Islam in some sort of crusades remix?  History is replete with examples of civilizations whose worst atrocities are done in the name of God.  Everything from fascism to racism has been justified as the will of God. People have heard all kinds of voices and claimed to have heard God.

            Well, what about the possibility that Abraham was mentally ill?  Many psychotic individuals have heard voices in their heads that they thought was the voice of God.  And some of them have acted on the commands of these voices, as did one David Berkowitz, who killed six people one summer in New York because he heard the voice of God coming out of his neighbor’s German Shepherd.  We could save face if the aged Abraham had some dementia going on, but there is no other evidence of such. 

            We at a simple, rational level might say that the command of God challenged Abraham to embrace the absurd, the irrational, or the unintelligible. What sense does it make to murder the son of promise through whom God had promised to bless all the earth? Maybe in the end Abraham had to transcend normal ethical expectations. Good parents love and nourish their children; they do not murder them in religiously-inspired violence and claim that “God told me to do it.”

            Writer Dan Clendenin asks these questions of this passage:

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is one of those passages in Scripture that will always remain opaque; I doubt that any interpretation will fully satisfy us. It provokes so many questions. What are we to make of a God who commands child sacrifice? Might God ask me to do something similar today? How would we respond to a believer who invoked this passage to abort her baby as an act of obedience to what she heard as God’s command? Does the Bible sanction religious violence? Should we listen to our community when hey advise us that we are deceived and deceiving, or trump them by invoking the argument that “God told me so?” What about the divine bait-and-switch in this passage, where God asks Abraham to do the incomprehensible, and then at the last minute provides an alternative? This is Kierkegaard’s version 2.0 that smacks of psychic torture (recall Dostoyevsky’s last minute reprieve from the firing squad). How could Abraham possibly have known whether Isaac would be spared (as it so happened), whether he might kill Isaac only to have God raise him from the dead (the interpretation of Hebrews 11:17–19), or whether God might have him murder Isaac only to provide him with yet a third son of promise after Ishmael and Isaac?   He could not have known the answers to these questions in advance, and I take that simple observation as an important theme of the story. Abraham had to act as a solitary individual, with no guarantees or clarity, knowing that he might be horribly wrong and deeply deceived by himself or others, knowing that his actions would merit the opprobrium of his family and community, knowing that his act would be irreversible, and contrary to everyday standards of ethics and rationality. In his radical obedience, Abraham “worked out his salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12–13), with palpable dread and humility, before a God who asks everything, absolutely everything, of us.  (Journey with Jesus)

Maybe it is the fact that we have more questions than answers about this text that is the subject for the most famous of questioners, the existentialists.  The most famous of existential philosophers, Sóren Kierkegaard throws some insight our way in a book he wrote psuedononymously called Fear and Trembling.  In Fear and Trembling following the Preface and Prelude, there is a Panegyric Upon Abraham and a series of three Problemata, which address three specific philosophical questions raised by the story of Abraham’s sacrifice:

n      Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? (That is, can Abraham’s intent to sacrifice Isaac be considered “good” even though, ethically, human sacrifice is unacceptable?)

n      Is there an absolute duty to God? (In other words, beyond that which is ethical)

n      Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to have concealed his purpose from Sarah, Eleazar, and Isaac?

Now I will be honest, not only do I not understand Kierkegaard very well, I don’t even understand the people who explain Kierkegaard very well.  But in the end, in the Epilogue Kierkegaard concludes the work on the theme of faith by saying “Faith is the highest passion in a person. As Kierkegaard’s main criticism of his society is that men are passionless, his fear was that a static ethical requirement might not encourage us to a passion for God. Passion is required for the qualitative leap of faith toward God (the religious sphere).

And therein lays the key for me.  It is about passion that gets us off the couch and thrusts us forward to make the great leap of faith that defines us. And that is tough to do for us status quo loving moderates. Because the truth is, it is easy to be passionless about our faith or to be passionate about the wrong things.  Child sacrifice was likely common in Abraham’s barbaric world.  It was natural for him to think that commitment to Yahweh would involve this type of action.  If the pagans down in the valley sacrificed children of the tribe, how much more should he be willing to give his son Isaac?  But God stops him, for this is not what God desires, that type of passion is as misdirected as a suicide bomber.  God wants passion in the right direction, and that is almost always countercultural.  You see the problem with many a mega church is misdirected passion, through the distractions of anonymous sideline sitting and empire building. But what about us here at Providence, the mini-church?  It is a safe place, it is a special place, and it is a sacred place. It is also a moderate place where there are few rules and no expectations.  Like Lia Scholl said last week about her church, we do church-lite that has “less guilt and is more filling”. And that is mostly good.  But for those of us who have been sucker-punched by religion the temptation is to withdraw into complacency, into the safe haven of leave me alone, of I’m OK and you’re OK.  May we never be satisfied with just settling for the easy or the convenient, or the safe.  May we burn with passion where we need to make a difference, and even though we have little strength may we have big plans.  May we have fire in our bellies to do right and seek justice, and put love into action.  May we always seek to take our spirituality seriously even if we don’t always take our institutions or religion or even ourselves seriously.  Our faith is about passion.  Passion that is correctly directed in the way of God, to the things that God shows us to be important through the life of Christ.  I believe that this passage of scripture is story with a point to make and not details to expand, and as such has a lesson for us and that is that God requires us to climb a mountain or two, and that God almost always requires more than we would like or expect.  Our faith in the end is radical or nothing at all.

            So is the leap of faith possible for the passionless?  For the less than radical one?  Or for the goodwill, kind-hearted, tolerant and inclusive moderate?  Maybe that other great philosopher made the most sense to me when I was struggling with this passage.  My wife Dianna said that this passage was simple—that God does something for us that he simply cannot ask us to do ourselves—he gives us his all.  And as barbaric as this passage seems in Genesis 22, it was merely a test or an illusion.  Hundreds of years later, it actually would happen on a hill that looked like a skull.  And as paradoxical as that is, we must risk faith and that is always radical – not at all like the prepackaged stuff we dispense in churches. Not like the sugar coated Pollyannaish naïveté that some call faith. Not like the stuff we have deductively spoon fed to us at church every week. And just maybe like nothing that we ever expected or totally ever figured out.  If our life if faith is nothing else it is a great adventure.  And it is a leap in the dark not knowing that we will land in the light. 

             Because the God who would sacrifice his only son is a countercultural God who always goes against the grain and who always surprises us by his grace. And his grace that comes on the heels of radical faith is the point of this marvelous story.  Because if you haven’t climbed a wild and windy mountain to give your all lately, you have not risked radical faith, and I am sorry, you will never ever understand the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.  You will always see that boy on the altar, and never see the substitute that God has provided.  But if we learn to dare to step out, to speak up, to move forward, to risk all, to literally work out our salvation with fear and trembling, we will find something else – we will find the Good News of the gospel of radical love.  And this love freed Isaac and has the power to set us free indeed.  Thanks be to God! Amen.