To the Heart of All Things

... and [He] led them up a high mountain apart by themselves ...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Where is the heart of all things? Where is the center point from which you can see and understand things clearly in this life? As so often is the case with the brilliant or the transcendent or the divine, it has been right in front of us the whole time, without wavering or fading, but we did not see it. It is held up regularly as being the holiest thing, the thing that all people everywhere can agree is a most transcendent thing .... before which everyone everywhere removes their hats or bow or even prostrate themselves with an outpouring of tears. It is at once our moment of highest joy and yet regarded as the greatest tragedy. It is the moment of thanksgiving to God, the highest moment, yet frequently cursed and the cause of people losing their faith. It is the beginning of all our dreams yet widely believed to be the end of all hope. It is the gateway to God yet condemned as a door slammed in our face. This It .... until we understand it, we are apt to languish in wandering mazes lost forever.

One man was called to this very center and point. Today's meditation is devoted to his all-important story. We cannot know why Abram (the name means "exalted father") was chosen to become the progenitor of God's people. All we really can know about him was, first, he was a fallible man, and, second, he was in the end absolutely faithful. (Indeed, the presence of shameful anecdotes in his biography inclines the reader to trust its veracity.)

Imagine the glittering city of Ur of the Chaldees. The very name dazzles: Ur, which means the first of all cities, and Chaldees, the ancient name for the first great civilization, Mesopotamia. The luster and high dignity of this name is difficult for us to grasp today who live in a city-dominated world. But before there were great cities, when the world was wild and unknown and filled with hard wildernesses and desolate wastelands, Ur of the Chaldees bespoke cool waters; fresh greenery; comfortable beds; elegant, soft clothing; abundant foods that were spiced and well-cooked. It was here that Abram experienced a theophany: he heard the voice of God. Who is this Abram? Shall we call him a Prince of the Chaldees? He was the son of Terah, a descendant of Shem, Noah's son. His wife, Sarai, was his half-sister. We imagine their lives to have been comfortable, ensconced in high civilization, enjoying every privilege and comfort imaginable to the Iron Age.

Suddenly, Abram is called away from this pleasant place. As we follow his path with Sarai through trackless wastes, we come to realize that they are the first since Noah on his ark to be called into complete solitude with God, a radical solitude without paths or sign posts. And Abram presses on from one wilderness to another. All they know of their destination is that it is "a place God will show them." You can imagine that on occasion Sarai might have pressed her husband for more details:

"Abram, are you certain that it was God, Who spoke to you?"
"Well, yes Sarai, I do believe it was God.
"And when was the last time you heard from Him?"
"Well, you know ... the last one was about twenty years ago .... though I must admit that one was in a dream."

A life in the wilderness that seems to go on forever and whose duration is not known; a destination which has not been revealed ... and will remain unrevealed for decades; a land of promise whose meaning is a mystery; a commission to parent many nations though a man and woman roughly 100-years-old have tried and tried for many, many years. Well might Sarah and Abraham be called our mother and father of faithfulness. And then, after so many long decades of wandering and laboring and suffering, a son! And not from a surrogate mother. Not an adopted child. But their own boy within Sarah's womb, an offspring of Abraham's seed — a pearl beyond price, granted following two lifetimes of unwavering faithfulness and oblation. What more could be done to underscore the precious value of this child? And Isaac's birth would be a safe one for the baby and his 90-year-old mother. The child grew, and his parents adored him. But then something new appears: the child is to be bound and offered as a blood sacrifice to God.

It is here, on this point, that Abraham and Sarah have arrived to the true destination of all their wanderings and travels.

During this past week, we have lived through a flood of curses poured out through the media and social networks vilifying our God. Very often, they begin with the words, "What kind of God would ..." And the very symbol and icon of "a God Who permits the murder of children ..." to borrow a phrase repeated in Facebook many times last week, is the Binding of Isaac. We might even say, the Sacrifice of Isaac, as Abraham had committed his will entirely to it.

I cannot hope adequately to address the subject of suffering in the world and the place of God in that suffering ... all in the space of a few minutes. But I will remind myself this morning that we humans are inclined to blame especially in the face of catastrophe. And few figures are blamed more often than God. Most of the world's suffering is caused by ourselves. World hunger, pandemics, even the outcomes of natural disasters are all in our hands to amend and nullify.

Those of you listening on the Web may not know that we lived in Haiti for many years and were present for an earthquake in 2010. How many people blamed God for that! .... when, in fact, most of the injuries where due to faulty buildings and unscrupulous contractors who had sold watered-down concrete to gouge for more profits. This never would have happened had these buildings been constructed properly.

You see, God has given us the awesome gift of a freedom that is absolutely sovereign, which He will not abridged or suspend. May I pause to note .... how many people have said to me, "But this cruel trial that Abraham and Sarah had to endure!" Well, can you explain to me any other way that God can plumb the depths of the human heart? If this freedom is not a mere joke, a fiction, or an illusion, there is only way to know what the content of a human's heart is (for the content of a heart is not a steady, much less a permanent, thing), and that is to permit that human the full scope and exercise of his or her powers. That is God's dilemma .... because He loves us.

We may use this freedom any way we wish. If the great cataclysms of the twentieth century — two world wars, the holocaust of the Jewish people, the advent of nuclear weapons, .... and I could go on all morning — if they have taught us anything, it is that God will not take over the reins of control. I do not say that He does not answer our prayers. There is a hidden presence that gives us certain powers and strengths, and miracles of timing do happen. But He will not seize the reins of control. He will not change the course of history — not across the world and not in a school yard in Florida. That control He has given to us, for "the heavens are the Lord's heavens, / but the earth he has given to the sons of men" (Psalm 115:16).

Yet, the Binding of Isaac continues to be an icon of the pain we experienced last week and the place of God in human events. Many years ago I listened to a homily delivered by the Canon to the Ordinary to Bishop John Shelby Spong, a foremost leader of The Episcopal Church. The lessons that morning were the ones we are reading today including the Binding of Isaac. Standing in the pulpit this Episcopal priest held the Holy Bible aloft and then threw it into a trashcan, crying out, "Here are the heroes of your so-called faith: a schizophrenic maniac who hears voices and then nearly murders his own son!" Yes, I sat there stunned, as if someone had kicked my stomach in, but the greater pain was looking around the room and seeing all the sincere faces that quietly nodded in agreement. And I wanted at that moment to stand up before this large crowd and say, "Do you not see that the destination of all Abraham's journeys is the safety of God, Who is the Lord of all Life? Death is rendered meaningless in His sight. Powerless! Death is the place where one steps out of time, where God is."

Yet, so powerful is this place, is this moment, where one stands before the living God on one side and at the scene of horrific death on the other, that without deep and steady faith it is too much to endure, too much to grasp. Yet, this place has not been reserved only to Abraham or to Sarah. Their journey is our journey. Where Abraham stands with Isaac ... this is where we will stand.

That this moment and place is common to all people is not to say that it is less sublime for that. But quite the opposite. The place where Abraham stood, where we shall stand, this wormhole in time and space, was understood as being the most important place on the earth to the Lord Jesus and His contemporaries. The ancient Church named this place (in St. Jerome's Vulgate translation), the terra Visionis "the land of Vision." Before that, ancient Jewish tradition held that God had reserved the dust He had used to create Adam and then used it to create the place to which He summoned Abraham and where Isaac was to be bound. Our English translation calls it Mount Moriah, which thousands of years later, according to the Talmud, would be called by another name — Mount Zion — where the Temple would stand, the place where the Divine Presence is most intensively felt in the world. You see, Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldees to stand upon the burning point of the entire human lifeworld. And standing on this mount one is able to see another mount a short distance away: Golgotha, Calvary hill.

The primary purpose of Abraham's original call from Ur of the Chaldees was not to be a father to many nations (though he would be) nor to hold deed to an important piece of real estate (though it would come to his children). The primary purpose of his call was to meet with God. And this is the purpose of our own calls from God today. God had come into Abraham's life, and from that moment he was willing to sacrifice everything in order to continue in that very special relationship. And that is what is required: to sacrifice everthing. As we Christians would say, he lost his whole life in order to find it.

I do not know why. It has always been true and shall always be true, that the moment when we meet God face-to-face will be for our loved ones a most aggrieved experience. Some spouses left behind wear black the remainder of their lives. Yet, for those of us who die, it is the most joyous and exalted experience. We now have databases — much more than ten million stories — telling of these very same joys. Death. It is the always held up as being the most horrible thing, the moment to be feared with the greatest dread. And, yet, it is not. I know that some deaths seem to be horrific. But may I humbly say, as one who once was thrown through a windshield at 60-miles-per-hour, that, miraculously, no violence comes to the one who is in it. Bystanders are horrified. Yes. I saw it with my own eyes. But not to the one who is in it. And the bombs of any battlefield, however near, are happening at a very great distance from those who have fallen and are dying. But no matter what the manner of death might have been, it is death itself, with its hideous visage, that preys upon our minds and thoughts. It holds us thrall. It makes us squirm. It propels us into irrational behavior, even hysteria. Yet, it is, in fact, the safest and most sane moment of our lives.

Perhaps the greatest irony of this past week are all the people who are mourning the death of Billy Graham .... of all people! And his reply? "Some day you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God." He once was asked, "Pastor, Where is Heaven?" His answer was swift: "Heaven is where God is."

Why was Abraham brought to the point of death, the death of his only-begotten son, in order to stand on the brightest point of Divine Lifeforce on earth? Because it is not until we are able to see Death's helplessness, its powerlessness before the face of God, that we can truly begin to live: "where God is," where abundance and peace begin .... and never end. And one more thing. Not so many feet from the holy site where Isaac was bound, God was required by us to sacrifice His only-begotten Son, not a trial but an accomplished execution, that we might stand "where God is" forever.

You see, the One to Whom death is nothing understands our griefs, understands what death means to us. And if you should wonder at the coincidence of this Old Testament lesson appearing today, following a week of our collective tragedy and griefs, following the death of Billy Graham, then you do not understand the ways of our loving and merciful God. For God brought the inner circle of His Disciples — John, James, and Peter — to witness His victory over death before the Crucifixion. Transfigured from mortality to divinity, the Lord Jesus stood between the two deathless ones of the Hebrew Scriptures, Moses and Elijah, and a word of power was heard: "This is my Beloved Son. Listen to Him!" And he plainly tells His Disciples, "... before I rise from the dead."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.