June 20, 1999
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Today’s Scriptural lesson is one of those that most of us find difficult to understand. Without any explanation from God and with almost a cruel sense of ultimatum, God orders Abraham to take his only son Isaac the one he loves, and offer him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that God will show him. This horrifying tale of God’s order to Abraham sends a collection of questions to us today. How can a father do such a thing? And even more perplexing, what kind of God would first bless Abraham with a son from Sarah and then to take him away in what sounds like child abuse?
Let’s hear the story again. Abraham saddles his donkey, takes two young men and his son Isaac, and hits the road toward the place known as Moriah in the distance that God will show him. Over several days of travel, Abraham has time to think. And while he thinks, he ponders over how his long life has been. “Why can’t my contact with God be pleasant and enjoyable? How can I handle the horror I feel as I think about what is going to happen to my son? Is there any way that I can find a peaceful way out of this? How can I reconcile with my son before I…before I…before I…have to kill him?” Abraham desperately wants to choose harmony over conflict. He wants to have a sense of peace in his heart with God and in God’s name, have peace with his beloved son Isaac.
And yet, despite his intense inner pain, Abraham remains faithful to God. He takes the wood for the burnt offering and lays it on his son Isaac, and he carries the fire and the knife, almost like he didn’t want Isaac to get hurt. The two of them walk on together, and then Isaac innocently asks, “Father! The fire and wood are here but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? We can imagine the ache in Abraham’s chest and the lump in his throat as he answers, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
Harmony in the Home
The older I get, the more I am beginning to understand myself. Not entirely yet, you can ask Joy. But I do realize that as the middle child of three brothers born in the span of less than three years, my birth order means that I tend to seek for harmony in our family. Philip being oldest and Steven being the youngest, I mediated over fights and wanted everyone to win out at the end. Like Abraham, I want harmony and peace instead of conflict.
My Myers-Briggs personality profile of ENFJ confirms my desire for peace and harmony. I am “Responsive and responsible. Generally feel real concern for what others think and want, and try to handle things with due regard for other person’s feelings. Can present a proposal or leads a group discussion with ease and tact. Sociable, popular, sympathetic. Responsive to praise and criticism.” Now, that’s a pretty nice sounding description, right?
From my birth station and personality profile, choosing harmony over conflict is a temptation that I find myself gravitating toward. However, it may not necessarily be the best choice to take. For most of us, we would rather avoid conflicts in our homes then to deal with them. In fact, some of us may even want to deny that they exist at all. But when we are wishfully striving for an atmosphere of total harmony at home, what productive conflicts are we not seeing?
God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac could have led to an easy peace, with Abraham abandoning the Lord and living a safe and unremarkable life with his little family. But he chose instead the productive conflict that goes along with faithfulness to God, and he became the father of a great nation.
Abraham Makes a Tough Choice
On top of that mountain, Abraham knew that God is God and that he was Abraham. As far as he knew, his other son Ishmael was gone, presumed dead, expelled with nothing but his mother Hagar. Now, Abraham has only Isaac left. The anguish must have been intolerable. Abraham has to make a heart-wrenching difficult decision, a conflicted choice that looks like it will lead to certain sorrow and despair in his life. He desperately wants harmony, but he does not know how in the world he can achieve it while remaining faithful to God. So he makes the choice—the tough choice—of productive conflict, throwing his life into turmoil and sacrificing his immediate peace in order to gain peace in the long haul.
Abraham binds his son Isaac, lays him on the altar, on top of the wood, and clutching the knife in his hand, reaches out to kill his son. But an angel appears with a last-minute stay of execution, and announces that Abraham has passed the Lord’s test of faithfulness. Abraham looks up to see a ram, caught in the thicket by his horns, and he sacrifices this beast in place of his son, discovering in a new and dramatic way that the Lord does indeed, provide.
The peace that Abraham could have taken and avoiding this excruciating event in his life would have paralyzed his call by God. He could have been one of the trillions and zillions of people who were born, lived on this earth, and died into oblivion. The short-term harmony of living out his life with his little family was attractive, but instead Abraham chose the better choice of a long-term productive conflict. If we behave in a way that is faithful to God and to each other, we can choose constructive conflict, and trust that we will grow in productivity, relationships, and spiritual well-being. Just as God provided a ram for Abraham, the Lord will provide for us as he helps us to grow into the people he wants us to be.
God Provides
Many times we want to believe that we should maintain harmony and good relationships at all cost. We think that short-termed solutions can at least get us to the next step so we avoid dealing with some of the hard questions today. We put off difficult issues and situations and soon we realize that the immediate benefits don’t necessarily live up to what was promised. This is when peace in our families actually paralyzes. There may not be outright fighting and yelling, but creative and meaningful communication lines have been severed just to maintain a semblance of peace.
What decisions are you facing in your life? Are you being tempted to choose harmony over productive conflict? Are you picking peace instead of painful growth? Do you find conflict:
*in an abusive relationship that hurts you
*in confronting a friend with a sinful lifestyle
*in surviving a marriage that has gone cold
*in providing tough-love with a child
A conflict in life that we can all identify with is growing up with parents or if you are a parent, raising children today. Being parents today is not easy. For many parents, the only way we learned to be parents at all is from watching our own function hopefully as loving and caring nurturers. But as family members are increasingly scattered across great miles because of work and affordable housing, we begin to see that mothers and fathers are left on their own to care for their children. The ability to have grandparents to baby-sit stops being remotely possible. And when our own love and acceptance as parents for our children are diminished because of our need to maintain a certain level of economical standard, our children are left alone to fend for themselves. It is no wonder that we have deep seeded and serious problems in our schools and neighborhoods.
The tragedy of Columbine High School in Littleton, CO continues to haunt me because I wonder what I could have done to better help children and young people growing up in America today. This past week, my former office called to interview me for a perspective on what my thoughts are on youth ministry. I told Eleanor that now that I am a local church pastor, I realized that I have made some mistakes in setting program priorities when I was in Valley Forge. If I were to do my twenty years over again, I would not focus on youth, but center more time and energies on parents of youth and adults who work with youth. Kids don’t naturally live on their own in what we have fabricated as a “youth culture.” They have contacts, relationships with, and involvement from adults. And if children and youth want to live their lives without their parents and other adults, we must not let them. As parents and caring adults in this church, we must not avoid facing difficult situations and topics with our kids only to let a naïve peace paralyze us in the future. What happened in Littleton, Colorado is still paralyzing me and possibly you today.
Before our son Greg was married on May 29th, I selfishly asked him if it was at all possible to spend some time with each other as just “dad and son” before his wedding. I was elated to hear that he wanted some time with me too. It had been two years after he moved out after college to live and work in Boston. And we have been very proud that he’s been able to care for himself, pay his bills, and enjoyed his graphic design job. He was independent. Although we joked that the reason why we decided to move to San
Francisco is so that the kids can’t eventually move back home, Greg was doing quite well with just a little help from us.
Thursday before his wedding on Saturday, we spent a whole afternoon together. We bought $5 “standing room only” tickets at Busch Stadium only to see the Giants lose to the Cardinals in the tenth. We saw Mark McQuire hit his 15th for this year. We ate expensive stadium hot dogs. We had a great time at the ball game because we gave each other 100% of our time. And since our relationship as dad and son was never based on maintaining harmony at all cost, the peace that we had that afternoon was built on a lifetime of working creatively through growing pains.
God will be with you if you choose the tougher path. Just as Abraham chose the tougher path and God provided the ram in the thicket, God will also provide everything we need when we choose to follow God’s path instead of taking the easy path of life. If God is calling you to service, to obedience, or to greater faithfulness, God will challenge you—as he challenged Abraham—to trust him with all your mind, soul, and strength. You too will find that divinely sanctioned conflict does not lead to death and destruction, but rather to life and growth and new opportunity.
Struggles Create Hope in Communities
History shows us that it is struggles that can save us. According to the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, great civilizations have risen to power not because of their advantages. Instead, they have flourished because they treated their disadvantages as challenges, to which they discovered creative responses.
Toynbee shows, for example, that Athens rose to dominance in the classical world after its soil was depleted. Instead of being destroyed by that major setback, the Athenians treated it as a challenge to find a new way to participate actively in the economy of their day. Their creative response was to turn to the cultivation of olives, which could draw on much deeper water than could field crops. The Athenians rebuilt their economy around the export of olive oil, which further challenged them to build merchant marine to transport it, a mining industry to create the coin to pay for goods, and a pottery industry to produce the bottles to contain the oil.
Victor Low, our Chinatown historian, shared a video tape about San Francisco Chinatown with me recently. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed all of Chinatown, the Chinese could have suffered the displacement of their homes and shops by the city planners to move them to less prime property like Hunter’s Point or the Mission District. But it was the foresight and vision of Luke Tin Eli who seized the opportunity of rebuilding Chinatown as a tourist center that convinced the city planners to allow Chinatown to rise up from the ashes again. Mr. Luke suggested that if Chinatown was rebuilt in what people perceived Chinatown to look like than people will come. And with the parking problems that we have here, it’s been true ever since. And as you know, our church was rebuilt on the same corner in 1908.
Whether it is the depletion of the soil in Athens or the earthquake and fire in San Francisco, these struggles could have led to an easy peace, with the Athenians accepting the fate of poverty and powerlessness and the Chinese displaced to Hunter’s Point.
But the Athenians and the San Francisco Chinese chose instead the productive conflict that goes along with creating a new economy. And the Athenians became a world power and we are still here today.
God’s command to sacrifice Isaac could have led to an easy peace, with Abraham abandoning the Lord and living a safe and unremarkable life with his little family. But he chose instead the productive conflict that goes along with faithfulness to God, and he became the father of a great nation.
The challenges of abusive relationships, tough-love with our wayward kids, and sinful lifestyles can lead to an easy peace, with people taking the path of denial and avoidance. But for those who choose the productive conflict that goes along with doing God’s will in love and justice, God promises us life and growth and new opportunity.
Father’s Day
Today is Father’s Day. Bill Cosby once said,
“Mothers stress the lovely meaning of Mother’s Day by gathering their
children and tenderly saying, “I carried every one of you in my body for
nine months, and then my hips started spreading because of you. I wasn’t
built like this until you were born, and I didn’t have this big blue vein on
the back of my leg. You did this to me.”
“For Father’s Day, however, this same woman comes to you and says, “It’s one
of those compulsory holidays again, one of those meaningless greeting-card
things, so the kids are under pressure to buy some presents for you and the
money is certainly not coming from me. Twenty bucks for each of them
should do it—unless you’d rather have me put it on your charge.”
For all the fathers, grandfathers, and uncles here this morning, I want you to gather all your children around you today. We won’t dip so low as making our children feel guilty, but I want you to talk with them about not always taking the easy path in life. And that when problems show up and we all know that they will, that you want them to come to you with these problems so that you can struggle with them together.
You and I don’t need another tie or a sweater in June or a “soap on a rope.” Like Abraham spent time with Isaac, you and I need to spend time with our children and have the faith that with any struggles that we might have, God will provide and see us through.
Let us pray.
Precious Lord, guide our paths through times of productive conflict so that we remain faithful to your call for our lives. We pray for all the family relationships that we have and particularly today the relationship between fathers and their children, that facing struggles and difficult concerns will lead to healing, reconciliation, and lasting hope. Amen.