Spiritual Hiccups - God in the Messiness and Muck

It was interesting to read today's passage from Genesis next to the one from Hebrews.  Genesis recounts the birth of Isaac along with Hagar and Ishmael being cast out of the family.  Hebrews mentions Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a sign of his faith.  But I wonder if the writer or Hebrews doesn't give ole Abe more credit than he deserves.

If I saw someone about to kill his own child, I would call the police and try to stop him.  And if I knew about someone sending a woman and child out into the desert supplied with only some bread and a water bottle, I'd be calling the authorities again.  And I don't think it would matter at all to me if the person said God had said to do it.

We often trivialize the biblical stories, turning them into trite object lessons with clear cut morals or lessons, ones that often ignore the terrifying parts of such stories.  Sarah is jealous of Hagar and her son by Abraham, so she want to be rid of them.  This troubles Abe, but he prays about and is convinced God approves of excluding Hagar and Ishmael.  But that still doesn't explain sending her off on foot with such meager provisions. 

This and the "sacrifice" of Isaac are difficult stories, and we would do well to acknowledge their difficulty. (Jewish interpreters sometimes do a better job of wrestling with this difficulty than Christians have.)  But regardless of how one resolves these difficulties, there is no denying that God gets mixed up pretty thoroughly in the messiness and muck we humans create.  In today's Genesis reading, God even seems to be implicated in it. 

There's no escaping some troubling aspects of this, but I think there is also good news in it.  God is not simply interested in the disposition of our "souls" after we've died.  God is no cosmic watchmaker who creates the cosmos, winds it up, and then observes things play out from a distance.  God is engaged in and with creation, and that is nowhere more evident than with Jesus. 

Jesus' ministry sometimes gets trivialized the same way the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac do.  His life gets collapsed into a cosmic sacrifice that punches our tickets for heaven.  But much of the "saving" that Jesus does in the Bible is of a different kind, healing people from illnesses, freeing them from mental illness or other spirits and demons that bind, constrict, and distort human life.  Jesus doesn't come to grant us escape from the messiness of human existence but rather to redeem that messiness.  Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God which is not heaven but is God's will done here on earth.

This makes for a messy Bible that is sometimes difficult to comprehend, but I am very happy to know that God is at work within creation, in my life, in my relationships, in the community of faith, and in the world, to bend the messiness and muck of human history toward God's dream for the world.

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