Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Abraham

  • Who Knows What’s True?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was the first half of one of the more troubling stories from the Bible, from Genesis chapter 22.

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

    “Here I am,” Abraham replied.

    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.”

    Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

    “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

    “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”…

    The second reading was by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones, a humanist Unitarian Universalist minister, from his essay “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows”:

    Abraham’s situation, when he is commanded to slay Isaac, represents the human situation. Forced to decide whether he is addressed by God or Moloch and given the impossibility of demonstrating whose voice he hears, Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.

    Sermon

    In the first reading, we heard the first half of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is one of the more troubling stories in the Hebrew Bible. While this story has been interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways, I’d like to draw on it as a way for us to think about truth. How do we know what is true, and what is false? Who is it that knows what is true? And along the way, I’ll also make a connection between truth and justice.

    I’ll begin by retelling the whole story, interspersed with some of my own interpretation and commentary. As usual, my interpretation and commentary are provisional, so after the sermon please tell me where I went wrong.

    Before I begin, I have to say a little bit about the names for the God of the Israelites. In this story, two names for God appear: Elohim, and the name that is spelled Y-H-W-H, which we English speakers often pronounce as “Jehovah.” Explaining why these two different names are used to refer to the same deity would get us into fairly deep waters, so I’m going to skip over that for now; but as I retell the story of Abraham and Isaac, I’ll use the names “Jehovah” and “Elohim” to show where the original text had two different Hebrew names.

    The story begins with Elohim deciding to test Abraham. Elohim says to him, “Abraham!”

    And Abraham replies to Elohim, “Here I am.”

    Elohim says to Abraham, “I want you to take your only son, Isaac, whom you love. I want you to go to the place called Moriah. When you get there, I’m going to show you a mountain where you will sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.”

    At this point, I’ll pause to interject some commentary. The Biblical story remains silent at what goes through Abraham’s head when Elohim speaks to him. I can imagine many different thoughts he might have had. For one thing, Abraham might not be entirely sure that this is actually Elohim speaking. One of the Canaanite gods, a deity named Moloch who is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as existing at this time, was kind of notorious in those days for requiring child sacrifices, so Abraham might be concerned that this is actually Moloch speaking, not Elohim. For another thing, I imagine that Abraham would wonder what Sarah, Isaac’s mother, would think about all this, and I imagine that Abraham is going to want to talk this over with Sarah. That’s enough of my commentary; let’s get back to the story.

    So the next morning, Abraham gets up real early, loads up his donkey, wakes up Isaac and two of the family servants, and cuts a bunch of wood so he can do a burnt offering. Then they all set out for Moriah. It takes them most of three days to get where they can see the place about which Elohim told Abraham. Abraham turns to the two servants, and says, “You two stay here with the donkey. I’m going over there with the boy. We’ll worship by offering up a burnt offering, and then we will come back to you.”

    Another pause for commentary: I like how Abraham says, “WE will come back to you.” To my way of thinking, this means that he fully expects that he is not going to have to kill Isaac, that both he and Isaac will be returning to the servants. To put it another way, Abraham is pretty sure that he is not being deceived by the evil deity Moloch, that something else is going on here; he is feeling his way towards the truth. Now back to the story.

    Abraham takes the bundle of wood that they had carried for the past three days, and gives it to Isaac to carry. Abraham carries the fire (remember, they didn’t have matches or lighters, so he’s carrying some kind of live embers) and the sacrificial knife. They walk along together, and Isaac says, “Father, I see we’ve got the wood and the fire, but where’s the lamb we’re going to sacrifice?”

    Abraham says, “Don’t worry, Elohim is going to provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” And then they get to the place that Elohim told Abraham about, and Abraham builds an altar, and sets up the wood for a fire. Then he ties up Isaac and puts him on top of the wood. Then Abraham picks up the knife….

    Another pause for commentary: At this point Abraham must be wondering if he has correctly discerned the truth. Who was it that spoke to him? Was it Moloch, the evil god who demands child sacrifices, or was it Elohim, the good god? If it was Elohim, then Elohim is waiting until the last possible moment to keep him from killing his son. Determining the truth has become a life and death matter! Now back to the story.

    Just at this moment, the angel of Jehovah calls out, “Abraham!” And Abraham replies to the angel from Jehovah, “Here I am.” And the angel says, “Don’t do anything to the boy. Now I know you fear Jehovah, because you didn’t hold back when you were asked to sacrifice your only son.”

    A quick pause for commentary: You will notice that in this short passage, Genesis 22:11 and 12, the deity is referred to as Jehovah, not as Elohim. Some Biblical scholars believe that this short passage was added into the original story. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but now back to the story.

    So Abraham looks up from the sacrificial altar, and sees a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. He goes over to the ram, grabs it, and sacrifices it as a burnt offering instead of Isaac. Abraham names the place “Elohim Will Provide.” Which gives rise to a proverbial saying, “On the mountain of Elohim it will be provided.”

    Another pause for commentary. If you leave out the short passage about the angel from Jehovah, the story still works. But without the passage with the angel from Jehovah, we wind up with a different story. The philosopher Omri Boehm puts it this way: “In the original narrative, Abraham ultimately disobeys God’s command, sacrificing the ram ‘instead of his son’ by his own decision. [But] the interpolated figure of an angel takes out of Abraham’s hand not just the knife but the responsibility for stopping the trial: It takes a story that culminates in Abraham’s ethical disobedience as the symbol of faith, and makes it into one that celebrates obedience….” Boehm goes on to cite the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who found two levels of meaning in this story — the familiar meaning of obedience to the deity, and another meaning of disobedience. Or maybe it’s not disobedience, but something else instead? The story is almost over, so let’s finish it, then think about this some more. (1)

    The angel of Jehovah calls to Abraham a second time and says, “I swear by myself, declares Jehovah, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 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 all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” So speaks Jehovah. Abraham and his son and his servants head back home. So ends the story. (2)

    Now that the story is over, I’d like to think with you about a question: Is there a difference between the parts of the story with Elohim, and the parts of the story with Jehovah? Biblical scholars continue to debate this question, and I’m not qualified to give a definitive answer. But I would like to consider what Rev. Dr. William R. Jones said in the second reading this morning:

    “Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.”

    Jones would have agreed with Omri Boehm that the story of Abraham could be interpreted to mean, not that Abraham is to be celebrated for his obedience to God, but rather that Abraham is to be celebrated for using his free will to figure out the truth of the matter. Jones was a humanist who did not believe in the literal truth of God, but he believed in the deeper truth of this story — that we human beings are sometimes confronted with impossible ethical decisions, and when that happens it is up to us to make “the crucial decision.”

    William R. Jones implies that Abraham makes this crucial decision alone, without talking to other people. To me, this is a crucial point — must we make ethical decisions like this entirely on our own? Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started out as a Unitarian minister and who remains one of our greatest Unitarian theologians, also seems to think that we make big ethical decisions on our own, solely in consultation with some kind of divine power. In his essay titled “Greatness,” Emerson quoted one of his intellectual mentors, Mary Rotch, as saying:

    “I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.”(3)

    Thus Emerson believes that some kind of divine voice or divine guidance can require our obedience, to the point where we cannot be shaken in our decision even though the rest of humankind says we are wrong. We can see how this might apply to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Under the urging of a voice claiming to be Elohim, Abraham forms the plan of sacrificing his son Isaac. But it’s not clear to me whether Abraham is obedient to the voice of Elohim, or to the messenger from Jehovah, or whether instead he finds a silent obstacle in his mind that prevents him from killing Isaac, an obstacle for which he cannot account. From whence does that obstacle come? Does it come from Elohim, or Jehovah? Or does that silent obstacle come from a sense of truth and justice to which even Elohim is obedient? Abraham lets that obstacle lie there, thinking it might pass away, but it does not. And when the time comes to actually sacrifice Isaac, that silent obstacle stops him — or perhaps it stops Elohim from letting him proceed.

    Here is where I part ways with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and with Dr. William Jones. I do not believe that this kind of ethical decision-making is a solitary occupation. Yes, it is critically important that we learn to make these kinds of ethical decisions on our own, but we must also check in with other people to confirm whether or intuitive insight into truth is correct. Emerson himself had occasion to insist that we check in with other people to make sure our insights are correct. Jones Very, one of Emerson’s younger proteges, was a talented poet who also suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness. Emerson was impressed by Jones Very’s poetic talent, but Emerson was also aware of his mental illness. One time, so the story goes, Jones Very brought some poems to Emerson to read. When Emerson ventured to make some small criticism of the poems, Jones Very said that the poems had been dictated to him by God, and therefore no valid criticism could be offered. To this Emerson responded dryly that surely God knew enough to use correct spelling and grammar. In other words, Emerson knew that no matter how it might seem that our insights are divinely inspired, we have to check in with other people.

    Because of this, when I hear the story of Abraham and Isaac, I tend to believe that some important bits got left out of the story. When Elohim first tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, I have to imagine that Abraham goes immediately to his wife Sarah to talk it over. I can imagine Abraham saying, This is what Elohim said to me; but can this be Elohim, or is it really Moloch who is trying to deceive me? I also imagine Abraham must have talked this over with other leaders in his clan. The decision to kill his only son is not a decision that he can make alone. Abraham and Sarah, along with other leaders and their close associates in the clan — they must all talk this over together, to determine if what Abraham has heard is the truth. Yes, the burden of final decision and of action ultimately rests on Abraham’s shoulders alone; but he is not alone in making his decision. Like all humans, Abraham is a limited and fallible being; at the same time, he is always a part of humankind; and so he must rely on other humans to help him determine truth.

    I am not saying, however, that truth is relative, or that truth is made up by humans, or that truth is nothing more than a human construct. Not only is that not something I believe, it is also not something that appears in the story of Abraham and Isaac. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, there exists an ultimate truth to which both Abraham and Elohim are answerable. Abraham must answer to Elohim, who is his god; but both Abraham and Elohim must answer to absolute truth and justice. Elohim, being answerable to that absolute justice, would never have let Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Abraham is also answerable to that absolute sense of justice, but being a mere human being, his vision is cloudy; he can’t always be certain that he perceives absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. The drama of the story arises from his lack of certainty; Abraham knows that Elohim is answerable to absolute justice, and Abraham must judge whether Elohim would actually tell him to kill his son, or whether he is being deceived by a false deity like Moloch.

    Like Abraham, all of us human beings cannot see absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. Because we cannot see clearly, it is possible for us to believe that there is no ultimate justice in the universe. Yet just because we can’t see it clearly doesn’t mean truth and justice don’t exist. And so we are forced to ask, “Who knows what is true?” Our own time, the mid-twenty-first century, is filled with things that prevent us from perceiving with clarity: social media algorithms, fake news, AI-generated falsehoods, and so on. We thus may be tempted to believe that all we have to do is to listen to an inner voice to know what is true, even if what I hear my inner self saying contradicts what you believe is true. If we rely only on ourselves, we may not realize that we have been deceived by Moloch.

    The great philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who died two weeks ago, believed in the power of communication between human beings as a way to arrive at ultimate truth and justice. In this belief, Habermas differed with many people today who are convinced that there is no one single truth; that there are many truths and many kinds of justice, no one of which pertains to all humankind. We see this in our current political debates here in the United States. Many political liberals and many political conservatives no longer believe that we can arrive at a single sense of truth that applies to us all. Both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of creating fake news. Some political conservatives have decided that there is only one way to interpret the history of America, and they want to ban any competing interpretations. Some political liberals have decided that different identity groups have different truths, and that those not included in a given identity group cannot question truths claimed by that identity group. Thus in our time it seems few people believe that truth is universal; and few people believe we must work with other people, including people we disagree with, to establish what is true, and to establish a truly just society.

    I find myself agreeing with Jurgen Habermas: there is an ultimate sense of truth and justice in the universe. Limited being that I am, I can sense it only dimly by myself. As a limited being, I may have some small insight into this ultimate truth and justice; perhaps there is that of the divine in me that gives me that insight, or perhaps there is a divinity that sends messengers to me with notice of what is true and just. The story of Abraham and Isaac tells me that even if I have some small insight into ultimate truth and justice, I may still be forced to make decisions that wrack my soul.

    But I believe we should not interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac as telling us that we must make these decisions alone, by ourselves, as rugged individualists. The story of Abraham and Isaac is but one episode in the larger story told in the book of Genesis; and the book of Genesis tells but one part of the much larger story that is told in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is not merely a collection of stories about individuals, but it is rather a larger story of a group of people. Thus, when the Hebrew Bible tells a story of an individual, that individual’s story must be understood as being a part of the larger story of a people. While the story in the Hebrew Bible tells of one people, it implies a still larger story that includes all peoples, all of humankind. In that larger story, the story that includes all humankind, we discover that there is an ultimate truth, there is ultimate justice; that ultimate truth and justice apply to all humankind equally. This is, in fact, one of the origins of our modern conception of justice and human rights for all human beings.

    Each individual and each group of people perceives a small part of this larger truth. When we Unitarian Universalists perceive a small part of this larger truth, we like to proclaim the inherent dignity and worthiness of all human beings. We like to say that although we can perceive it but dimly, we know the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. We also know that we human beings are easily deceived. And so we pay great attention to the story of Abraham and Isaac. When we commit ourselves to a course of action, we might discover that if we look up from the task in front of us, and turn around, we might see a ram caught in the thicket behind us. We listen for the promptings of ultimate truth and justice, knowing that we can never perceive them with absolute clarity, but also knowing that by relying on other people we can overcome some of our human fallibility.

    Notes

    (1) Omri Boehm, Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (New York Review Books, 2025), pp. 143-144. I do not agree with everything Boehm says in this book, but his interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is similar to that of William R. Jones, while offering more detail than Jones’s brief discussion.
    (2) Story of Abraham adapted from NRSV and NIV, Genesis 22:1-19.
    (3) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), v.8, pp. 309-310. In an endnote, the editors state, “These were the words of Miss Mary Rotch of New Bedford, and they made deep impression on Mr. Emerson, when in 1834 he was invited to preach for a time in that city.”

  • The Covenant of Abraham

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Reading

    The reading is from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Genesis, chapter 12. In this reading, instead of using the traditional term “the Lord,” I will use the more correct name “Adonai” for the God of Abraham:

    “Now Adonai said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

    “So Abram went, as Adonai had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then Adonai appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to Adonai, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to Adonai and invoked the name of Adonai.”

    [NRSV Genesis 12.1-8]

    Sermon — The Covenant of Abraham

    If you come regularly to First Unitarian, or if you get the church newsletter, you will know that our church is in the process of creating a mission statement, a set of goals, and a covenant. This process began a couple of years ago with something called the “Seeker’s Task Force” — Ned Lund came up with that name based on the words I usually read just before the worship begins: “…we come together … to seek after truth and goodness…” The Seeker’s Task Force was a group of people who were charged with discerning what direction this congregation might pursue in the future. They talked with members and friends of the congregation to find out what about this church was most important to people. Then the Ministry Committee took the next step, developing a mission statement, a set of goals, and a covenant; all these are based on the final report of the Seeker’s Task Force, aw well as additional conversations with church members and friends.

    On February 22, we’ll take the next step in this process. After the worship service on February 22, there will be a special congregational meeting to vote on a mission statement, set of goals, and a covenant; and while everyone is welcome to observe this meeting, it is those of you who have made the commitment to becoming full voting members of the congregation who will actually vote. This Sunday and next, there will be two further meetings after church as a final opportunity for you to talk with members of the Ministry Committee about the draft mission statement, goals, and covenant; in other words, if you have any question or concerns, you have two more Sundays to express them; and after next Sunday, the Ministry Committee will write out the final wording to be voted on at the meeting on February 22.

    We all know what goals are, and we all pretty much know what a mission statement is too. But it may not be quite so clear what a covenant is, at least what a religious covenant might be. In order to clarify this concept well before the congregational meeting, I would like to speak to you this morning about covenants in our religious tradition.

    1. I will start out by saying that a covenant is the center of our religious tradition. Unitarian Universalists are less concerned about what individuals believe:– we can believe in God or not; we do not require anyone to subscribe to a specific creed or dogma. Instead of being organized around specific beliefs, we are organized around our covenant, that is, we are organized around a set of promises that we make to one another. There is no requirement for us to have a written covenant. Yet in our tradition there is always a covenant at the center of our congregations, whether it happens to be an explicit written covenant, or an implicit unwritten covenant.

    When I arrived here three and a half years ago, we had no written covenant for this congregation. I did discover that we had had one during the ministry of John Weiss, that is, until the 1850s. Yet while there was no written covenant, it was clear to me that this congregation had, and has, a strong implicit covenant. I wanted to find out what that covenant was, so I did a little research. Most importantly, I listened hard when members and friends of this church talked about what this church meant to them. I also read through the church bylaws, and many other documents. Based on what I had heard from you, and what I had found that had been written down, I wrote up a rough version of the unwritten, implicit covenant of this church. And I started reading my rough version of this covenant before each worship service each week just at 11 a.m. Over the past three years, you listened to what I read out loud, and you corrected my rough version of this church’s covenant. Three years later, based on what I heard from you, this is what I now read:

    Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by some creed or dogma, but by our covenant: We come together in love to seek after truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives; and in the spirit of love we care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world.

    This is how I tried to articulate the promises that we in this congregation make to one another. Mind you, my version is pretty rough and far from perfect! Based on the Seeker’s Task Force report and further conversations with you, the Ministry Committee has developed a more refined version, which reads like this:

    We come together as a religious community upholding freedom of conscience, right relationship, and the inherent worth of all people. We value our diversity, and pledge to care for one another in the spirit of love and to promote justice and kindness in the world.

    You can see that this new written version is smoother and more concise. Even so, what’s written down isn’t what’s most important about a covenant. Any written covenant merely puts into writing a set of promises that already exists at the core of who we are as a congregation. A covenant describes our way of being together as a religious community. And in our tradition, the way we make ourselves into a religious community is through our covenant, that is, through a set of promises that we make. It is easier for everyone if we put our covenant into writing — it especially makes it easier for newcomers to figure out who we are — but really what’s important about any covenant is the way we live it out in real life.

    I think I can make this clearer to you if I tell you where our idea of covenant comes from.

    2. Now the idea of covenant is at the center of three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of these religions trace themselves back to the figure of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, says the Hebrew Bible, made a covenant with the god named YHWH, or Adonai. So let me tell you the story of Abraham and his covenant with Adonai.

    The story as it is told in the book of Genesis begins in most ancient times. There’s that flood, where Noah built the ark; somewhere in there there’s the Tower of Babel; anyway, one of Noah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandsons was a man named Abram. (If I counted right, that’s ten generations from Noah to Abram; it would be as if Noah was the first European settler here in New Bedford, and Abram was one of his descendants living today.)

    As the story opens, Abram is living in a place called Haran with his wife Sarai, and his father Terah. Terah dies, and Abram decides to move into the land of Canaan — he and his family are semi-nomadic, they lived in tents and moved around a lot. But how does Abram decide that it’s time to move into Canaan? Adonai — this is the same god named Adonai who told Noah to build the ark because there was a flood coming — Adonai appears to Abram, and tells him: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In other words, Adonai promises certain things to Abram — blessings, greatness, and so on — if Abram will promise in return to do what Adonai says, beginning with going into the land of Canaan. This is the beginning of Adonai’s covenant, or set of promises, with Abram.

    Abram tells everyone to pack up, and they all move into Canaan. When they get there, Adonai appears to Abram and says again, I’m giving this land to you and your descendants. So Abram builds a temple to Adonai, which probably was a platform made out of stones, an altar to offer up burnt offerings.

    Then there was a famine in the land, and so Abram had to go to Egypt, and he underwent all kinds of adventures there, but Adonai looked out for him the whole time. And Adonai kept promising Abram that the land of Canaan was going to belong to him and to his descendants. Problem was, Abram had no descendants; he and Sarai were in their nineties, and they didn’t have any children. But Adonai tells Abram not to worry, and promises yet again that all this land will belong to him and to his descendants. And Adonai makes more promises — he adds to the covenant with Abram — as follows: Abram has to change his name to Abraham, and his wife’s name to Sarah; Abraham has to make sure every man in his tribe is circumcised; Abraham has to promise that he and all his kinfolk and all his descendants will keep Adonai as their god, and obey Adonai. In return, Adonai promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a son; they will have lots of descendants, who will make great nations; some of his descendants will be kings; he and his descendants will own the land of Canaan in perpetuity.

    To which Abraham responds: “Whaddya mean, Sarah and I are gonna have a son? I’m ninety-nine years old, for Pete’s sake, and Sarah is ninety. How are we gonna have a child?” But Adonai says, Trust me. So Abraham trusts him, goes back, and makes all his male kinfolk and all his male slaves get circumcised. Then Adonai, being all-powerful, makes sure that Sarah gets pregnant. Abraham and Sarah are overjoyed when they have a baby boy, whom they name Isaac.

    Then Adonai tests Abraham. Adonai appears to Abraham, and tells him: OK, you have to sacrifice Isaac to me. Sacrifice, as in kill your son, and offer him up as a burnt offering on that altar you made for me. Sacrifice, as in murder your son because Adonai tells you to do so.

    (At this point in the story, I can’t resist interjecting a little parenthetical comment: I am glad that the children are up in the Sunday school, and not with us right now to hear this story. I really don’t want to tell one of our children about God telling someone to kill his child; it sends the wrong message to our children. We really want to be careful about the Bible stories we tell to our kids. Now back to the story:)

    So Abraham says, Yes, Adonai, whatever you say, and he takes Isaac out to the stone altar, lays Isaac down under a big pile of firewood, and gets ready to kill him and burn his body. At the very last minute, Adonai stops Abraham from killing Isaac, and makes a sheep appear magically, so Abraham kills the sheep and turns it into a burnt offering instead of his son.

    If you’re like me, your first reaction will be: What a gruesome story! — how could Adonai test a father in this way? And how could a father actually consent to sacrifice one of his children? And based on that reaction, we might conclude: The whole reason Abraham is willing to kill his own son is because of his covenant with Adonai; because of the promises he has made to his god Adonai. This does not make covenants seem particularly attractive.

    But before we jump to conclusions, let’s stop for a moment and do a more considered analysis of the story. If we put aside traditional Christian and Jewish notions of God for just a moment, we realize the story is not quite as simple as we might have though. First of all, it is clear from the Hebrew Bible that Adonai had competition, that there were other gods and goddesses out there. Abraham didn’t have to choose Adonai; he could have chosen another god, or no god at all. Abraham chose Adonai freely, and furthermore it seems to me that Abraham went into the covenant with his eyes wide open; he knew that the benefits Adonai offered would come at a high price.

    And if we pause to give this story even more careful consideration, we would have to ask ourselves why we are taking this story so literally. Is this story any worse than the fairy tales we read to children? Think about the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch eats children, which is just as gruesome; think about all those fairy tales where parents kill their children. Yet we don’t take the story of Hansel and Gretel literally; we treat it as a myth, a story which contains psychological truth, but which is not literally true. We can treat story of Abraham and Isaac in the same way.

    Considered as a myth containing psychological truth, the story of Abraham and Isaac can tell us something important about covenants. You will recall that a covenant is a set of promises where you promise something, and get something in return. Take the implicit unwritten covenant of our congregation as it exists right now: in our implicit covenant with one another, we promise to come together in love; we promise to seek truth and goodness; we promise to transform ourselves spiritually; we promise to care for one another; and we promise to go out and make the world a better place. We promise those things, and in return we get to be part of a community based on love; we get companions to accompany us on the often unpleasant journey towards truth and goodness; we get other people caring for us; and we get help as we try to change the world into a better place.

    When I look at our own unwritten covenant, the first thing that I notice is that these promises are hard to keep. Come together in love? — in every church I’ve been a part of, that has been a promise that has been broken as much as it has been observed: people behave as badly in church as they do out of church! Companions on the journey to truth and goodness? — that means people telling me when I’m being stupid and avoiding the truth, and letting me know when I have done something wrong; it hurts when people let me know that I’m stupid or wrong. Care for one another? — it’s hard to actually care for one another, especially here in New England where often people don’t want to be cared for, and where the general culture is to keep people at arm’s length and neither ask for nor receive help. Change the world into a better place? — that’s hard work, we often disagree on how to accomplish that, and besides it takes time away from doing fun things like watching TV.

    These promises we make to one another are idealistic, and difficult to keep. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just swallow the creeds they want you to believe in a fundamentalist church — it might be easier than actually having to live out the promises we make to other people, the promises we make to something greater than our selves.

    So we come back to the story where Adonai told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is a psychologically impossible act, yet somehow Abraham brought himself to do it — or at least, he started to do it, until Adonai said, Stop! you don’t really have to kill Isaac. Similarly, we make impossible promises to one another as part of our covenant; the promises we make to each other don’t involve any actually killing of our firstborn children. Yet the promises we make to each other are demanding in their own way because we know that some god isn’t going to come along at the last moment and say, “Just fooling! you don’t really have to treat each other with love, or go off together on a search for truth, or care for others (and be cared for!), or make the world a better place.” We know that we will have to follow through on our own promises.

    This is why I find the story of Abraham and Isaac so powerful: because it tells me a psychological truth. The story reminds me that it is hard to keep promises; the story reminds me that it is hard to be a part of a caring religious community. We know that even though we make promises to one another, they are promises that are hard to keep; and because we are imperfect human beings, we will occasionally break our promises to one another. And yet, the story tells us another psychological truth: that even though at times it will seem impossible for us to keep our promises to one another, we can find a way to do it; and we can find a way that won’t involve killing anyone.

    3. At this point you may well ask: Why not just forget about these old fairy tales? Why not just do away with covenants, and even religion, altogether?

    Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A person will worship something — have no doubt about that.” When you find out what someone worships, then you will have a measure of that person. In our society, there are lots of things to worship: People worship money and consumer goods (probably most of us do, to a greater or lesser extent); and if someone worships consumer goods, you have the true measure of that person, who worships something impermanent that will wear out as soon as the warranty ends. People worship sports and pop musicians and celebrities; and there you have the true measure of those people, because they worship figures of fantasy who will fade away when they are no longer pretty, or musical, or able to play sports well.

    The point of our covenant is that we are worshipping something greater, more permanent, and much more significant. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that we shall worship that which is greater than our selves, which some of us call God and some of us prefer to call the highest and best in humanity. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that our worship is not done on bended knee and with a great show of ritual, but rather it is done is our daily lives, in the way we live out our promises. When we establish a covenant amongst ourselves, we are saying that we want to establish goodness and truth that our children will carry on after us, goodness and truth that will last for generations.

    ———

    In this way, our covenant lies at the center of our religious community. We can ignore each other’s religious beliefs. But people certainly notice what I do with my life, how I live out my values. The point of a covenant is to establish a community that helps me live out my values; a community that supports me when I am weak or suffering or when I don’t have the strength to live out my values. A covenant provides a community in which I can (and will) transform myself, so that I can in turn go out and transform the world into a better place.

    All this goes back to that old, old story about the covenant that Abraham made with Adonai. At first, it seems like a crazy story. But when you think about it, you realize it’s telling us something important: it’s telling us that if we want to live out our highest values in the world, it will not be easy to do so, and we know we won’t be able to do it alone.