It is in the bailiwick of the spiritually appraised to attend to the matters of the right now, to be acutely aware of our situatedness and yet to transcend our present circumstance in an effort to know how we got here, what our being here might portend and how we may live into the reality God intends for us.

And so, while we gather in Convo XV, let us note (the obvious):
that we gather in the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee which will serve as the site of the 49th Session of the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
that we are located in a complex which sustained substantial damage during the epic flood in 2010
that we are in the midst of the season of Advent, preparing hearts and minds for the coming of Christ
that we are moving quickly into the threshold of a new year

It is imperative, too, that we discipline ourselves to ensure we are aware of less obvious circumstances that surround us and in which we are embedded:

Just a couple miles down Briley Parkway, you will find I-440, a connector of sort for Interstates 24, 40 and 65. I-65 will take you from Mobile, Alabama through Tennessee and Kentucky to Gary, Indiana. I-24 will take you from Illinois through Kentucky and Tennessee and passes through a smidgen of North Georgia before terminating in Chattanooga. I-40 will take you from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, pret near through the heart of downtown Nashville, Tennessee passing right beneath Lee Chapel and a couple blocks from St. John will take you all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina. So we are sitting in a crossroads and everything that is true about crossroads is true about where you are sitting.

North Nashville is fraught with challenges. It is, in fact, a food desert and one of the most dangerous places in the city. Every Sunday morning at St. John and Lee Chapel when Pastors Sinkfield and Thompson stand to preach the Gospel they are trusting God (while we are praying with them in our supposedly safer places), that someone will not enter and do violence as they have in other parts of the country.

In a community where shootings of black men and boys seem to take place daily, Rev. Thompson, our Pastor at Lee Chapel and our members there continue to mentor, educate, train young boys and girls in rites of passage and music programs reversing the negative projections made about our young people.

In this Crossroads, more and more cases of human trafficking are being reported in Davidson County.
South Nashville is a hotbed of prostitution. On I-24 there is a proliferation of inexpensive hotels where immigrants, the young, the poor are victimized and forced into prostitution.

Housing the Homeless in middle Tennessee continues to be a great challenge in Tennessee as more families become homeless and transients due to loss of homes and jobs. We are finding that more and more children are eating their only meals during the school day and are left hungry on the weekends.

For over 20 years, our sisters and brothers at Greater Bethel led by Pastor Michael Broadnax and St. John led by Pastor W. Antoni Sinkfield have sought to minister to the homeless population by opening their doors to offer people a place to sleep and eat through their participation in an ecumenical organization called Room in the Inn. Pastor Sidney Bryant and the anointed people of Payne Chapel have been feeding the hungry in East Nashville and the larger community consistently and in times of crises.

We are a city rich with the cultural contributions of people from all over the world. We are a stones-throw from Little Kurdistan, areas of the city so-named because Middle Tennessee has the largest number of Kurds in the country. Little Kurdistan in emblematic of the diversity of the city of Nashville.

We have welcomed our sisters and brothers from the Sudan, there is a burgeoning community of Egyptian Christians who are struggling to enjoy religious freedom here.
Our Somali and Bhutanese (who began to arrive in 2008) brothers and sisters have taken refuge here and there is a very strong Hispanic community in Middle Tennessee.

And, as I stand and celebrate God’s distributed abundance amid and amongst the various communities of Middle Tennessee, there are those who are unwelcoming and inhospitable. Yet, African Methodist pastors have been standing with other clergy and faith leaders to declare that we are a community of hospitality and that similar legislation to that which passed in Alabama is not acceptable here in Tennessee.

Nashville enjoys religious diversity. Still, our Muslim brothers and sisters face the challenges of the ignorant and afraid who have stood in protest of their building of mosques in Murfreesboro and Brentwood.

And in our congregations, challenges of ministry about. Being consistent and effective in pastoral care among them. Pastor Lisa Hammonds models for us excellence in discipleship ministry and in tender care to the least of these. She is a champion of the ministry of compassion, teaching us not to be afraid and to embrace the power of touch.

During the epic flood of 2010, Pastor Harold Love, Jr. picked up the gauntlet and, leading the people at St. Paul Hamilton Road became the main point person in North Nashville that City, state and federal officials called upon to develop their response. Pastor Sidney Bryant and the people of Payne Chapel stepped up to the plate in that grave our and have continued to feed the hungry in their community and the larger Nashville community.

In our larger context,

Occupy movements nationally and internationally, as they all but deny identification, seem to be loosely connected movements in protest of economic and social injustice.

1 in 3 girls and 1 in 6 boys in the United States will be sexually abused before they reach the age of 18. It is believed that the number of boys abused is higher but for the reluctance to report the number is as stated. Predators and rapists hiding out in positions of trust and great responsibility.

The world: the Arab Spring which has become an Arab Spring Summer, Fall and Winter that have included uprisings, revolutions and / or civil wars in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen. We have seen then emergence of a new Southern Sudan while we pray with them for how they will build an infrastructure and whence the energy resources to sustain themselves.

The growth of Christianity in the global south but pay attention that too often our sisters and brothers are learning Christianity from those who are not too friendly to us over here nor are their expressions of Christianity consistent with our vision for justice for all of humankind.

But at this moment, you are seated in the environs of the Tennessee Annual Conference comprised of about 60 congregations of passionate, living, breathing, loving people who are committed to God and the mission of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as we understand it. We are mostly rural and very rural. Many are family churches. We are doing ministry and we are paying our budget! The greatness of our history is only eclipsed by glory of the future God has promised to us. But we in Nashville, like you in the cities and towns where you live and minister are not basking in the light of an awesome past nor sitting saucer-eyed waiting for the revealing of a brighter future, we are right here and in the right now with our sleeves rolled up, our collars loosened and our preaching shoes on. We have determined to answer the call of God to participate with Christ in the ongoing renewal of creation.

I beg your attention to these notes on the city of my birth in an effort to use it as a window through which to see and understand that everywhere we are as African Methodists there are challenges to be met, problems to be solved, questions to be answered, sicknesses to be healed, injustices to undo and oppressed persons to be delivered.

And so it is to a prophetic ministry that we have been called. Called to unfurl a vision of the glorious future God intends into a world that has all but given up hope.
Called to preach the gospel to people who know the sound of preaching but who have been disappointed so many times they are unable to believe the content of it.

It is into this site of our interpretive enterprise that we have been called by God to cast a vision of God’s love in action. God calls the prophet to cast a vision of a brighter and more glorious future. As this vision unfolds into a world that runs counter to it, a great tension is created. There is an unavoidable tension between what is and what God desires to be. It is in this tension that miracles are made. It is in this tension that a lowdown world is pulled up into the shape and contour of the creation God intended from the beginning.

It is ours, African Methodists who seize onto the prophetic ministry, who live out the prophetic calling to stand and deliver, to paint a vivid picture of the reality God intends.

And so, the question is asked, “Are you willing to be prophetic?”
Are you willing to speak truth to power?
Are you willing to to set aside the pursuit of comfort
Are you willing to expose yourself to the scrutiny of a hostile public
Are you willing to stand in opposition to those with more money, more resources, more time and often more hate than you?
Are you willing to go even if you have to go by yourself?
Are you willing to disclipline yourself?
Are you willing to spend a great deal of time in prayer?
Are you willing to lose sleep?
• to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write, to study, to read, to write
• Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you? Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you? Are you willing to allow the Word of God to work on you?
• Are you willing to give up long held beliefs, practices and even prejudices?
• to allow the Word of God to cut you and heal you? Are you willing to expose your heart to this two-edged sword?
• to give up your druthers and preferences
• to stop knowing and begin listening and learning
• to confront your own stuff
• Are you willing to let the Word of God shape YOU?
• Are you willing to live a life of sacrifice
• to be lonely
• to be judged, maligned, misunderstood, dreaded, unappreciated, feared
• to practice the Presence of God
Are you willing to lay your head in the bosom of the Father and learn the beating of His heart?
Are you then willing to speak it when the world is out of step with the Father’s heartbeat?

And so it our right, privilege and responsibility to preach prophetically

The voice of God IS summoning us:
• To rediscover our voices, cultivate a prophetic vocabulary and preach with power,
• To situate ourselves in the history of our people with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass echoing in our hearts, and then, without equivocation or excuse, use the severest language we can command to preach with power.
• To envision high ideals, render them into poetry and speak with power
• To “dream in league with God” and
• To lose ourselves in the ecstasy of heavenly visions and have the courage and the audacity to translate what we see into what we say
• To risk the ire and disdain of the dim, dull and benighted majority and speak light into dark places
• To shun, to eschew distractions that are as delightful as they are deadly and maintain the determination to speak with power
• To slay lazy thinking, banish unrefined thoughts, open a worthy and challenging book, go down into it by yourself and wrestle with the content until you are blessed with new and fresh ideas of your own

Are you willing to pray?

Are we willing to set prayer as priority rather than having it relegated to very early mornings and out of the way sites. Prioritizing prayer is to give preminence to hearing from God rather than giving (first place / honor) to our own human devisings

It is a reality that churches of every size and description are suffering as the members of our congregations suffer through this economic malaise. But it is sophomoric to just blame the economy and then set about to find new revenue streams. We must take the time, discipline ourselves and climb up into the bosom of the Father and rest our heads long enough to discern the beats of His heart. The heartbeat of God is, in fact, the cadence to which we must march our entire lives. Time must be taken to discern, not to figure out, but to discern how it is that we find ourselves in our current financial predicament. Perhaps a good place to start would be close, prayerful readings of Biblical famine narratives. How did they end up in a famine and how did they make it out?

Maybe it is that we are going to have to do less thinking and strategizing and figuring and more praying and fasting, listening and obeying.

Maybe it is time that we have to admit that we are not as smart nor as strong as we believe and purport ourselves to be and

Maybe it is time to humble ourselves, and pray, recognizing that the Bible says that God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Maybe it is time to “come down where we ought to be” and from our position at the Master’s feet moistened with our tears to cry out

Father, I Stretch my hands to Thee
No other help I know
If Thou withdraw Thyself from me
Ah wither shall I go?

Maybe it is time to have less of all these other meetings and start holding some sho nuff prayer meetings.

Author of Faith to Thee I lift
My weary longing eyes
O my I now receive that gift
My soul without it dies

Maybe, just maybe it is time to confront our decline not with marketing strategies and church growth gimmickry but by talking to the only One who can give the increase….

Surely, Thou canst not let me die
O Speak and I shall live
and here will I unwearied lie
Till Thou Thy Spirit give.

(I SEND YOU)

John 20:19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples k when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

The labeling of the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright as a racist and the repeated playing of decontextualized clips from his sermons is an intentional attack against President Barack Obama.  But what these wicked, treacherous and conniving folk have done as well is seek to silence preachers who stand in the prophetic tradition of the black church from speaking out against the evil perpetuated by the country.  They have shrewdly taught the ignorant around and among us that to critique is to be un-American and unpatriotic.  To call someone un-American and unpatriotic is an attempt to silence and to discredit them and to render their critique invalid.  There are people in this country who want to silence the prophetic voice of the Christian church.  The Church of Jesus Christ is compelled by the Gospel to be a light shining in darkness.  But there are some folk who do not like light and whatever they can do to snuff it out they will seek to do.   Jesus condemned these people when He said: This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil (John 3:19).

African American preachers have a history of shining light on the evil deeds perpetrated against people of color in this country.  For this, they have been lynched, murdered, threatened, unjustly investigated by the federal government and under appreciated by their own community.  But these have not deterred the Gospel preacher from crying out against injustice as Isaiah models for us in Isaiah 58:1:

Cry loudly, do not hold back;

Raise your voice like a trumpet,

And declare to My people their transgression

And to the house of Jacob their sins.

This passage is not about the personal private lives of individuals but about the unjust practices of a people who try to act holy and righteous but who treat others like garbage.  These are people who like to fast and pray to appear holy before men but have no sense of justice and compassion.  Isaiah tells them because of their hypocrisy their voices will never be heard on high.

The prophetic tradition of the Christian Church is grounded in the earnest desire of a people to emerge from the tyranny of injustice and poverty.  It is an holy desire rooted in sheer human dignity and the divine right breathed into us by God at creation.  Prophetic work requires a call.  No one would dare enter into this work without it.  The prophet is one with his/her message.  There is no separating him/her from what s/he speaks.  When Ezekiel answered the call he was handed a scroll on which was written lamentations and woe.  When he ate it as he was commanded he remarked that it tasted sweet to him, indicating that he and the message had become one.  The prophet therefore, has no choice but to preach and, as the Quaker edict says, “speak truth to power.”  The prophet has no choice because the pain of the suffering people is woven into the fabric of his being.  This is not the kind of ministry from which you can retreat or take a sabbatical.  The prophetic ministry is your life.  It is all consuming.  This is why folk say prophets are crazy.  They might appear to mumble to themselves.  They are often abrasive and impatient.  They are highly sensitive and prickly.  But when you have eaten the scroll from the hand of God you are forever changed.

One day Jesus enters a room with a locked door to find a frightened group of cowering men and women.  Men and women who has just days before left him alone to suffer at the hands of evil doers.  But upon entering, Jesus took no thought of their abandonment of him.  They were a forgiven people whose sins were washed away at the foot of the cross they were too terrified to approach.  Jesus bid them, “Peace…”  “Peace be with you.”  Then He showed them His right, His authority, His power, His mantle.  He show them His scars.  These were the authenticating marks.  These were the marks of grace and mercy.  When they saw and recognized who Jesus was they rejoiced.  Then Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you…”

Here it is.  This is what the Christian church is to do, is created to do.  We are to do what Jesus did.  This is why we must stand in the prophetic tradition.  Because Jesus has sent us as the Father sent Him.  We are called to do what Jesus did.  No, more:  The works that I do shall ye do also, but greater works shall ye do because I go to the Father. Can you imagine that we have been called to outdo Jesus in bringing justice into an unjust world?

This church of which we are a part, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was born out of the emergent needs of a people, born out of people’s need for justice.

▪       This church was born because there was a need for people of African descent to be able to worship God in a place the recognized that, to God, they were not second class, not 3/5′s of a person, not enslaved by birth.

▪       This church was born out of a pressing need for justice.

▪       This church was born in the heart of a community of people who read and studied the scriptures for themselves.

▪       This church was born in the belly of a people who, filled with the Holy Ghost, could discern the voice and move of God.

▪       This church was conceived in the collective mind of a disciplined people who were faithful practitioners of the disciplines of the spirit, those who learned and practiced wilderness discipline.

▪       This church was born in a community of sun-kissed children of God whose indomitable spirit demanded a house of worship in which the Word of God would not come mediated through racist and exclusivist and oppressive matrices of interpretation.

African Methodists have a long standing tradition of fighting for justice:

▪       Bishop Richard Allen who led worshipers out of St. George’s Methodist Church in the 1700s.

▪       Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr. son of a Bishop of the Church preached the Gospel with power to people in this racist society at the height of the struggle for civil rights.

▪       The Reverend Oliver Brown, who pastored St. Mark AME Church in Topeka Kansas was a pillar in the movement for civil rights and from that AME church was birthed the landmark case: Brown vs. the Board of Education Topeka.

This is who we are.  We are those who struggle for liberation and for justice.  But it seems that the more access we have, the more organizations to which we belong and the more resources we have been able to amass the more silent we have become because we believe access and resources have inoculated us from the deadly ravages of systematic racism and institutionalized hatred.

Black folk have been drinking the kool-aid.  Too many Black folk don’t want to hear the Gospel anymore, they want to gather to themselves preachers that will tickle their ears and touch their heart with sentimentalism and fairy tales concocted without a shred of biblical truth to them.  Which is sheer foolishness when we remember that the first sermon Jesus preached was from Isaiah 61 which says:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,

because the LORD has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

2 to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor

There is no escaping this truth, Jesus cares about the poor, the imprisoned, the outcast, the sick, the orphan, the widow, the ugly and the afflicted.  Those who follow Jesus cannot be isolationists who care only about what happens in their own back yard, who are looking for personal salvation and personal blessings.

This is heretical teaching.  This is error.  Personal wealth and material gain is not the aim of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  This is not to say that you should not have material blessings, but to remind you that you are blessed to be a blessing.  You are blessed to Gospel others.

The Gospel tradition is not one of denial nor sugar-coating.  Mary Poppins’ teaspoon of sugar to help the medicine go down is not a part of the prophetic tradition of which we are a part.  We are a

▪       Sackcloth and ash people

▪       Rending garment people

▪       Sitting on ash heaps people

The prophet used whatever means s/he at his/her disposal to force you to hear and feel and experience the great, tragic and horrific injustices suffered by God’s people.  The prophetic utterance was to have great impact.  It was also often an exercise in longsuffering.  While we read these prophetic writings in one sitting, we must remember that these were spoken mostly over long periods of time.  These prophets were able to sustain the passion, the power, the purpose.  They were not fair-weather folk, they were the ones I am sure Paul had in mind when he taught Timothy:

1 I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;

2 Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.

3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;

4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

5 But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry (2 Timothy 4).

The preacher of the Gospel has to ward off the evil spirits of compromise and accommodationism.  Folk will try to tell you what to preach and what not to preach.  They will try to buy influence through offerings of time, talent and treasure.  They will start campaigns to get the preacher to relent from truth-telling.  They will offer whatever they think expedient to get their ears tickled.  For the time the Paul talked about back then is now.  We are living in a time in which people want to be entertained.

▪       People have been thorough indoctrinated by an entertainment culture.

▪       People have been lulled into thinking and, therefore, communicating in sound bytes.

▪       People have been taught to imbibe the opinions of others rather than to turn a thought on their own.

▪       People have been convinced that if it is displeasing to them then it is not worth their time.

Furthermore, folk have gotten so slovenly and careless in their thinking that when there is something presented to them that they can’t get the first time, they dismiss it as unnecessary.  The time that Paul talked about is now, people cannot endure sound doctrine.  They want to have their ears tickled with platitudes and one-liners and slogans and fodder for bumper stickers rather than to hear a Word that challenges them to a higher level of living

▪       Than to hear a word that will correct aberrant and ugly behavior

▪       Than to hear a word that upholds a standard of holiness

▪       Than to hear a word that really fleshes out the true meaning of righteousness beyond these vapid admonitions to petty piety

▪       Than to hear a word that demands that the rich share with the poor

▪       Than to hear the command to love

▪       Than to hear that love is an action word that means embodying  and practicing patience, kindness, humility.

People want to hear that living is going to be easy all the time, that everything is going to go the way they want it to go if they pray in a certain way, that they are never going to have to suffer.  But there is suffering in the world, there is pain in the world, there is sickness in the world, there is poverty in the world, there is racism in the world, there is hatred in the world and if you have been victim of any of these it does not mean that God does not love you or that God does not care.  God loves you and God cares.  This is why Jesus has sent us as the Father has sent Him.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ requires and charges the Christian with resisting these evils in the world.

“Peace be unto you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  We are called to struggle against evil.  We are called to be the Body of Christ active in the world

▪       To restore outcasts to community

▪       To give sight to the physically blind and insight to the spiritually blind

▪       To meet wayward women (and men) at the wells where they are and set them on a path of witness and testimony to the goodness of God.

▪       To stop the persecution of people caught in sin and to lovingly admonish them to chose another course

▪       To speak life to those laying paralyzed by the pools of life in desperation

▪       To make and give the wine of happiness and joy to teach the celebration of life

▪       To stand up and correct errors committed in the name of God

▪       To love people and to teach people how to love

▪       To feed the hungry

▪       To say what needs to be said

▪       To confront those who hold the reins of injustice

▪       To expose the deeds of darkness that afflict the people of God

▪       To recognize that sometimes the sinners are the victims and the church is too often the oppressor

▪       To recognize that the Christian’s way of living should not hurt people, any people

▪       To spread the Gospel

▪       To spread the love of God

▪       To spread the peace of God

▪       To spread the joy of God

“Peace be unto you.  As the Father has sent me, so I sent you.”  Then Jesus breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Ghost.”  I am sending you to stand up to injustice in this world. But I am not going to send you by yourself, I am going to send you with power….

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
- Genesis 22:9-10

Storytelling is powerful. I remember hearing, when the preacher was particularly passionate in her/his unfolding of the narrative that made up his/her sermon, that those in whom the narrative had resonance, would shout, “tell the story.” This witnessing, this cosigning, as it were, is really the sounding of a chord struck within the heart of the listener. Something in that story unfolding from the pulpit is speaking life to the one doing all that talking back to the pulpit.
It is a quickening, a life-giving experience to hear your story told, even to hear a scene of your life echoing in the life-story of another. It is almost as if someone were peering into the window of your soul, elevating, making poetry of your secrets. Singing the secrets of your soul.
• Telling the story is to affirm the lived experience of folk with some shared history.
• Telling the story is to lift the common, the mundane to the level of the spiritual
• Telling the story is to bring into community those once isolated by the details of their lives.
• Telling the story is to restore those whose lives have been depleted, whose circumstances have syphoned off the force/fuel of their lives.
• Telling the story is to seek out and to settle the lost ones into a sense of belonging.
• Telling the story is to repair those formed by a myriad of wrongs
• Telling the story is to participate in making the wounded whole
• Telling the story is to raise up those murdered by transgressions.
• Telling the story is to instruct the hearer, to inform the listener
• Telling the story gives us the opportunity the see the world from the perspective of (an)other.
• Telling the story gives faith a vehicle, a means of transportation, a way to travel from one heart to another.
• Telling the story has the power to resuscitate
• Revive
• Regenerate
• Rejuvenate
• Revitalize
Telling the story has the power to resurrect, to bring people back to life from the silence of death, from the death of silence.

It is the unspoken-ness of tragedies of our lives that empower them to be perpetuated in the lives of others, our neighbors, our children. It is our silence, our unwillingness to speak about, to give voice to our tragedies that cause us to remain alone, apart from others, from family, from community.

The poet Robert Pinsky in reviewing Kathryn Harrison’s book, “While The Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family,” says that “the violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling. Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs.” Pinsky says that “literature…manifest[s] a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable.” Such narratives bring to to our ears, to our hearts, “…the unspeakable isolation of ruptured lives, and the reparative need to speak of that isolation… [Telling the story] brings moral clarity to the dark fate of a family: the daylight gaze of narrative itself as a form of empathy.”[1] And this is the certain power of story, to give the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is the power of speaking the unspeakable.

The Akedah, the binding of Isaac, is a horror story. Indeed, what else can it be? A young man bound by his own father and laid upon an altar of sacrifice to be bludgeoned to death, his blood let by his own father. Yes, when read from the perspective of Abraham, the akedah could be the story of faith, for one would draw certain conclusions when reading through Abraham: Abraham was a man of great faith. Abraham loved God more than the blessings of God. Abraham would suspend ethics and moral imperative to prove his love for God. Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. When read from Abraham’s perspective, there are two major actors in this scene: Abraham and God. Who will regard the one being acted upon? Does not the bound one deserve to have a voice? I suggest that the bound one has to come to voice and that those, like us, with a history of bondage, are uniquely able and have a responsibility to articulate the experience of Isaac. We must read from the aspect, the perspective not of the actors but from the aspect of those acted upon. I suggest that as we read this passage from Isaac’s perspective we will read out meaning relevant to our experience, we are likely to find the message of this passage that speaks life to us.
The Bible says that God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Here I am.” 2 And He said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” 3 So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. 5 Then Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you.”
6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the firestone and the knife; and the two walked off together. 7 Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he answered, “Yes, my son.” And he said, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” 8 And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together.
9 They arrived at the place of which God had told him. Abraham built an altar there; he laid out the wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. 11 Then an angel of the Lord called to him from heaven: “Abraham! Abraham!” And he answered, “Here I am.” 12 And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.” 13 When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son. 14 And Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh, whence the present saying, “On the mount of the Lord there is vision.”

Questions abound when reading this passage…
Here is a young man taken from his home by his father to go to high mountain to worship. This must not have been an unusual occurrence in their lives for the Bible recounts several instances in which Abraham built an altar to God prior to this. Abraham was a man who worshipped and commemorated the blessings of God, the promises of God and the Presence of God. He followed the prescribed way of building altars and offering sacrifices to his God. Isaac, son of Abraham, favored member of this household must have been with his father for other occasions or, at the very least, have known of this worship practice. This is attested to by Isaac asking his father the whereabouts of the sheep for the sacrifice.

And so, Isaac is taken from his home by his father with two servants. These together travel about three days until they reach the place that God shows to Abraham. Abraham leaves the two servants with the donkey and their provisions while he and Isaac continue up the mountain to the site of worship. Abraham carried the firestone and the knife. But the young Isaac carries the wood that would become his burning bed. It is on the way that Isaac poses this heart wrenching question: “I see the firestone and I see the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering.” Some suggest that Isaac may very well have known what was about to take place given that human sacrifice was practiced by peoples in this part of the world at the period in history. But his pain at realizing the terrifying potential of the moment made him appeal to his father, “Father, what’s really going on here…. I see the firestone and I see the wood but where is the creature that will be sacrificed here?” Then Isaac heard these words from his father’s lips, “God will see to the sheep for the burnt offering.” And the two of them walked on together. This must have been among the most solemn of all processions. A young man, full of hopes, aspirations, dreams on his way to his death commanded by God at his father’s hands. How could I be expendable? Why is my life not worth living? How could I be more meaningful death than in life? How is it that binding me creates value? How is it that immobilizing me makes me worth more than I am worth now? How is it that you would spend more to incarcerate me than to educate me? Was this the plan from the beginning or did you wait until you saw my fourth grade test scores to determine that this would be my fate? How did it happen that you could see your way clear to sacrifice me to ensure you received all you believe you have coming to you? God said it? God commanded this? You are therefore more important than I? My sacrifice, my blood becomes the fuel that drives the engine of your economy.

Aren’t I worthy to have a future beyond this? Don’t I have a right to be, to become? Are the views I have had toward the future pure fantasy? Am I not the son of promise? Is it not through me that God’s plan for his people will come to fruition? Does mother know about this? Did even she approve of this?And what about this God from whom you say you hear? Does He take joy in my suffering? Will He be pleased by this blood-letting? What price will my blood pay?What have I done? What did I do to deserve this fate?

I wonder at what pace they walked. I wonder if the silence of their voices was deafening. I wonder how loudly the brush and fallen branches and debris crunched under their feet. I wonder if anxiety poured out of Isaac in rivers of sweat while he made his way up to the place of his binding. I wonder if his mouth grew dry and stank with the stench of fear. I wonder how many thought rushed through his mind. I wonder if the hysteria of this moment was when his sight began to fail? I wonder what he felt in his stomach while they walked along the way. I wonder if the weight of the wood became to much for him, there was no servant, no Simon to bear the load if his strength failed. And the Bible says that they walked on together.

When they arrived at the worship site, the Bible says that Abraham built an altar. He knew how to do this. He had done this many times before. He gathers stones that had not been cut by human hands and laid them painstakingly one on top of another until he had built an elevated table on which he then spread our the wood that he had split before he left home days earlier. And then he bound Isaac.

How did Abraham bind Isaac? Did they wrestle? Did Isaac simply submit to his father?Did Isaac believe that God had commanded his death as a sacrifice? If he did, what is Isaac left to think about this God who commanded his death? He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar and stretched forth his hand to take the knife to kill him. Then the Angel of the Lord cried out from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham.” And he answered, “Here I am.” 12 And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.”

Yes, God did stay the execution but what about the sheer trauma of being bound and having a knife closing in at your throat? What is Isaac to do with the residue of such a horrible memory? How is he to live with post traumatic stress syndrome.

Isaac was witness to the inconsistencies and the contradictions that were his father. He had heard the stories told in the household of his father’s great faith and his great failures. How could he now come to sacrifice Isaac. This man had demonstrated himself to be a champion of the innocent. In chapters 18 and 19 of Genesis, When God was investigating the sinfulness of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham bargains with God for the deliverance of the city on account of the innocent ones who lived there. He says, “will you destroy the innocent with the wicked?” And Abraham keeps taking chances with God on account of the innocent, so they would not be destroyed with the wicked. Yet, there were not ten righteous folk found in the city. How could this man, defender of the innocent, be the same man who gets up early in the morning to travel for three days to sacrifice his own son whom he loves? What has happened to this man? What is at stake here when the life of the innocent Isaac was on the line that was not at stake in Sodom and Gomorrah? What is the difference in these two scenes? Could Abraham have so longed for the blessings, the notoriety, the fame, the fortune that he would give up one beloved blessing as leverage for other blessings, for more blessings?

Well, this is a man who has given his wife Sarah into the hands of two kings, he has taken advantage of his wife’s slave Hagar, he sanctions Sarah’s abuse of Hagar, he banishes Hagar and his firstborn son and abandons them to death in the wilderness with a skin of water. He had experienced the loss of his brother, He had been witness to his mother’s loathing and manipulation. How did he feel seeing his father send his brother away into the brutality of the wilderness? And now, he, in response to a test, or a trial, is willing to murder his own son. Isaac was already damaged before he got to Mount Moriah. This Abraham is a man who is completely focused on himself, his needs, his desires, his expectations, his requirements and his supposed promises. I, me, my. Egocentric man.
This seems ridiculous to us but how many children are given up for less? For partying? For nights of fun, drugs and alcohol? How many children are sacrificed so that parents can simply do what they want to do? How many children in the world are just given up because they are too much responsibility? Cost too much? Because there were just too many?

During adolescence, youth of all races and ethnicities become involved in violence, property crimes, and other delinquent behaviors, with only modest differences in the frequency and severity of their lawbreaking. Specifically, confidential youth surveys show that compared with white youth, African-American teens commit slightly more violent crime (36 percent versus 25 percent of boys commit at least one violent offense by age 17),50 about the same amount of property crime, and less drug crime.51 Yet African-American youth are arrested at dramatically higher rates than white youth for all types of crime and, once arrested, they are…
• more likely to be detained;
• more likely to be formally charged in juvenile court;
• more likely to be placed into a locked correctional facility (and less likely to receive probation), once adjudicated;
• more likely to be waived to adult court; and
• more likely to be incarcerated in an adult prison, once waived to adult court.52[2]
500,000 children in Foster Care in this country are waiting for permanence. Furthermore, many studies have documented that the outlook for foster youth who age out is often grim:
• One in four will be incarcerated within the first two years after they leave the system.
• Over one-fifth will become homeless at some time after age 18.3
• Approximately 58 percent had a high school degree at age 19, compared to 87 percent of a national comparison group of non-foster youth.4
• Of youth who aged out of foster care and are over the age of 25, less than 3 percent earned their college degrees5, compared with 28 percent of the general population.6 [3]
How long would society tolerate continued adherence to ill-conceived policies and discredited practices if the majority of the juvenile justice caseloads were not poor youth of color?

The akedah, the binding of Isaac. This is how this horror story must necessarily be named. Isaac is not sacrificed, Isaac is bound. Bound. The text is silent on how, or even whether, Isaac is loosed. This image, I believe is instructive for us as we think deeply about the impact this binding and near filicide had on Isaac and has on Isaacs up to this very day. Does one become free from the memory of a parent tying and fully intending to kill him? Does one become free from the feeling that s/he is expendable? Does one ever get loosed from the notion that they are worth more dead than alive? Does one ever recover from being bound?

There are effects sisters and brothers. Yes, there is a ram in the bush. Yes, Abraham does name the mountain Adonai-yireh. But Isaac is still bound. Isaac does not walk back down from the site of his binding with his father. Isaac is silent. Isaac looses his voice. Isaac was a man left utterly devastated. Isaac was a cipher, he was left, it seems with no will of his own. He had done the bidding of his father and kept his life but lost his soul. It was he whose eyesight became so dim that he could not tell the difference between his twin sons. It was he who would seem to be completely oblivious to the rivalry that seethed between the two boys. It was he who was tricked by his wife.

No one left this binding unscathed. Abraham returns to live in Beersheba, the location that marks the region where Hagar and Ishmael wandered before settling in Paran as well as the region from which Abraham went forth tot he mountain with Isaac. Meanwhile, Sarah has moved to Hebron. Isaac and his father never speak again. God and Abraham never again talk to each other. “Perhaps these characters dare not speak among themselves after participating in so terrifying and event of near sacrifice.” What are they really going to discuss? There will be no meaningless idle chit-chat among this company.

This family is broken. They are relegated to silence. There is complete isolation, there is no healing, there are no reparations, there is no restitution and they only get together for funeral. So, this presents us with opportunities. To tell the story. To speak the unspeakable horrors to which we have been victim, to which we have been witness, of which we have been guilty.
• to restore those whose lives have been depleted, whose circumstances have syphoned off the force/fuel of their lives.
• to seek out and to settle the lost ones into a sense of belonging.
• to repair those damaged by a myriad of wrongs
• to participate in making the wounded whole
• to raise up those murdered by transgressions.
• to instruct the hearer, to inform the listener
• to see the world from the perspective of (an)other.
• to resurrect, to bring people back to life from the silence of death, from the death of silence.
For in so doing we open our eyes to the vision of God for His people, to see God’s vision for (an)other way.

[1] “Speaking the Unspeakable” Robert Pinsky in the NYTimes Book Review. June 8, 2008
[2] http://www.kidscount.org/datacenter/db_08pdf/2008_essay.pdf
[3] http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Foster_care_reform/Kids_are_Waiting_TimeforReform0307.pdf