Sacrifice and Legacy

For those who read my blog, you may have noticed that I’ve gotten a bit out of routine lately. Last week was heavy personally and ministry-wise with Remembrance Day and unforeseen things thrown in.

I preached last Sunday on God’s command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac just a few days after my 8 year old niece ‘went under the knife’ for long-delayed corrective heart surgery. The ironic timing of this still boggles my mind. The sacrifice in her case was more of the medical staff at Sick Kids Hospital who are incredible, and to a lesser extent my brother and sister-in-law and other niece, but there was still sacrifice involved. She came through it well, by the way.

This story of Isaac where, at the last minute God provided an alternative animal to sacrifice, also dove-tailed with Remembrance Day the day before. It being a Saturday, we had good numbers out for the community service and then time at the cenotaph and lunch at the legion after. It all caused me to ponder what hills God asks us to climb (because Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac after a three day hike up a mountain - this wasn’t just a ‘do it wherever’ ritual). It also made me ponder what sacrifices personally, congregationally and institutionally as the church we’re being asked to make in a painful time of realignment some see as the next Reformation. And do we remember and trust that God will provide in this wilderness time, even if we don’t recognize what is happening?

Tomorrow my series on Abraham and Sarah ends with her death at 127. We’re starting to get more and more people living beyond 100 and it will be interesting to see how that impacts society and the planet. Perhaps the greater question is, how are we honouring those ahead of us who have so much wisdom and experience to share, and how do we honour them when they are no longer with us? Genesis 23 gives a whopping two verses to mention Abraham’s grief over losing his wife of many decades and the matriarch of the family. And yet, that’s more information about a woman’s death than probably anywhere else in the Bible.

The rest of the chapter is about arranging for a burial ground for her, himself and other family. We are reminded that he is a foreigner despite having lived in the land for a long time. People who have tried to move to small towns can relate to this phenomenon. You can have lived there for decades, but if you’re not born and bred there you’re still seen as an outsider. Abraham, in the midst of his grief, handles this with grace and we find that the Hittites respect and honour him, wanting to give him any land he wanted. He insists on paying full price for Ephron’s cave and field, staking his claim, and officially owning a sliver of the Promised Land.

This one choice will have far-reaching implications for his descendants who are now established in the land with a place to bury the dead. This honours not only Sarah but their family as worthy of a permanent tomb and makes them all less like sojourners and more permanent in their status in the community. It allows for their story to be passed down by the locals as the transaction of buying the land was done outside the city gate and witnessed and recorded. There would be no random hole dug in the ground for his beloved wife but a proper cave where she could rest in peace and be visited by family at any time.

Sarah’s legacy at the time of her death might have seemed little. She only birthed a single son and ran a large and wealthy household, but where else did her reach extend? It was only many years later that the descendants of that single son would fulfill God’s promise to number more than the stars in the sky. She didn’t get to see it. She had to trust that God would be faithful, as Abraham did. She had to trust that they had played the part God needed them to play and that the vision of God would prevail even after they were gone.

Do we have that kind of faith still, post-pandemic with shrinking church numbers and that on-edge feeling all the time of when the next crisis or wave of Covid will come and dismantle what we’re trying to rebuild? Do we have the kind of faith that says we trust God implicitly and that no matter what happens we know we’re headed to a heavenly homeland prepared for us? I’m not sure that I always do. I try, and I stand in awe of the decades of waiting they experienced when the likelihood of the birth of a child seemed absolutely impossible. And yet…God.

In this ongoing time of recalibrating our lives and the church and re-membering we will be asked to make sacrifices. No doubt we won’t always know where we’re going and the picture of God’s renewed vision will be hazy at best. Those sacrifices are for a long game, something current culture isn’t keen on. But out of this time, if we are faithful, a legacy will be left. We may not see the fruit of it in our lifetime, but it matters.

May you be ready and willing to embrace what God asks of you, and able to lean into the ways God provides so that you can be blessed as you do it.