A child, about six or seven, once asked me after church, after hearing the grim story in Genesis 22 of Abraham preparing to make a burnt offering of his only beloved son, Isaac.
“Did this really happen?”
“No,” I answered.
“Then why do we read it in church?”
“The biblical readings are meant to teach us something about God.”
“I learned that God was a really bad Dad.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you listen? God told Abraham to burn up his own son.
“But Abraham didn’t do it, did he?”
“No, but it was close.”
“Why didn’t Abraham do it?” I asked this delightfully inquisitive child.
I waited and wondered what the child would say next. There was a long, long pause. I stayed quiet. The child was waiting for me to solve this problem for him. I waited. Maybe five minutes passed before the child said anything. He looked up at me before he finally said.
“Because God finally said NO Way?
I nodded.
“Still it took God waaaay too long, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
* * * *
Back in the late 1980s, it took me a long time to say NO to significant pressure I thought was from God but which really was from the diocesan bishop’s expectation that, after ordination, I would go into full-time parish ministry to help with the shortage of parish clergy. I tried. The parishes I served were authentically appreciative of my ministry with them. I wasn’t bad at the task of managing a small business on volunteer giving the Church calls “stewardship.” I felt as if every sermon secretly functioned like a report card. Whether that was true or not, I knew parish ministry was not for me. I only wanted to be a priest of Word and Sacrament, not a rector. So I said NO. When I left that parish and parish ministry, they presented me with a white stole, hand sewn and delicately embroidered with dates and gratitude for my ministry with them and blessings for my future.
* * * *
When you go against traditional expectations as Charles Darwin did, you take huge risks. Darwin published his 1859 book On The Origin of Species, saying NO to scientific and religious declarations about his sanity, and NO to the theology of his day that insisted on the omnipotence of God, Creation being the evidence of the same. Darwin went as an unpaid companion on an expedition with Robert Fitzroy, Captain of the HMS Beagle. On the journey to South America, they landed in Rio and stayed till June, 1832. Darwin became ill in sweltering 103-degree temperatures in the tropics but was cured by “cinnamon and port wine.” This remedy still works I’m told!
On the trip he sampled all kinds of animals, even iguanas, armadillos and agouti rodents, proving that his species could survive and evolve, alongside all kinds of others evolving by natural selection. Darwin’s theory has been misconstrued to mean the survival of the fittest, but he wrote about naturally evolved ingenuity, the development of new traits, and the willingness of the human species to ask questions, take chances, observe closely, and realize that the ONE God created and blessed ALL of it to co-exist. (I confess to swatting mosquitoes, trapping mice, and squishing some wee crawling bugs. I notice they all seem to increase and multiply anyway.)
When Darwin came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar, to be eaten alive by the grubs after hatching, the event alone challenged his belief in God. He wrote: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
So Darwin said NO to this omnipotent Divinity and YES to the God who chooses Love over Control. Darwin risked prison time when his theory was published. Was it denying God as THE Creator? NO, it advocated the growth of ALL creation. I, centuries later as a 21st century woman, believe that the one God delights in the evolving of all Life including its risks and uncertainties.
Apparently, so did the Buddha. Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877, took a trip in 1911 to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published. He wrote: "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.” I said YES.
As a parent I learned this lesson early. If I prevented every fall a toddler took while she or he was learning to walk, he or she would never have learned to walk or how to fall and then get up. I also learned how hard it is to love and let go, hard to say NO. I made many mistakes trying to balance the two. I often erred on the side of permissiveness. In time, I said NO to over-mothering, did plenty of under-mothering and exercised my own God-given freedom to evolve.
* * * *
P.S. No God in His Almighty right mind OR heart, would ever authorize the kind of stupid parenting Abraham tried to exercise by sacrificing Isaac.
God said NO!
