There is a comedian that I love to watch on TikTok named Mitch Hedberg. He has a very dry delivery and what I consider to be intellectual jokes. They take some thought work. As I was reading the passage for this morning from Genesis, I was reminded of one of his sketches in which he talks about club sandwiches. I will definitely not be as good at telling it, but I’m going to make the attempt anyway. It goes like this: “I order the club sandwich all the time, and I’m not even a member, man. I don’t know how I get away with it. I like my sandwiches with three pieces of bread. So do I! Let’s form a club. Okay, but we need more stipulations. Yes we do! Instead of cutting the sandwich once, let’s cut it again. Oh yeah! Four triangles! We’ll position them into a circle, and in the middle we will dump…chips. Or potato salad. Cool! I can deal with that. Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about frilly toothpicks? I’m for them.” Now, at this point you are probably wondering one of two things: What could this possibly have to do with our story from Genesis 22? OR How do I get into that club?

That second one I can’t answer, but I can tell you how reading Genesis 22 reminded me of this joke. In this passage, we see a phrase spoken by Abraham three times: once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end. The story begins with God calling to Abraham, and Abraham replying, “Here I am.” The Hebrew word is hinneni. A bit later, when Abraham and Isaac leave the group and head off on their own, Isaac says to Abraham, “Father!” And Abraham replies, “Hinneni” (Here I am). And then at the end, an angel of the Lord calls Abraham’s name twice, and Abraham responds, “Hinneni” (Here I Am). It’s a sandwich with three pieces of bread. It is a sandwich of Abraham responding to the call on his life, and each time responding seemingly without hesitation.

As I studied this passage this week, I began to ask three questions that go along with the three “pieces of bread” in the story: (1) How do we recognize when God is calling us?, (2) What was going through Isaac’s mind during all of this?, and (3) Why? I want to examine each of these questions a bit this morning.

How do we recognize when God is calling us? I find this to be a really tough question to answer. I think that the Biblical witness on this matter does not actually aid us in making sense of it all. In many of the Bible stories, like this one, it sounds from the telling of the stories as if God speaks directly to us in an audible way. In Genesis 22, God literally calls out to Abraham. God speaks Abraham’s name and Abraham hears God. Now, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t ever heard God speak to me directly, not in an audible way anyway. So, if God doesn’t audibly communicate with us typically, then how do we recognize God calling to us?

I remember being asked this question on a camping trip with some youth at a church where April and I were interns during seminary. I didn’t really know how to answer that so I just spoke about my own experiences. In the times in my life when I felt most strongly that God was calling to me, that call did not come from a voice in the clouds but the voice of someone else, another person whose words seemed to trigger something within me. Those words stuck with me. And I just sensed in my heart that it was a call from God.

That was my experience when God called me to attend seminary and become a minister. God spoke to me through a number of different people, in a number of different ways. There was no burning bush or talking donkey or voice from the clouds. God’s call came to me over time through multiple voices. I heard the call in the voice of my sister’s pastor when he spoke about young people stepping up and responding to God’s call to proclaim the good news of Christ in word and deed. I also heard the call through the pastor of a church I had just begun attending and eventually became a member of. The very first time we met, he asked me if I had ever considered going to seminary and becoming a minister. Then, over time, as I considered it in my mind, others confirmed the idea for me. Through those experiences and the reading of the Bible, I began to sense that it was truly a call from God for my life. We can hear God in other people and through the scriptures.

Abraham heard this call from God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and he chose to heed the call. I can’t imagine being called to do something like that. What sort of God would call me to kill my own son? Yet Abraham did not question God. Did he know that God wouldn’t actually have him sacrifice Isaac? When Isaac asks Abraham about what they will use for the sacrifice, Abraham says that “God will provide the lamb.” Was Abraham so confident of that that he felt he could play along with God on the call to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that God would not make him do it in the end? If that’s the case, then is he really following God’s call?

And I really can’t imagine what that would have been like for Isaac. It seems pretty clear that Isaac was not made privy to what Abraham had been called to do. In my mind, I always pictured Isaac as being a child, perhaps elementary or middle school age. But scholars suggest that he was somewhere between 13 and 30-something. That gives me a whole different perspective on this story. I have got to believe that this scenario was strange for Isaac. He may not have known what was going on exactly, but he had to have been sensing that something was off. As they walked away from the rest of the group, Isaac questioned his father a bit. He asked about what was to be sacrificed, and I wonder how he felt about Abraham’s response. And then how did Isaac feel when Abraham tied him up and lifted the knife to kill him? I imagine that Abraham and Isaac may have had a strained relationship for a while after this.

So, what is the point of this story? Why did God put Abraham and Isaac through all of this? I believe this story is really about two things. First, it is about sacrifice. Are we willing to give up everything for God? This story serves as a bit of a foreshadowing of God’s willingness to sacrifice his own son for us. God’s call to Abraham was not an easy one by any means. In order to follow it, Abraham had to have complete faith and trust in God. It required a willingness to risk it all for God, to be willing to give up the thing that matters the most to us in order to follow God. 90’s Christian musician Steven Curtis Chapman wrote a song that said, “I will abandon it all for the sake of the call. No other reason at all, but the sake of the call. Wholly devoted to live and to die for the sake of the call.” God’s calling on our lives isn’t always easy. It may not require sacrificing our child, but it still often requires a giving up of something.

What are we willing to give up to follow God? How much do we trust God to provide for us? This story began with Abraham’s openness to listening to God. Then when Isaac questioned Abraham, we saw Abraham’s faith that God would provide a way out of this. And in the end, we saw Abraham’s relief that God truly did provide. The details of this story are a bit disturbing to me. But the overall message that God calls us and that we should be willing to take some risks in following God is a good message. When we devote ourselves to anything (a marriage, parenting, a job, a hobby, whatever it may be), we must choose that thing, that person, over other things. We must sacrifice other options, other pieces of our lives, in order to focus better on that thing that is important to us. Are we willing to give some things up in order to follow God? How far does that faith go for us?

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, wrote, “This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway.” Sacrifice sometimes feels like giving up. It feels like losing. Yet it is in giving that we receive. It is in sacrificing that we find fullness. That seems like a contradiction, but I believe it to be true. Often victory comes out of the jaws of defeat. Trusting God to provide is not easy, sometimes it feels downright impossible. But look what God sacrificed for us. And it was out of that sacrifice that the world has been saved. Thanks be to God for that precious gift. Amen.