Listening to Abraham on Refugee Sunday

July 2, 2017

Cate Thorn

Refugee Sunday / Ordinary 13     Genesis 22:1-14     Matthew 10:40-42

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Ah, the Abraham sacrificing Isaac story, it’s a great story isn’t it, a great tale? The Patriarch of the religions of the Word – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is willing to sacrifice his beloved son, the son of his old age, the only child borne by his wife, removing stigma of her barrenness, because God told him to. A great story because we sure don’t forget it. But being a great story doesn’t make it a good or easy story. Of all today’s readings it’s perhaps the one best avoided. It’s challenging to listen to. We identify with it for we know how to be parent and what it is to be child. It reveals there are perhaps fault lines running through our faith story, inconsistencies, if we insist God is good and loving. Fault lines we’d rather not know about for they make the story and us vulnerable to criticism and critique. The Abraham willing to sacrifice Isaac story raises for us questions I suspect we’d prefer not face or even ask because what if we couldn’t bear the answers? It might cause us to ask what sort of man this Abraham is and he a Patriarch, example to us of faithful living we’d rather not emulate, what sort of faith test is this he’s put to, will it be asked of us, what sort of faithfulness does this demand and do we aspire to it, and undergirding all of these what sort of God is this that demands such a monstrous thing?

Of course this is if we come to this story with our presuppositions intact, with already formed ideas of what God should be and be doing, of how Abraham as a father should act, of what should happen and what we think is going on here. Ears and minds full of our own rhetoric we shape the words as we read, interpret the story as we listen, judge it according to our expectations, what we think it should say, what we want it to speak into where we are from where we are. The context of our life, all we’ve learned about the bible, about God, about living faithfully, about right and wrong, about being parent and/or child, all our experience of life influences how we meet this text. We try, perhaps, to make this story fit, however awkwardly into our world where God and characters like Abraham have place. Or maybe we don’t, rather we leave it in that corner of difficult, not much examined things, our inattention excluding such stories from having undue impact so not to disturb our overall view of Abraham or God.

When we hear this story I suspect we get drawn into it, as we listen from inside the drama we judge the story, the characters, Abraham, God, what happens by our own standards. It’s difficult to extricate ourselves from inside the story, to step back with fresh ears to hear. It’s inevitable our presuppositions influence our capacity to perceive. Such meeting the world and engaging from within our version of the way things are is not, of course not only a religious tendency.

Let me illustrate with a story told by Eduardo Sirelli worked for an Italian NGO, involved in technical cooperation with Africa. In one particular project the Italian people decided they would teach Zambian people how to grow food. They arrived with Italian seed in Zambia’s absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River to teach the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini. The local people had no interest in doing that so they were paid to come and work and sometimes they would show up. The Italians were amazed that local people in such a fertile valley would have no agriculture. Instead of asking them why they didn’t grow anything we simply said “Thank God we are here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.” Of course everything in Zambia grew beautifully and we had these magnificent tomatoes. We were telling the Zambians “Look how easy agriculture is when, the tomatoes ripe and red overnight, 200 hippos came up from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians “My God, the hippos.” “Yes, that’s why we have no agriculture here.” “Why didn’t you tell us?” “You never asked.” Sirelli’s advice, if you really want to help you do it by developing relationship and the first thing you have to do is to shut up and listen.

When we hear today’s Abraham and Isaac story let’s take seriously the refrain ‘Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people and, in the words of Eduardo Sirelli, “Shut up and listen.” Ask, rather than assume we know. Listen to what might be being revealed to us today from this text, of the human wrestle to know how to enact a relationship of integrity with the divine in this world, in our context, the challenge to know how to discern that which brings life then to act for its flourishing. And today we do so in context of Refugee Sunday. The one day in our liturgical calendar we pay attention to the daily crisis for life of millions of people who through no fault of their own no longer have a place to stand, a place to live.

Refugees – those who seek a refuge, shelter, protection, safety from danger and trouble, we as much as hear their stories today. Horrifying images of millions of people forced to flee, seek refuge away from what was home but has become a life destroying context of conflict and too often unreasoned hatred. The statistics are mind-boggling, so unimaginable to become mind numbing, render us unknowing of quite how to respond.

What resource might this Abraham story be for us this Refugee Sunday? Abraham and Isaac are beginning patriarchs in the faith tradition in which we stand. If we consider the narrative as it unfolds since then we can see this narrative coheres around characters who are made refugees. Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; Abram and Sarai from home, with only promise of what would become; Moses, then the Israelite nation from Egypt; truth speaking prophets; Mary, Joseph and Jesus, from baptism Jesus into the wilderness, a from which he steps into his identity. It almost suggests it is the call of faithful people, our call to understand ourselves as refugees.

I somehow doubt we’d choose to exchange place with someone who’s a refugee, prefer to be driven from home, in fear for our life, be stripped of all security, unknowing and utterly vulnerable to whim of chance and circumstance. I doubt we’d prefer to have all that secured us, made us who we are, by which we know ourselves … gone. And yet, and yet are we not, like Sarah and Abraham, Miriam and Moses and the many in our faith story, also people of faith?

If this is so, we’re not well resourced to know about this. Maybe this Refugee Sunday we’re to stop, listen and learn, not just assume we already know what Refugee Sunday is about, to do for, do to the refugee. If our call is to live as if we were refugees we may need to listen to the story of one who is refugee to know how and what it is to be refugee, why bearers of faith have been refugees. How on earth is this imaginable or even possible that living as if we were a refugee would be asked of us? How on earth could there be anything good in being a refugee?

So let me tell you a story: “It is the story of Acholdeng, A Dinka woman from the southern Sudan who, starving, had walked with her baby son Rial for four days and three nights to reach an Oxfam feeding centre. Once she had had a husband, a cow, a field. But last year, he had died, the crop had failed in the terrible droughts, people were dying around her and she had barely eaten for two months. With the baby she set off to look for food. The story of this four-day trek is a terrible one – being turned away from feeding centres, the baby and herself creeping ever nearer to death. When they finally reached the Oxfam centre Rial was barely breathing. He was found to have diarrhoea, to be anaemic and to be suffering from hypothermia and dehydration. Exhausted, mother and son curled up on a blanket and slept. She awoke later and was given more food and then something amazing happened:

Even as babies were dying, one by one they [the mothers] left their children on the mats and joined together in a circle … They started singing. It sounded like the tiny bells which the Dinka attach to the horns of their best cattle … They sang courting songs, songs of prosperity and hope, songs of praise to the cows they didn’t have and to the life they only half had. They clapped. They moved back and forth, pounded the baked earth. Whistled and laughed. It was light in the darkness.

Slowly Acholdeng hobbled over to join them, taking up the rhythms and the dance. In minutes, all those in the centre – assistants, mothers who had been grieving, children and doctors – were dancing and singing. It was a great act of defiance against the rotten climate, the accursed war, the land that wouldn’t produce, the armies, the cattle raiders and all the troubles.”

From Acholdeng and these mothers we learn about hope, about community – its potency and how much we need it, about the immense resilience of the human spirit, about what matters most. It’s not that we would choose to be in such place or wish it upon another, but it is sadly and shockingly true that this is the real life way it is for too many people. We should seek to alleviate such suffering and perhaps more potently use our privilege and power to address its cause, our human capacity to be inhuman and the systems we generate that perpetuate such inhumanity.

Refugees are absolutely vulnerable, utterly dependent upon circumstances and others like us, as we are from birth. And yet amazingly so many are not overcome – anchored in dignity and sense of self not gained through material possessions but in something deeper, some urge, desire for life even as it is. And, perhaps most surprisingly, despite all and everything that life brings with it hope.

So this Refugee Sunday we might begin with a lesson in humility. Recognise we’re engaged in a relationship of mutuality with those who are refugees – we may be the ones in the position to give something from the excess of our abundant resource. Yet what we receive in return is treasure beyond price – a life stripped bare revealing of what matters most, of the precious gift of life, of the simple abundance, the resilience of the human spirit and the hope that arises from within it. Thankfulness, abundance of spirit, hope is stirred in us. Even if just for a moment we find our hearts curiously restored, and it was not we who had to pay price of its uncovering.