Truth be told, when we first heard this scripture story, many of us reacted by wondering, “What kind of a god would order a parent to sacrifice a child!” We may not have said that out loud, but some version of that thought probably crossed our minds.

            But the story is before us again, and there are a couple of things we need to get straight about it, right at the outset. In the first place, one point of this story is that God didn’t order Abraham to sacrifice his child; God ordered Abraham to stop! Israel, at that time in history, was surrounded by pagan cultures that literally offered children as human sacrifices to their gods, for a number of things — rain in times of drought, the dedication of a house, many of the things that people pray for with fervor nowadays. What we learn in this morning’s story is, one of the things that make Israel’s God (and, needless to say, ours) different is that our God says, “Stop! You mustn’t do that! I do not require that of you!”

            In the second place, just who are we to say — indignantly, self-righteously, smugly, contemptuously, as is usually the case — “What kind of a god would require the sacrifice of children?”

How the world works

            This is the place where the taking a look around at how the world really works comes in: Some of us were soldiers for a while, trained, basically, to kill on command by our government. No, it was not quite as blunt and brutal as that — not at first, anyway; but those of us who actually went off to war quickly learned that it can become that blunt and that brutal. So who are we to take God to task for

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