Abraham 1: The Call

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"…and  by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves."

-- Genesis 12:3

Abraham has much to answer for, poor man! He is blamed for the three Western religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam - that presently are far from blessing the world. Indeed, they are currently an integral part of a curse of violence and blind brutishness that must make any reasonably decent human being sympathize with Voltaire when he said of religion, “Crush the infamous thing!” Not all three religions are equally involved in the present curse on the world. When I contemplate the current hotspots and ask myself what they have in common the answer that comes to me is “radical Islam.” In Kashmir radical Islam’s terrorists cross the border into India and wreak havoc, in the Philippines they murder American hostages, in Israel they send suicide bombers to kill civilians, in Manhattan their suicide bombers demolish skyscrapers and kill thousands, in Washington they bomb the Pentagon, in Sudan they enslave Christians, in Kosovo they kidnap young women and sell them into the brothel circuit of Europe, in Albania they import the heroin they make in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as heroin from Colombia, and distribute it through their Swiss connection, and in Afghanistan they fight each other mercilessly for warlord hegemony after we cleared the way for them to resume their barbarism. After we made Kosovo safe for Muslim gangsters we made Afghanistan safe for Muslim pirates; the former now act under the protection of NATO and the latter under the protection of US and the UK.

By comparison the oldest Western religion Judaism is limited to the awful atrocities against the Palestinians, by no means negligible nor benign, and the middle child of Abraham, Christianity, is currently cursed by love not war, the wrong kind of love, disordered and pathetic, which some people I hear seem to regard as worse than mass murder. Poor old Abraham! I certainly would not want to be held responsible for this lot!

We have only two choices if we are remotely decent human beings, one is to give up Abraham’s kind of faith as a frightful self-delusion that drives us mad with rage, the other is to claim that our practice of faith is different from what I have just described, that we do not believe in murdering those who do not accept the same things in the same way as we do; that our faith is enlightened, benign and what is more, loving.  Now I would like to choose the latter option, and of course at the deepest level do, but I must say that living as part of the religious community does not make it easy. I am frequently appalled at how we cruel religious people can be, how convinced we are of our own innocence and of the other’s fault, how easily we turn to persecuting the other.

Let us reflect for a while on what we know about the nature of religion in order to understand this phenomenon. I think we human beings are at our worst when we face change, and I think this fear of change, fear of the future plays a big part in the violence of religion, and makes religion probably the most conservative, change-resistant element in history. Anthropology tells us that we humans have always feared change, and for that reason our wiser traditional cultures always offer a sacrifice whenever they start something new, or pass a milestone of life, or return bloodied from the hunt to re-enter the camp’s domestic life. Change makes us so anxious that we have to kill someone. Traditional societies have sacrifice and we have scapegoating. We cannot have a transition without a sacrifice, someone must always be to blame so that we can load the poor goat with our own anxieties and blame him or her for what troubles us. 

My former colleague the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo did his fieldwork in the sixties among a tribe of headhunters in the Philippines. There his wife Michelle fell to her death from a mountain track they were walking together. He tells of rushing down to her body as it lay broken on the stones of the river below, and of the huge wave of anger that swept down with him. He was deaf, dumb and blind with anger and raged aloud at the innocent sky. Later an elder of the tribe tried to console him. He said to Renato that the only way to deal with this loss is to “take a head.” Up to that point the tribe had refused to admit to the anthropologists that they were headhunters. This is only one of many proofs that in moments of great loss or great change, sacrifice is the tried and true, old-fashioned way of dealing with it.

We still deal with change and loss in that way, only we “Christians” are more correct about it. The one we blame is always wrong and worthy of blame, we are always right and entitled to blame him/her, and thus we load another sacrificial victim with our sins and go our way smelling like the rose of righteous indignation. Have you ever experienced this kind of thing in connection with a death in the family? At such times one has to be very careful not to fall into the trap of sacrifice and scapegoating.

We Christians should understand this dynamic well because we have a scapegoated victim at the center of our faith; what else does it mean to “lift high the Cross,” than to remind ourselves of what reckless blaming does? But alas, so often we fall below the standards of our own faith and into the same pit of horror as radical Islam and fanatic Judaism, only our pit is a genteel indentation where we quietly lacerate the reputation and the feelings of fellow Christians, never forgetting and never forgiving. The difference in gentility does not make a difference in what is really going on. Someone else is being blamed for our own inadequacies, and that someone must metaphorically or actually die for this sin. Thus religions deal with many things, and especially the need to change.

Now what does this have to do with the call of Abraham?  Simply this: God called Abraham to a new future, God called him to change. So far the premise of my argument has been that since Abraham is the model of faith for all three Western religions, there must be a link between their behavior and Abraham’s behavior. I ask now whether we can find a standard in Abraham’s faithful behavior by which to measure the faithfulness of the three religions relative to each other in the present time. Let’s try to answer the question whether the dreadful behavior of these religions in the present is a true reenactment of Abraham’s faith.  The standard of judgment I propose is this: God called Abraham to leave his ancestral home, the lands his family had farmed for generations, and the graves of his ancestors. He had to leave the valued past behind. Furthermore he had to go to a destination that God did not disclose to him at first, but only gradually as he was underway. The standard then is: Accept change and cooperate with it! Leave the past, and go into the future without knowing precisely where you are going. The premise of this is that we must trust God, by letting go, and going on. Faith is to obey when God says, “Go,” and to trust God on the journey.

Is that what Abraham’s religions are doing today? In some regards “Yes,” and in some “No.” There are progressive elements in all three religions but currently the regressive nature of Islam and Judaism are vividly evident. Judaism is hanging onto its allegedly ancestral land for dear life, willing to make any sacrifice rather than change. Islam is lashing out in wild resentment because the island of past glories on which the religion is pathetically marooned cannot accommodate anything modern, so having failed to keep up they are making a virtue of failure and trying to drive us all back into the twilight of superstition. And Christianity? Let me risk a local example. Here in Woodside, not necessarily a religious town, I hear loud and pious defenses of something called the “master plan” which seems to mean to some that huge private houses are preferable to a school. My thoughts as a non-resident but as the pastor of this church noting the role of church members in the opposition to the school, are very sad. I hear an idolization of a master plan drawn up in the past and I miss a spirit of faithful generosity. Nothing, not even Woodside, should stay the same, and in any case where should our children go to school?

God called Abraham to leave the past behind and move on into an undefined future. That is what true biblical faith means, to trust the future, to accept change, to cherish the new and the young, to let go of my world and accept God’s world, even when He does not give us the details. The fact that the Church has so often been a conservative community, whose first reaction to change is, “Whom may we blame? What shall we kill? dismays me no end.

Let me be careful in conclusion: I emphatically do not say that those who oppose the school are like Islamic terrorists or Jewish settlers! Is that clear? What I do say is that all three of the Abrahamic religions include powerful elements that resist rather than practice the faith of Abraham, and are, each in its own way, mired in a swamp of nostalgia. They have failed their founding faith, which leaves ancestors behind and answers God’s call into the future.

God’s call to us is always a call to the future; we are headed there anyway; our only option is whether we go willingly in answer to God’s call and to share God’s work to bring forth that future, or whether we go kicking and screaming. I would not care how people chose to go except that those who kick and scream hold up the work of God and spread confusion and frustration; and in any case to kick and scream is dangerous for the soul! So let us answer God’s call, which comes from the future and assures us that it will be full of divine grace and kindness.