Worth A Thousand Pictures

Why did it have to be at the top of a mountain on a hot day, carrying all that wood? His father wasn’t young anymore (had he ever been?) so Isaac took the load of wood himself. Abraham went ahead, finding the path, carrying the fire for the altar. This was a long, long way to come to make a sacrifice. Isaac had seen his father make sacrifices to his god before, and it was always the same. He’d build an altar, stone on stone ‘till it was right, lay it with wood – first the tinder, then the kindling, then the fuel. He’d choose the very best lamb he could find, sometimes that took hours, talking to the shepherds, looking at hooves and skin. If he couldn’t find the one he wanted, he’d buy one from a neighbour. That could take a day or two. Once he’d found the one he wanted, he’d tie its legs with rope, lay it on the altar. He’d cut the lamb’s throat quickly so it wouldn’t suffer and light the fire. A complete waste, except it wasn’t. It was a gift, a symbol of...

Until recently (in heart-time, if not calendar-time) I was very involved in a church that pursued the “seeker sensitive” model of worship. We spent many volunteer hours each week talking and e-mailing and meeting to plan services that would connect with the “unchurched” (assuming, of course, they chose to sacrifice their Sunday morning to darken our door). We cared (and I’m sure they still do) very much that we not miss our possibly only opportunity to communicate God’s love to just one of these folks. We prayed and worked until 2:30 am on Powerpoint and song arrangements and skits and talked endlessly about how to make our ‘transitions’ better, so as not to be a distraction to what the Spirit might be doing. How can we be non-threatening? How can we engage their emotions? How can we welcome them, without being in their faces? We talked of excellence and building community and “worship”. We went to conferences, purportedly to “team-build”, but effectively to steal a few ideas that we c...