The Story of Abraham and Family Trauma Part 2

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The older woman was frail; months of cancer treatment had taken their toll. But she was undeterred as she made her way to a microphone, before more than two hundred family members, representing four generations. She began feebly, but her voice grew stronger with the recounting of her story. She spoke of a day –when she was no older than fifteen years of age – on which her father had taken her to a man on a nearby farm. She’d not understood that her father was selling her body for sexual favors to the man – until the man had done his deed and her father was pocketing the money the man had paid as he walked away. Violated, confused and physically hurt, she walked home with her father. But she knew that day that she would leave, and he would not continue to hurt her that way.  

Her story was met with silence and tears. A sister, two years younger, stood at her seat, and with a tear-streamed face told the gathered family members that the same thing had happened to her. A child resulted from her encounters with the man. Her stepmother threw her out of the family home, and another family member took her child and refused to return him. He grew up in another household, without his mother, the man she later married, and his eight siblings. 

So many lives had been affected.  

This family story isn’t just any family story: It is my family’s story – the story of two of my Aunts and potentially others – perhaps even my own mother. It is a story that caused our family to reflect on all of the stories we’d heard from older family members about my grandfather. We’d all heard older relatives describe him as “evil,” “brutal,” “cruel” and “mean”; we’d heard that he’d physically harmed my grandmother, and two of my uncles told their own stories about how he’d beaten them, thrown axes at them. 

What we saw that day was incomprehensible pain and suffering. As a priest and pastor who walks journeys with families who are broken, scarred, grieving, and fractured, I realize that stories of family trauma are as old as time itself – and that our scriptures tell us much about the ways in which we have struggled with one another, in the presence of a faithful God.  

I wonder how the Church can be more supportive – and preach and teach the scriptural texts that have been given to us with more honesty and transparency.  

 7 This is the length of Abraham’s life, one hundred and seventy-five years. 8 Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. 9 His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, 10 the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah. (Genesis 25:7-10, NRSV) 

A short text from the Book of Genesis appears to wrap the story of Abraham and his family in a lovely package with a bow on top: He lived a long life, was gathered to his people, and was buried with his wife, Sarah, by his sons, Ishmael and Isaac. 

If only Genesis didn’t offer painstaking detail about the rest of Abraham’s life, this would seem to be a lovely epitaph. But Genesis does offer painstaking detail about Abraham’s life – from the time that God calls him to leave his father’s house and go to an unknown land that God would show him, until he had become an old man full of years. 

The Book of Genesis reveals much more to us about Abraham’s family. Struggles with infertility plague at least three generations of the family – and Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, is the product of his relationship with a slavewoman named Hagar, who with her child become expendable – and are left to die – after Sarah bears a child of her own. Abraham’s second son, Isaac, is left to bear the scars of nearly being sacrificed by his father. After the attempted sacrifice, Sarah leaves to find a home of her own, away from Abraham. When she dies, Abraham remarries and begins a new family – at well past 100 years of age (Genesis 25). 

So after his wife has died, after his relationships with Ishmael and Isaac have been fractured, after he has started another family, Abraham dies, and Ishmael and Isaac – after more than 70 years apart – come together, in spite of the scars they both bore, to bury their father in the place where Sarah had been buried. 

I want to believe that these sons could, when they are reunited, share their experience of their father, learn from one another how both had suffered, find some bond in their suffering, find some way forward together. That would make for a neater and tidier ending to Abraham’s story. 

Genesis doesn’t tell us that any healing takes place when these two estranged sons meet again to perform the duty of burying their father. 

Indeed, the suffering in Isaac’s family doesn’t end with his near-death experience. Isaac’s own family would be torn apart when the younger of his twin sons, Jacob, would trick his infirm father and cheat his older brother, Esau, of his blessing and birthright. Jacob’s family would be torn apart with the story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50). 

The suffering continued through at least three generations. 

But, whatever Ishmael and Isaac believe that they have learned of Abraham, and whatever perceptions they have taken from their own final encounters with their father, they have seen something very powerful about Abraham’s God: They have seen that Abraham’s God is unquestionably faithful. Abraham’s God keeps God’s promises – showing up in the desert to renew the covenant with Ishmael, showing up at the altar to provide a sacrifice in place of Isaac. Abraham’s God is faithful – even if it might appear to his sons that Abraham has not been faithful to them. Ishmael and Isaac would go on, in their own way, to embrace the story of a faithful God and pass that story along to their offspring – a faith story that has lived on, in the faith traditions of Jews, Muslims and Christians. 

More than 50 years after a father who had sold his daughters’ bodies had died, a dying daughter came to a family reunion to tell her heartbreaking story of how she had been violated and harmed. A sister was empowered to speak and tell her truth, as well. They told a story of family trauma that has no neat, tidy wrapping, a story that has affected multiple generations. They came with scars – theirs, ours, those of our ancestors – and unspeakable heartache, pain, and grieving, the reality of our humanity etched into our souls. Our family came together with great need to see those scars, and to hear and bear witness to each other’s stories. 

Our hopes and expectations for neat, tidy epitaphs may be unrealistic. But in the moments that we are brought together, there is opportunity for healing: for engaging in hard dialogue, for respectfully and lovingly hearing one another’s stories, in diligently working to see the image and likeness of God in one another and in those who came before us. For indeed, it seems that it is only in coming together to share the painful truths that we can find our way forward in healing and love.  

The Story of Abraham and Family Trauma Part 1

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Year “A” of the Revised Common Lectionary offers worshippers the chance to re-visit the stories of Abraham and the next three generations of his descendants These texts from the Book of Genesis are shared with our Jewish friends, as well, and some people – Christians and Jews alike, find these texts traumatizing. To some extent, they are. However, the stories, like that of Abraham and his descendants, enable us in our modern times to understand that stories of family dysfunction are not at all new. These stories give us much with which to wrestle with as we learn and ponder them anew. 

When Abraham settled in Canaan, God entered into a covenant with Abraham and promised him more descendants than the stars in the sky and the sands on the shore (Genesis 15). There was just one problem: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, appeared to be barren. They were advancing in years, and Sarah had not conceived and borne a child. 

It was probably good that Sarah didn’t conceive early in their marriage: Twice (Genesis 12 and Genesis 20), Abraham passed Sarah off to foreign kings as his sister, so that Abraham would not be harmed because he was traveling with his beautiful wife. Twice, these foreign kings took the beautiful Sarah, whom they believed to be Abraham’s sister, for themselves – for a time, that is, until their households were punished because of their relationships with Sarah. Genesis reveals quite a bit about Sarah and her opinions (She is far from silent!), but readers are not told how Sarah reacted to having been placed in the hands of Pharaoh and King Abimelech. Maybe she expected to have to commit herself to whatever she needed to do to keep Abraham safe. Maybe she felt betrayed, violated, and ashamed. Maybe she wondered if her inability to conceive might have resulted from her having been taken as the “wife” of other men. 

When Sarah and Abraham continued on their way, and still no children had been born to them despite God’s promise of descendants, Sarah took matters into her own hands, offering up her Egyptian slave woman, Hagar, to Abraham so that he might have children through her. Hagar conceived and bore Abraham a son, named Ishmael (Genesis 16). But as Genesis also teaches us, humankind really hasn’t changed much over the ages, and as we might imagine, conflict quickly arises between Sarah and Hagar. Ultimately, Sarah – at age 90 – does indeed bear a child of her own, who is named Isaac. With Hagar and Ishmael’s “usefulness” having ended, Sarah demands that Abraham remove them from the encampment (Genesis 21). And, so, the last encounter recorded in Genesis between Abraham and his firstborn son, Ishmael, takes place on the fateful day that Abraham takes Ishmael and Hagar and leaves them in the desert, with a single skin of water, ostensibly to die. Ishmael is a young teen by this point – old enough to understand, and certainly to be scarred by, the fate to which his father is leaving him and his mother.  

All won’t go smoothly for Isaac, either: We are told in Genesis 22 that God tested Abraham in asking that Isaac be sacrificed. The last encounter between Abraham and Isaac recorded in Genesis takes place when Abraham bound Isaac on the altar, preparing to sacrifice him to God. For all of the arguments that Abraham had previously given God for sparing the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah when God is preparing to destroy them, Abraham met God’s request to sacrifice Isaac with seemingly little to no resistance.  

Hebrews 11:17-19 extols Abraham for having trusted in God when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps a broken Abraham wonders the price that he must pay for what he has done to Ishmael and Hagar. However Abraham has received this request from God, we fail to ask how Isaac has been scarred and traumatized by this episode. Isaac is old enough to understand that there is to be a sacrifice – and even asks Abraham about the lamb for the sacrifice. Does he truly understand when he is bound and tied that he is the intended sacrifice – until, that is, God steps in and provides a ram? What does Isaac tell Sarah when they return home? How does a mother begin to understand a husband’s need to follow a command from God to sacrifice a child for whom she’d waited 90 years? 

There are no further scenes of Abraham together with his family after the sacrifice. Sarah leaves Abraham’s encampment, and dies in another land, where Abraham purchases land for a burial place. Isaac settles in another land, as well. 

The suffering doesn’t end with Isaac’s near-death experience; it continues through at least three generations. 

Isaac married his kinswoman, Rebekah, who also struggled to conceive. When she finally became pregnant, she gave birth to twins who emerged from her womb embroiled in their own battle. The older twin, Esau, grew up to be an outdoorsy hunter and gatherer. The younger twin, Jacob, received his name because he literally was born holding on to Esau’s heel. Jacob’s envy of his brother as heir would ultimately tear apart their family, when Jacob (at his mother’s urging) tricked a then-infirm Isaac and cheated his older brother, Esau, of his blessing and birthright.  

Jacob made a life for himself apart from Esau, and settled with his mother’s brother, Laban. Believing that he had married his true love, Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, he had been tricked by his uncle, and had married older sister, Leah, instead (“This is not done in our country – giving the younger before the firstborn.” Genesis 29:26). Although Leah bore several sons for Jacob, his favorite son was Rachel’s firstborn, a son named Joseph. Joseph became the target of his older brothers’ jealousy and rage – and while the older brothers plotted to kill Joseph, they ultimately chose to sell him into slavery, pocketing twenty silver coins for him, and representing to their father that he had been killed by wild animals (Genesis 37:22-34). Jacob, too, would know separation from the son he loved. 

All was not peaceful or happy among Abraham and his descendants. All is not happy in many families. If we tend to feel alone in family dysfunction, we remember that even the family of our ancestor most chosen and loved by God, Abraham, struggled. Faith persisted, even amid that struggle.  

Hope Has You

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I sit at my desk. A clean sheet of paper before me, a favorite pen in my hand, music streams in the background. On this late fall afternoon, sunlight floods through the stained-glass window in my office. The plan seemed simple: write an essay in which I would discuss ways and places for fellow leaders to find hope. I sit in this space for a good while, waiting until something comes, the way a poet might wait for a poem to arrive. I rise from my desk, and run my fingers against the smooth spines of the books on the shelf. I’ve read these volumes over the course of the pandemic.  I’m drawn in by the titles, with words like burnout, loneliness, loss, stuck, and trauma. I look to another shelf. One asks whether the Lord’s Supper can rightly be celebrated online. An issue of a journal leans against it, the theme’s focus is around what the new normal will look like. A few novels I had yet to read taunt me.  Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and Life Together stand next to a memoir about anxiety. Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time rests next to a volume of Luther’s Works. In my car, a list of podcasts flashes on the screen, ready to play with the push of my finger. Travel times are quicker because so many people now work from home. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to either listen in or pay attention. There’s barely a moment to breathe.

Each resource released into the world is meant to bring leaders help as we navigate pandemic realities. But where can leaders turn when the waters we navigate flow over our heads? Where can we turn when it feels as though there is no help – as though no one understands what we’re going through? What do we do when the hope we proclaim evaporates like steam before us?

At an appointment with a new physician, I’m asked what I do for a living. When I tell the doctor, she takes off her glasses and sits down next to me. She confides I’m not the first church leader she’s seen in the clinic during the pandemic. “I’m sure that’s true,” I said, and meant it. “So much depression and anxiety among church workers,” she said. “So much pressure.” I nod my head in agreement. “So many opinions to negotiate.” I agreed. “And the politics – as if the health of the congregation is somehow wrapped up in one’s political perspective.”

A familiar heaviness began to pulse within me. “Yes,” I said. “And for the life of me, I can’t find any hope anymore.” The doctor put down her glasses and leaned in. “How are you?” I felt her compassion and concern in the question. “I’m fine,” I said. This was a complete lie. I wanted to tell her that a series of text messages and anonymous notes left on my desk triggered memories from an traumatic childhood for which I had previously received a good amount of therapy. As a result, these things set loose a spiral of anxiety and despair I thought I’d never come out from. But I couldn’t locate the hope within me that would allow for me to tell the truth about how I was doing.

Eventually, hope was revealed to me once more in a hospital where I stayed for a week. It came through the voice of a paramedic (his name was Jésus – I’m not even kidding) who preached to me in the back of an ambulance, a nurse who declared me a child of God the first moment she met me, and a doctor who heard me tell my story many times over. “You are not what they say about you.” But what if I was? “You’re not,” he said. Later, he turned this into a question for me – one he’d ask with a smile. “Are you what they say of you,” he asked? “Hell no,” I said, and smiled.

But it was more than that. It was also the conversations I had with others that week – my friends, my family, and my wife. And, I began to listen again to and for God in the prayers I surprised myself by praying. It was in the middle-of-the-night check-ins the nurses did to make sure everything was alright. It was in the freedom to laugh, cry, to express doubts and fears, to name the pain and to find constructive ways to address what stirred within me. It was in the vulnerable stare in the mirror each morning and evening as I made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and reminded myself that whatever else was – and wasn’t – true about me, the one thing most true about me is that I’m a beloved child of God. Say it with me: I am a child of God.

I continue to be captivated by the story of the Road to Emmaus from Luke’s Gospel. There are two on the road, but only one is named. Could it be, as a former seminary professor once said, that the absence of a name in this story is so we can find ourselves in what unfolds there. You also are on the road. You’ve borne witness to a terrible catastrophe. You don’t know what to make of it. All you turn can do is turn toward Emmaus. The two of you try to make meaning of what has occurred. Yet, the language you have for these things doesn’t feel adequate. You don’t feel adequate to lead because of all that’s happened. Still, a stranger walks among you, asks you what’s happened, speaks into the silence. You invite them in to join you for dinner. This One speaks through bread broken and blood poured out for you. Your eyes are opened. Your heart beats once again in the rhythm of grace. You realize once more what has always been true. Hope isn’t something you have. Hope has you.

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Paul Lutter

Paul Lutter is an ELCA interim pastor, writer, and teacher. He lives with his family in Plymouth, MN.

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 Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.

Where Our Deep Sadness and the World’s Deep Hunger Meet

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This is an excerpt of an article written by Church Anew contributor, Dr. Deanna A. Thompson. You can read the full article on the Christian Century website here.

In spring 2009, I taught what I thought was going to be my last class ever. The mysterious breaking of two vertebrae in my back had led to a stage IV cancer diagnosis, and the year had begun with me resigning from virtually every aspect of my life. I went on sabbatical the following fall, intending to try to bring closure to my life before it ended.

Instead of dying, however, I went into my first remission. I’m not naturally an anxious person, but life-threatening illness can mess with one’s equilibrium. As my sabbatical came to an end, I didn’t know if I could handle returning to teaching. What if I signed back up for life only to have to resign from it all again?

Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, author of the heartbreakingly beautiful book When Breath Becomes Air, lived just a few years after his diagnosis with incurable cancer. In that short period of time, he too went into remission and gained back much of his strength. His oncologist suggested he go back to working as a neurosurgeon. When he reminded his doctor he was dying, she responded, “True. But you’re not dying today.”

Of course, we’re all dying. But some of us know this more acutely than others. When that’s the case, it can be really hard to opt back into the life you’ve already had to opt out of. What does it mean to integrate trauma and death into our lives, even to make it part of our vocation, to figure out ways to go on?

In conversations about vocation, Christians often refer to Frederick Buechner’s observation in his book Wishful Thinking: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This has been a sweet spot for many of us who have come to see our calling as the place where our passions, our joy, and our gifts can be put to work in service of the suffering and needs of the world. But now, in my fourth remission living with incurable cancer, I know that conversations about vocation must also make space for the deep sadnesses that fill our lives. Our grief, too, can and does intersect with the world’s hunger.

We don’t talk of vocation in terms of sadness, perhaps because we often lack the language to talk about what we’ve been through and how our bodies respond in divergent ways to traumatic events. Theologian Shelly Rambo defines trauma as “the suffering that remains.” I like this definition because it extends the language of trauma to those without a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a disorder that can be debilitating and life-threatening. Invoking this language can open up ways for people without PTSD to talk about their deep sadness and how it relates to their sense of meaning and place in the world.

Copyright © 2022 by the Christian Century. “Where our deep sadness and the world’s deep hunger meet” by Deanna A. Thompson is excerpted by permission from the July 13, 2022 issue of the Christian Century. To read the full article, click here.

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Dr. Deanna A. Thompson

Dr. Deanna A. Thompson is an author, speaker, and the Director of the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community and the Martin E. Marty Regents Chair of Religion and the Academy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Thompson’s writing and speaking covers on topics ranging from Martin Luther and feminism, scriptural interpretation (Deuteronomy in particular), cancer and faith, and being the church in the digital age. When she’s not writing, speaking, or teaching, Thompson can be found hiking in a national park with her husband and two children.

Website | deannaathompson.com

 Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.

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