Sunday Sermon - June 28, 2026

Abraham's story is full of challenge and complication. His faith story, like ours, is full of a combination of trust and anxiety, confidence and fear, selflessness and selfishness. 

Genesis 22:1-14

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Scripture quotations from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. © Copyright 2011 COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A reading from Genesis. God tested Abraham. He said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. He said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Morah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac. He cut the word the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey, the boy and I will go over there. We will worship, and then we will come back to you. Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father, Abraham, Father, and he said, Here I am, my son. He said, The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham said, God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. And the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. The angel said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from me. And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place, the Lord will provide. As it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Genesis has been given us some rough stories. And as a preacher who is bound and determined to come before you and say, This is the good news, it's been a rough few weeks, and today's no better. So if you recall, last week we had the story of Hagar and Ishmael getting sent out into the wilderness to die. Sarah saw them, got jealous, and said, send them out. And Abraham's understandably a little concerned about this. And God, God says, go ahead. Um, God? Question mark? What's going on here? How would God send and like basically um allow and encourage Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness where they are sure to die? And as far as Abraham is concerned, they probably did die because Abraham did not know that God saved Hagar and Ishmael also with the spring of water. And Abraham does not see Ishmael again. The next time we hear about Ishmael is when he comes back to bury Abraham. Okay, so that's where we're at. And then in today's story, we have God, God, telling Abraham, instructing Abraham to go ahead and take his son, as far as he's aware, the only son he has left, Isaac, the one who's supposed to carry on his name and the covenant and be a father to nations, take that son and sacrifice him and kill him. Can you say traumatic to both father and son? Notice Isaac is suspiciously quiet at some point. And also, can you imagine being Sarah and Isaac coming home? Guess what dad and I did today? And these are the stories that I am now tasked with saying we worship a God of life and love and mercy. Okay. So in both these cases, we can redeem them a little bit by saying God walked with people to the point of death for Ishmael and for Isaac, and then offered life instead. Isaac was ready to be killed by his father, and uh God offered a ram to sacrifice instead, thus saving Isaac. But either way, we still have that very tricky point where in both of them, God is an active participant or is at least complicit in these stories. So then we we drill down in today's story just a little bit. And it starts off with uh God tested Abraham. So this is a test. And just before that verse, it actually says, after all these things, God tested Abraham. So from the get-go, we get the sense that God never actually intended for Isaac to die. And that after all these things, well, these things is not just sending Ishmael and Hagar out into the wilderness. These things include everything Abraham has done since God said, Go. And Abraham and Sarah said, sure thing. So what that means is that includes a time, two times, when Abraham was confronted with local people of authority, and they said, Boy, that Sarah woman's pretty. He says, Oh, he, she's my sister, you can have her. So that happened twice. And both times something bad happened to the person in authority and said, You take her back. And he says, Oh, by the way, she's actually my wife. Um Abraham's a little iffy there. Abraham was complicit in sending Ishmael and uh Hagar out into the wilderness. There's a couple of other times when Abraham basically does not seem like he is the most faithful, trusting, patient person. And actually, when you go all the way back to that very beginning, when God said go, God said go, and I will show you a land of milk and honey, and you will prosper, and you will be the father to many nations. Maybe for Abraham, that was not such a hard sell because he was maybe not doing super great in the area. I don't really know. But either way, when God says, I am going to give you great abundance if you just make this journey, okay. Take everything I got, I'll go because there's more out there for me. And so then quickly, Abraham's story becomes a fairly complicated story. It becomes a story where Abraham suddenly becomes very human. Yes, Abraham trusted God to go out and that Abraham would be a father. But yes, Abraham also laughed at the absurdity of it. Yes, Abraham also tried to give his wife away to avoid punishment for himself. Yes, Abraham also sent out Ishmael and Hagar out of jealousy, out of fear that there was not enough blessing of God to go around. And so Abraham starts to become this grand mixture of obedience and arrogance. As he takes God's promise as the gift that it is, but then also says, I will help make this promise happen. Because God's taken a little long. I'm gonna take over, I'm gonna start making this promise happen. Abraham becomes this mixture of faithfulness and trust in God, but also entitlement as he thinks of his due as the father of nations. So Abraham, on some level, his faithfulness is good and pure and wonderful, but also every now and then lets in this little stream where the faith is used for his own gain as he thinks about his legacy, as he thinks about the abundance of the promised land. And so Abraham becomes a very gray character. And then we get to today's story, where God says to test Abraham, Abraham, take your son. As far as you know, the only son left alive, the son you love very much, the son through whom I have promised to make you the father of nations, and kill him. There's no gray areas here. Abraham can't have it both ways. Either he is going to trust in God and trust the process and walk up that mountain, or Abraham's gonna take things into his own hand and hide Isaac away from God to protect Isaac and therefore the lineage. So Abraham trusts God because he knows that God's promise was for life. God's promise was that Abraham and Isaac would be the fathers to nations. Abraham knows that that was God's promise, and God does not go back on God's promises. So there must be another way. It seems like there is no other way. They don't have a spare lamb with them. They're not going to sacrifice their donkey. But Abraham trusts that God will make a way out of no way. And so Abraham goes up the mountain. And I like to imagine in my movie of the story in my brain that Abraham takes the knife, raises it up, and kind of does one of those, I'm waiting. Because Abraham trusts that there's no way that God would renege on God's promise. And so Abraham keeps his eyes and his ears open for what God is about to do, knowing that God is about to do something. And so he hears the voice. Abraham, stop what you're doing. Look up. And when Abraham looks up, there he sees the ram. There he sees the path forward. There he sees God's promise that life is sure, that God's mercy is sure, that God will keep God's promise of a legacy-lasting generations for Abraham, for Isaac, and for Ishmael. And so this testing, this testing that is happening here, perhaps, it's not a test to see what Abraham will do. Because I like to imagine God, A, knew, and B, God had a plan from the get-go. But this testing is to help Abraham refocus and settle in to God's promise. To remember what that entire journey from the beginning has always been about. This test is to help Abraham remember who he is and whose he is and what God has promised him. And to trust in God even in the absurdity of the ask. Sometimes when we talk about Abraham's very beginning of the story, we look at Abraham and we celebrate him as this unambiguously marvelous figure. I think I use the word the epitome of faith. We think of Abraham as this perfect person who we could never ever measure up to. That is not something that makes us unavailable to God or God unavailable to us. Those are times when we are called to remember. We are called to come back to this table. We are called to touch these waters and to remember who and whose we are, and that God's promise of life is sure. God's promise of love and mercy are sure. It can be easy to be like Abraham and to think of faith as something that will get us something else. I know it is frequently in some circles talked about how enough faith will get you to heaven where the streets are lined with gold, and if you just hang tough, all is gonna be great, and there's gonna be rainbows and unicorns and daisies. But faith also involves those hard and sticky moments. Faith also involves trusting when we don't know how the next path is gonna go. It's taking that next step, trusting that God will provide a way where there is no way. Faith is trusting that on the mountaintop, when it seems like there is no other option, God will call out to us and say, look up, open your ears, for there is help around you, there is support and life around you. A life of faith is hard. I was like told you I talked about the Ten Commandments or the confirmation camp last week, and the Ten Commandments. We think they're easy. I successfully did not murder anybody today. But there's also that extra level that Luther gives us. It's not just don't murder, it's don't harm in any way, shape, or form. To not lie, it's to not slander, it's to assume the best of our neighbors and to not assume the worst of them. But that's harder. And so faith, faith calls us to walk into that space, to know that we are often that mixture of confident and fearful, trusting and anxious, selfless and self-serving. And faith and trust leads us into those murky gray areas where God will invite us to open our eyes, open our ears, and be refocused and renewed as God's holy people, set apart to love our neighbors as ourselves and love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and trust that there will be a ram at the top of the mountain. Because did you notice? Abraham turned to his slaves and he said, The boy and I will go up the mountain, we will worship, and we will come back. It's hard to have that trust. It's hard to have that faith. Abraham certainly did not have it always, we certainly do not have it always. That is why we continue to gather around God's promise, to continually remind ourselves that God's promise of life, of love, of mercy, of grace is sure, is constant, and is for us. Amen.