SERMON SPOTLIGHT: 5 Pentecost, Proper 8; June 28, 2026

A sermon by The Rev. Aron Kramer

Sunday, June 28, 2026

5 Pentecost; Proper 8A

Abraham is a vital and important figure of the Church. For ten previous chapters in Genesis, which we don’t get to see in a consistent, week to week reading, Genesis tells his story, and what we discover is that Abraham is not a quiet man.

When God promised him a son in his old age, he fell on his face and laughed. He didn’t hesitate, the absurdity of the promise made him laugh, almost right in God’s face. When God announced that Sodom would burn, Abraham did not bow his head; he bargained directly with God, like a man haggling at a farmer’s market: what if there are fifty righteous, he asks God? Forty-five? Ten? “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” Abraham is a man who knew how to open his mouth to God. He laughed at God, he argued with God, he talked back to God, and God did not strike him down. God, instead, called him a friend.

This morning we get another story of Abraham and his family, this time on a mountain side, and in this story, today’s Old Testament reading, Abraham has gone terribly quiet.

“After these things God tested Abraham. Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” And here is what I think we all struggle with in this story, the part we, obviously, often struggle to get past: Abraham says nothing. He rises early. He saddles the donkey. He splits the wood. He walks for three days. He speaks to his servants saying stay here. He speaks to his son, God will provide the lamb, my son, knowing that Isaac is truly the lamb to be sacrificed. He has words for everyone on that mountain. But he has no words for God.

This seems deeply strange to me, considering what we know of Abraham, this hero of our faith. Abraham is not a silent biblical character; we have heard his voice again and again. The man who would not let Sodom fall without a fight will not say one word for his own son. The mouth that opened for strangers stays shut for his beloved Isaac. And the biblical storyteller, the same one who let us hear him laugh, who let us hear him bargain, at the knife’s edge gives us nothing. No anguish. No protest. No prayer. It’s a silence you could drown in. Why is that?

The text will not tell us. It does not say whether his silence was faith or failure, trust or trauma. It gives us silence, then the ram caught in the thicket, then a new name for God: the Lord will provide. The story shuts the door and leaves us standing outside wondering, confused. Any preacher who claims to know exactly what was in Abraham’s heart that morning is definitely selling you something.

But Scripture is not shy about what God wants from us. There is a line from a book called “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell. I have used it before, I think. It says, “God dances when his children defeat him in argument.” She did not invent it. The rabbis of old tell of a day the sages out-reasoned God on a point of law, and a voice came from heaven conceding the argument, and God, God laughed, and said, “My children have defeated me.” Remember Jacob at the river, wrestling the stranger until dawn, limping away with a new name: Israel, the one who strives with God and prevails. From the very beginning, the people of God are a people who wrestle God. The argument is not the opposite of faith. The argument is the dance.

So the question over today’s story is not whether Abraham obeyed. He did. The question is whether obedience was all God was waiting for in this moment, or whether, across three slow days, God kept hoping Abraham would turn and say: not this one. Not my child. Have you forgotten Sodom, Lord? Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?

He never said it. But listen to today’s scriptures carefully: where Abraham was silent, Christ cried out. Go to another hill, another beloved son, more wood carried for a death sentence. Jesus does not silently hang from the cross in wordless obedience. From the cross he prays, and what he prays is a psalm, a Jewish psalm, the prayer Israel had carried for a thousand years: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The lament. The protest. The holy why the argument Abraham never made, Jesus made from the cross.

And this is not the New Testament correcting an old mistake or rewriting something it considered inaccurate. It is the same faith Israel always knew, that God can bear our questions, that lament is faithful, that “How long, O Lord?” is a prayer and not faithlessness. Psalm 13, today’s Psalm has been waiting in the wings the whole time. The cure for the silence is the cry, and the cry was always ours, as children of God to make.

Which brings us, at last, to the Gospel’s cup of cold water. Jesus says: whoever welcomes one of these little ones, the small one, the one who cannot defend themselves, welcomes me, and the One who sent me. And he says it again in Matthew 25 with the same word: whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. To receive the little one is to receive Christ himself.

Do you see what that does to Abraham’s story? The binding of Isaac asked a terrible question: God, or the child? Your faith, or this small life in your hands? And the Gospel hears that question and calls it false. There was never a choice to be made between God and the little one, because the little one is where God is found. When Abraham lowered that knife, he was not failing the test. He was passing it.

But notice what that silence cost. After that morning, Scripture never shows Abraham and Isaac speaking to each other again. Abraham comes down the mountain alone; the text says he returned to his servants, and his son is not even named. Father and son end up living in different places. The next time they share a verse, Isaac is burying Abraham. A father and a son, and not one more word between them in all of Scripture.

So here is what I want us all to carry out these doors. We are not asked to prove our love for God by what we are willing to destroy. We are asked to prove it by whom we are willing to welcome: the small, the vulnerable, the ones who cannot bargain for themselves. The argument Abraham did not make, we are given to make with our hands, a refusal to lay the little ones on the altar of our own certainty. A cup of cold water, held out to the least of these.

That is the welcome. That is the cry, the lament made flesh. And the God who meets us there is the same God who has always loved a good argument, who dances, even now, when his children stand on their feet, and open their mouths, and refuse to keep silent for the sake of love.