Here I Am - 5th Sunday after Pentecost
Author: Pastor Scott Schul
June 28, 2026
“Here I am.” Abraham spoke those words not once but three times in today’s Old
Testament lesson. When God summons
Abraham to complete a task, Abraham responds, “Here I am.” When Abraham’s son Isaac calls for his father
with an unsettling question, Abraham responds, “Here I am.” And when the Lord’s angel urgently cries to
Abraham with a new command, Abraham responds, “Here I am.”
All these interactions understandably lead us
to assume that Abraham is at the center of this story. And when that’s the way we view and
understand it, then the story itself becomes deeply troubling… haunting… even
horrifying. Look, as a father, the most
painful feelings I have experienced have not been when I was in some
sort of peril. It has always been when
my children were somehow at risk. I
don’t think I’m unique in that regard. Most parents and grandparents I know would gladly take upon themselves
nearly any hardship if doing so would spare their child or grandchild from
suffering. What kind of God would
command a father to kill and sacrifice a beloved child? And what kind of father would blindly and
obediently follow such a command? It
makes no sense to me, just as it has made no sense to readers of this story for
thousands of years.
A few weeks ago when I began studying these
verses and praying about what I might preach about them, I called my friend
Rabbi David Ostrich to learn how our Jewish siblings approach this story. Rabbi David told me that Jewish scholars
since the beginning of recorded time have struggled to make sense of it. Would Abraham pass the test only if he took
Isaac’s life, thereby proving how utterly loyal he was to God? Or was the test really to see if Abraham was
an out-of-control fanatic with no moral compass who literally would do anything
he thought his God wanted? In other
words, in order to pass the test, did Abraham need to have the presence of
heart and mind to say, “No God, I won’t do it.” In the end, it is a puzzle we cannot answer on this side of heaven.
There are additional details to the story which
make it even more troubling (if that’s possible). We read that it’s a three-day journey to the
place of sacrifice. Imagine what it must’ve
been like for Abraham to walk with his son for three days, knowing all the time
what he was being asked to do. And
notice that Isaac is no child. We don’t
know how old he was – in his commentary on Genesis Luther supposes Isaac was 20
– but all we can say for sure is that Isaac was old enough to have
conversations with his father; old enough to realize that a religious sacrifice
required a live animal, which they didn’t possess; and old enough that he could
carry all of the wood that would be used to burn his soon-to-be-lifeless
body. Also notice that there’s no
indication Sarah knew anything about this commandment to sacrifice Isaac or
Abraham’s willingness to do it. And when
they reached the mountain where the sacrifice was to take place, Abraham made
the servants wait below. Was that
because he didn’t want anyone to know what he was going to do? Is it because he felt so much shame? Should God’s commands ever cause us to
feel such shame?
And then consider the logical disconnect in all
of this. Two weeks ago I told to you how
Isaac’s miraculous birth was the key to the fulfillment of God’s promise that a
great nation would arise from the offspring of Abraham and Sarah. How was that supposed to happen if God
commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham went through with it? Don’t you think both God and Abraham knew the
consequences of all this?
My point in unpacking all this is to free you
from any obligation you may feel to make logical, literal sense of this story. The Bible is a library of different books,
different authors, and different genres, from history to poetry to allegories
and even fables designed to teach a lesson, reveal a bit of God’s character, or
provide insight into something that will happen someday in the future. Don’t read the Bible the same way you read a
newspaper or a textbook. Much of it
wasn’t designed to function that way.
But what the stories of holy scripture do that
no newspaper or textbook can ever do is reveal deep spiritual truth. You see, from the very beginning,
the wisest and most deeply faithful Christian thinkers have encouraged us to
read this story from Genesis 22 with our spiritual eyes, not our literal
eyes, and have called us to shift our gaze from Abraham to Isaac and
what he reveals for us. Isaac
points us to another beloved son. That son was likewise tasked with carrying the wood upon which he would
be sacrificed. And like Isaac, he obediently
carried it to a mountain, Calvary, where he willingly ascended a cross. He did not do it because his father was a
bloodthirsty monster. His father had no
wrath that needed appeasing. And his
father didn’t need to be saved from anything.
But we did. We who were imprisoned by sin needed some
means of overcoming that sin and being made righteous so that we might have
eternal life with our Lord. And so the
Lamb of God stepped forward. Jesus said,
“Here I am.” And there on the cross he
gave us a gift we could never attain for ourselves.
Three days later, evoking the three-day journey
Abraham and Isaac took, Jesus stepped from the tomb as the conqueror of sin,
death, and the devil. To his startled
friends, he said “Here I am.” The
beloved son was alive. And in that supreme
event of love and grace, our salvation was secured. Hope was rekindled. All because the Lord provided.
So is that the end of the story? Not quite. The same love which summoned Jesus to the cross now calls our name. It does so not to ask or compel us
to sacrifice ourselves as Jesus did. No,
as we hear in Psalm 51 each Ash Wednesday, the only sacrifice our Lord calls of
us is “a broken and contrite heart.” God
simply wants us to respond to all of God’s gifts of mercy, grace, and salvation
– God’s astonishing love – by loving God and our neighbor in return, not as
something to earn God’s love (we already have that), but as a way of saying
thank you and of experiencing God’s love in its joyful fullness, and thereby
recapturing what it means and what it feels like to be fully and authentically
human as a child of God.
What will that look like in your life? That’s a good question to pose to God in
prayer today. It just might change the course
of your life. Friends, I believe God
longs to hear from us in prayer far more often. God is calling. Will you say,
“Hear I am”? I also believe God
wants us to dwell in God’s transformational Word far more than we do. We generally make time to eat three times a day. How would our lives shift if just once a day we read and contemplated even a tiny passage of scripture? God is calling. Will you say, “Hear I am”? God also desires us to gather for worship
more consistently. People nowadays are
starving from a lack of sabbath and a lack of worship. God is calling. Will you say, “Hear I am”?
And don’t you think God would delight if we
thought a little less about ourselves and a bit more about our neighbors? Prayerfully consider what that might entail. How could it change the way we spend our time? Might we volunteer more at church or in our
community? Might our faith propel us to
advocate more robustly for the marginalized? And how might a fulsome acknowledgement of the scope and breadth of
God’s love and grace for us change the way we share our money? Friends, right here, right now, God is
calling all of us. How will we,
God’s saved and beloved people, respond? We all know the right answer. “Lord,
here I am.” Amen.
© 2026 Rev. Scott E. Schul, all rights reserved
Sermon Text: Genesis 22:1-14
Gospel
Text: Matthew 10:40-42
[Jesus
said to the twelve:] 40 “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and
whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41 Whoever
welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will
receive the reward of the righteous, 42 and whoever gives even
a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly
I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
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