We are what God provides
Thumbnail image: “Sacrifice of Isaac” by Titian
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
June 28, 2026—Proper 8A
Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 10:40-42
A beloved son walks the long path up a hill. Accompanied by his father. Carrying the wood that is meant for his own death.
We hear little from Isaac in the story, nothing about how he feels or what he’s thinking, whether he senses something strange in his father’s demeanor or is just enjoying the adventure of a hike up the mountain. Nothing until he notices that there’s something missing: “Father,” he says, “… where’s the lamb?”
And Abraham, we might imagine, digs down deep into the depths of his trust in God, to reply, “God will provide.”
And we could spend all day fighting about how a willingness to kill your own child could possibly be a measure of faithfulness. Not to mention whether any God who deserves to be called good and just could possibly set such a test. Even if what’s actually being tested is whether you know God well enough to trust that God will not ever, in the end, require such a thing.
Still, seen as the story of a parent being asked to sacrifice their child, it’s one of the bible stories that give many of us chills. Which is not something we should shy away from; it’s very much worth digging into the parts of the Bible that scare, confuse or repel us. But this morning I do want to shift perspectives just a little, to allow this text to point us in a direction which might well still leave us with chills … but another kind of chills.
Because Isaac wasn’t just Abraham’s beloved child. It’s hard for us to see beyond that, but in the bible itself, that’s not his central significance. What Isaac was, was the promise. Isaac was the means by which God’s entire plan for Abraham and his descendants to be blessed to be blessing for the world was supposed to be worked out. So, if Isaac is killed, then that whole future disappears. That’s what’s at stake here. That’s what’s up there on that mountain: a father, and a son, and God’s plan for salvation.
You can hear it in the language. When Isaac calls out to Abraham, when the angel of God calls out to Abraham, his response is Hineni, “Here I am.” It’s what Moses said when he heard God calling out of the burning bush, Hineni (Exod 3:4); what Isaiah cries out when the Lord asks, “Whom shall I send?” Hineni (Isa 6:8); what the boy Samuel says when he hears the voice of God in the night: (1 Sam 3:4). “Here I am.” Which is to say, it is a declaration of willingness to be called into God’s purposes, to become an instrument of God’s dream for the world.
Isaac’s own Hineni remains unspoken. After he asks about the lamb, and Abraham assures him that God will provide, we hear nothing more from Isaac. Even when Abraham binds him and lays him upon the pyre, we do not hear him beg his father to release him from this fate. He utters no resolute, “Let your will be done.” If you look closely, you’ll find that we’re not even told that Isaac returns down the mountain after the terrible ordeal is over. In fact, he never has another conversation with Abraham in the bible, and only re-enters the story when he’s all grown up and marrying Rebekkah a few chapters later.
Which leaves us room to ask all kinds of questions about what it does to you, to be dedicated to the plans God has for the world. Especially in such a dramatic way! Especially when it’s made clear how very fragile you are.
The biblical narrative, however, is more interested in expressing how very fragile God’s plans are; in the ways that the Creator of the universe works through such small and easily breakable things.
People talk a lot about the Christian allegory in the Narnia books. But I’d argue there’s even deeper material in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. That in the midst of war and preparations for war, with powerful armies and heroes and wizards conferring and meeting in battle, it is Frodo and Sam who carry the true hope of salvation. Two small and almost entirely defenseless hobbits walking into the heart of the enemy, to defeat the powers of evil not by force, or even by trickery, but by the very act of refusing to take up those powers, by choosing to destroy the Ring of Power, rather than wield it.
And even at the last, even having survived the unimaginably long and perilous journey to Mount Doom, Frodo can’t bring himself to destroy the Ring. He has carried it for so long and its seductive power has such a strong hold upon him. So that it’s only the mercy he once showed to Gollum, sparing the life of that miserable hobbit who was even more deeply under the sway of the Ring than Frodo himself, that allows this audacious, insane plan to succeed. Gollum bites the ring off Frodo’s finger, and then slips and falls into the fires of Mount Doom as he cavorts in celebration.
So small. So vulnerable. So easily tempted by worldly values of victory through domination, pride and greed. Every last one of us. And yet still, God calls us into the redemption that comes when we choose against those things. When we offer ourselves (or perhaps we’re being offered), “Here I am.”
We hear it again in the gospels, in the Passion story, when another beloved Son climbs a hill, carrying the wood on which he will die. This time, the son knows what’s going on, and though he wishes it could be avoided, he nonetheless walks the path. Hineni. Here I am.
As promised, God provided the lamb. God provided the means by which God’s salvation will be worked out, by which God’s kingdom will come more fully, more visibly, more abundantly to this world.
That’s the promise: that God will provide. But as much as we might want it to be, it isn’t a promise that God will give you all the things you could possibly want. It isn’t even a promise for all the things you absolutely NEED in this life. It’s a larger promise; one made to the whole world: that God will provide what is necessary for its healing and redemption.
God provided Isaac (at his birth and then again on Mt Moriah). God provided Jesus (at his birth, then again on Calvary, and again at his resurrection and ascension). And God provides us. That means you too. Which is to say, that the promise that “God will provide” is less about what God will give to you, and a whole lot more about the fact that YOU are what God is providing to the world. Your hands, your heart. Your life as an offering, over and over again, given the chance to show forth what God’s values look like, in comparison to those of the world. To show generosity rather than greed, forgiveness rather than vengeance, self-sacrifice rather than self-interest, interdependence rather than domination, blessing rather than curse.
It seems so small, so easily destroyed, in the face of worldly power and corruption. But it is what God provides. We are what God provides. Bound up in God’s plans, offered as a reflection, a reminder, an embodiment of the cross: bearing the image of Jesus. May it be so, for the redemption of the world. Amen.