May we have the grace to be grateful for all that our faithful and generous God has provided, and may we have the grace to share what God has provided us with those around us, in the Name of Christ. Amen.
We humans are needy beings. Think of a newborn. When we slip out of Mother’s womb, we can’t survive out in the world on our own. We can’t take care of our own needs. We need to be washed, clothed, housed, fed, and kept hydrated, or we will die. This goes on for years, before we can even think about providing for ourselves, surviving on our own.
And even then, we can’t provide for ourselves all that we need. Think about it. You and I don’t make the electricity that makes our lives run. Either solar or wind power – forces provided by God – drive what our lives need, or oil or gas or coal – also forged into being by God’s creative forces down through the eons – or wood from forests seeded by God time immemorial – all these provide the fuels that fuel our lives. We need the earth and the seas that God made to provide us the food that we eat.
Let’s face it, much as we like to pride ourselves on being able to stand on our own two feet and provide for ourselves, we are dependent beings. Dependent on God and what God has made, and dependent on one another for the things we cannot make for ourselves.
Let me be personal. Without Bobby Martin to cut and deliver the firewood for our woodstove, our house would be quite cold in the winter. Without Noone’s to maintain our well and septic, we would not have clean water to drink, and a reliable way to dispose of our waste. Without MaryJo, Provincetown’s Town Moderator and her fellow worker bees at the Stop and Shop in Ptown stocking the shelves and working the cash registers, I would have no food to eat. And without a community like this one, I would be one lonely camper out here on this spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. And if I asked each of you to be personal, as I have just been, I know that – like me – you would start naming all the many ways that you must depend on God and others in order to live. Yes, we humans are needy beings. Needful of what God provides directly, and needful of one another for the many things we cannot provide for ourselves.
Did you hear Isaac’s plaintive words to his father Abraham in this morning’s first reading? He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”
Isaac knows what we should never forget: we are dependent on God – and one another’s compassion and wisdom – to provide what we human beings need for life. And Abraham responds with trust, with faith, to Isaac’s tremulous question, and Abraham says: “God himself will provide.”
And if God did not provide, then we would be in a pickle, as Isaac senses, and as Abraham knows. Without God’s provision we would be in a dog-eat-dog world, where we could survive only by trampling on, literally sacrificing one another.
Let’s face it. This is a difficult and frightening story. There are many ways to hear it, and suss out its meaning. For all too long, this story has been interpreted as an entirely positive story exalting Abraham’s faithful trust in God, a trust, a faith, so deep that he was willing to sacrifice his own son, his lifeblood, the heir to the promise that God had made to him.
But there is another way to hear the story. And that is to hear it as a story about humankind’s slow – O so very slow – learning that God does not ask for human sacrifice, that God does NOT want us to take life in order to survive and to prove our trust in God. We might understand this story, then, as if it is recounting a long history of developing human understanding compacted into the story of two men, one very old and one much younger. That long history is the long and heartbreaking, soul-shaking history that we humans have believed that one way – and perhaps the only way – to survive in this world is to placate God – and prove our ultimate loyalty to God – by giving up – literally sacrificing – what is most precious to us, our children, the seed of our loins. This false understanding – that God would only continue to provide for us with a fruitful earth and fruitful families if we were willing to give up one (or more) of our children to God – held on for millennia. There is archaeological evidence of child sacrifice all across the ancient Mediterranean, including in places where our Jewish forebears lived. But this story marks a turning point, a moment of learning – unlearning and re-learning – that God does not want blood, but instead wants the sharing of what makes for life. Though much of the ancient world continued to practice child sacrifice for much longer, by the 800s before the birth of our Lord, this story became part of the Jewish narrative, reminding the Jewish people – and those of us who have inherited their story as part of our own — that God does not desire sacrifice, but the giving, the sharing of life.
Given this background, we can hear this story of Abraham and Isaac as the story of humankind’s long and slow listening, a coming to believe that though it SEEMED God wanted sacrifice, that this was a misunderstanding, a mis-hearing. The good news in this story hinges on the fact that Abraham did not STOP listening to God. That kept listening…and listening….and listening. He listened long enough, well enough, thoroughly enough to God to move from a formerly established belief that God was asking for child sacrifice to a new and more compassionate view – that God would provide other ways ( a lamb, a ram, a good deed, a generous act) for us to demonstrate our understanding of and gratitude for our dependence on the generosity of God.
So like Abraham, we can and MUST listen with a careful and long listening so that we can defeat our first and false belief that God has called us to glorify God by killing off one another in order to survive. That is a false view of God, and a way that profanes God’s gift of life. God wants us to listen beyond our fearful way of living that kills off others so that we might survive. God wants us to listen, and hear, “Do not lay your hand on the boy – or on anyone else made in my divine image – and do not do anything to them.”
Behind this, I imagine God is saying: Instead of killing one another in order to survive, there is another way. Realize that I have made you in my own image, and provided all that you need to survive. If you want to survive and thrive, all else that is needed for you is this: to share with one another and support one another.” Then you will truly be the community made in my image, as you share and support one another and show the compassion to each other that I show to you by providing all you need for life.
Jesus gives a pointed and unmistakable illustration of this when he says “Learn what this means: I desire compassion/mercy, not sacrifice” (quoting the Prophet Hosea) at a supper where he admonished his self-righteous critics. And we can hear him give a superb example of this principle in his touching and simple guidance from this morning’s Gospel. “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones…will not lose their reward.” In a climate as hot and dry as Palestine was in Jesus’ day, a cup of water was not merely a kind gesture. It could be lifegiving and lifesaving – like rescuing Isaac from being bound on the altar. And a cup of COLD water – ah, what an especially generous and good gift. Not merely lifegiving – a source of genuine delight, and a sign of true affection and care as well.
Here is a better way of ensuring life, and guaranteeing the cycle of life. Not blood sacrifice, but sharing. Giving to another what that other needs. I have a vivid memory of a simple and brief moment on a hot NYC sidewalk one summer afternoon while I was there working on my PhD back in the early 2000s. I saw a well-dressed businessman stop along the sidewalk to hand two bottles of cold water from a nearby vendor to a young homeless woman, who was sitting on piece of cardboard. As I passed, I heard him say, “I hope these will help. And I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
Notice that this is not about “grand gestures.” Not about what in the present day has been called “virtue signaling,” so that others might notice and admire your “act of sacrificial generosity.” Not a gesture to make sure your name ends up on a list of donors or angels. No. A simple gift of water on a hot day. Perhaps saving a life, but at least providing a sigh of delight as the cold water relieves the parched throat. And brief words of promise to return the next day. The only thing needed was to notice the need, and then to make a choice to do something about it.
So often these acts of sharing life are simple, not grand. Day in and day out we have opportunities to do such things. Sometimes the opportunities are surprising. Sometimes they are not. Perhaps in your prayers, or morning time of reflection, the face of a particular friend comes into your mind’s yes, your heart’s eye. And so you make a phone call or send an email or text to say “I’m thinking about you, and hope you’re well” only to find out that that friend has been having a tough time, and needed nothing more than your gentle opening to be able to share the burden he has been carrying. The only thing you had to do to make this happen was to notice (drawn perhaps by the Holy Spirit’s tether) your intuition “I ought to be in touch with my friend Jan today,” and to choose to follow through on that nudge from within. This is its own version of a cup of cold water.
Sometimes the opportunity to share life can come about in a serendipitous way, that can turn what could have been felt as a loss, and turn it into a lifegiving gain. I love the story of Mahatma Gandhi in the years before he became famous as he led the push for independence in India.
Gandhi’s adult life after law school did not start off very auspiciously. He did not make it as a lawyer in India, so after two years of struggling, he left for South Africa where he was to live for the next 21 years, and where he first tried out the use of nonviolent resistance while campaigning for civil rights during apartheid. There is a well-known story from his years there – a story of a simple moment of choice that by chance – or should we think of it as by grace? – that happened to Gandhi. He and a colleague were racing to catch a train as it was departing. They barely made it by leaping onto the caboose, and as they did so, Gandhi lost one of his sandals. To the astonishment of his colleague, Gandhi slipped off his remaining sandal and threw it to land near the sandal that had fallen off his foot as they leapt onto the train. His colleague said simply: “WHY? Why did you do that?” The Mahatma said: “A single sandal is useless. But a complete pair: that is useful, a gift to whoever finds them.”
Sometimes these moments happen when we are going about our daily round, and doing what we always do – not thinking that what we do will make any huge difference. A teacher teaching day in and day out – who later (years later) finds out that her way of treating a particular student has encouraged that student to persevere so that as an adult that student looks back on that teacher as someone whose steady unremarkable care made a life-giving difference.
Or a priest just doing his usual round of priestly things, going to make a sick call at the home of someone struggling with cancer. They make their Communion from the reserved Sacrament, and as the priest folds the linens to put back into his Communion kit, he sees his parishioner close his eyes and hears the man say: “It is so much all that is needed!” And the priest, who in the busyness of his duties had forgotten that the Sacrament, and the touch of one hand to another as the Bread – the Body of the One who was and is Love Incarnate – is shared, that that simple moment with no fanfare can indeed be all that is needed, and so is reminded that neither he nor the one to whom he has given the Bread of Life will lose their reward.
“All I have needed thy hand hast provided!”
Thanks be to God!
The Rev. Dr. William W. Rich
June 28th, 2026 – 5th Sunday after Pentecost
Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet