SUNDAY, JUNE 28TH, 2026 – FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
MIND THE GAP
THE REV. RICHARD BURDEN
Photo by Amanda Yum on Unsplash
Title: Mind the Gap
2026.06.28 Proper 8A homily
How long, O Lord? Will you forget us forever? How long shall we be perplexed? Carry this grief in our hearts…? Answer us…Give light to our eyes…help us see…
Silence
We put our trust in your mercy…Our hearts are joyful because you rescue us. We will sing to the Lord…
What happened there? Between verses 4 and 5 of today’s psalm? Did the Psalmist simply run out of complaints? It happens…how long can you cry out, “how long?”
What happened on that precipice between those verses…the psalmist staring into the abyss….What was it…that changed…everything?
Silence
Last week, Hagar and Ishmael were staring into their own abyss…no home…no way back…no way forward…the water gone…the sun beating down…Nothing left…save one final appeal…”Do not let me look on the death of the child,” …my child… Stunning… not even a ”please save him…” it’s too far gone for that and she knows it… just “don’t make me watch…”
What happens after her last keening wail has stopped echoing…and the deafening silence of the desert consumes them?
Silence
What happens today after Abraham…silently…methodically…gathers his son…and some wood…and a couple of servants and heads off…into the wilderness. And after he sends the servants away…builds an altar…carefully lays the wood and then ritually binds his compliant son to the wood and the altar…takes a knife and raises his hand…to carry out this gruesome, incomprehensible test.
What happens with the blood pounding in his ears, drowning out every other sound…sweat stinging his eyes…muscles wrenched in agony as he grips the knife…holds his son…what happens as he takes one last shattering inhale and commits?
Silence
What happens when exhaustion overtakes us? And we cannot see a way out? Can’t even bear to look?
What happens when some project we’ve committed to…and faithfully tried carried out…leads us to an impossible choice?
What happens when the ideals we’ve clung to our whole lives… longer even …250 years maybe…what happens when they are ripped to shreds before our eyes?
What happens when our fists clench and our eyes narrow … When tears turn to a salty-grime on our cheeks and our throats become parched from crying…
What happens when we are so consumed with either “I can’t!” or “I have to!” that we are frozen and can no longer make a sound…
Silence
In that thunderous…apocalyptic…silence…an angel calls to Hagar and shows her a well of water…calls to Abraham — has to call twice, because Abraham was so fixated on the terrible task at hand — and shows him the ram.
But there is no angel in the psalm…but there is a silence…so maybe there was an angel that the psalmist didn’t mention…or maybe the angel who hears Hagar’s final cry…and sees Abraham’s terrifying conviction..maybe they are literary devices added by the writers to explain the inexplicable. To try and make sense of the miraculous…A well of water that suddenly appears…a ram caught in a thicket. And whatever it is that happens between verses 4 and 5…that transforms, “how long, O Lord?” into a song of praise.
Was the well there the whole time, and Hagar was just so distraught she didn’t see it? Was the ram caught and struggling the whole time and Abraham was just so focused that he missed the panicked thrashing of the animal? Could be…I can certainly think of times in my life (possibly even very recently) when I’ve missed something completely obvious because I was stuck in my own story.
So maybe those things were there all along… and a shift of attention is all it took…that would be an explicable kind of miracle…
Another possibility is that they weren’t there, but they arose because that was precisely what was needed in that moment…and Hagar and Abraham had finally let go of every story they had about themselves…and paused long enough for God to manifest between them what was truly needed? That’s a different kind of miracle.
Are these transforming silences available to us? All the time. You don’t have to go into the wilderness, or be a character in a gothic story to experience them…We don’t know where the psalmist was…they might have been making breakfast…or tending a sick loved-one…up late reading unable to sleep. Those silences are available to us…when we reach the end of our tether…when our obedience to a task becomes more fanatic than faithful…When we find ourselves in that place of “I can’t!” or “I have to!”… The space of a single breath is sometimes all that is needed.
So when that knot appears in your stomach, or that lump in your throat…when your eyes start to sting…and your heart pounds…you feel the heat and the dryness and the weight…In that moment…if someone offers you a cup of cold water…you know that it’s not just a kindness…It’s salvation.
Amen.