06/14/2026
Michael Colvin will be leading worship. All are welcome. Please join us!
This year, June 14 arrives crowded. It is Flag Day. It is the President's eightieth birthday, marked in Washington with celebrations on a grand scale. And it is the day a nationwide movement, the "No Kings" gatherings, has called for its own observances — this year built around concerts and watch parties in living rooms and community halls rather than marches in the street. However one reads the day, it is loud, and it is about power: who holds it, what it ought to look like, how a people chooses to show it or to share it.
That same Sunday, the lectionary sets before us a story with no throne in it at all.
In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, three strangers come walking up out of the desert heat. Abraham, an old man dozing at his tent, does not ask their business or their politics. He runs to meet them. He brings water for their feet and shade for their heads, and the small loaf he offers quickly becomes a feast — a calf, curds, milk, bread Sarah kneads in a hurry. Only after the guests are fed does the news come: this old, childless couple will have a son. Sarah, listening behind the tent, laughs the dry laugh of someone who stopped hoping years ago. "Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?" the visitor asks. Afraid, she denies it. Gently, he tells her that she did laugh.
The next spring the child is born, and they name him Isaac — "laughter." The sound Sarah was once ashamed of becomes the name she hands to the future. "God has made laughter for me," she says, "and everyone who hears will laugh with me."
It is worth noticing, on a day so given over to shows of strength, where this old story puts the real turning of things: not in a parade or a crowd of any kind, but at a tent thrown open to strangers, in a meal shared before a single question is asked, and in a laugh that began in doubt and ended in joy.
I look forward to seeing you in church. Michael Colvin
