Two Saturdays ago I saw David T. Little’s contemporary classical song cycle Soldier Songs, in which a young boy is repeatedly choked, shot, bloodied and sacrificed for theatrical effect. The next morning at church, the scripture reading and sermon concerned Abraham and Isaac.

I found Soldier Songs, at least in its staging, to be overblown and largely unbelievable, but I did nearly weep during one of its calmer, most poignant moments, when the show’s key performer David Adam Moore, having exchanged his earlier camouflage grunt attire for a tatty business suit and loosened tie, sings a mournful ode to his son who died in a foreign war.

I’ve been a theater critic and music critic for half my life, but that’s been trumped by my main gig of the past nine years—Dad.

Images of dead children are especially horrific to parents, whose own children’s lives flash before their eyes every time they hear a squeal from another room in the house. In shows and novels (hello, Stephen King) endangered children have become an overused suspense device that it would be simply boring if these unimaginative authors weren’t toying with something genuinely horrifying to the rest of us.

Rev. John Gage at the United Church on the Green in downtown New Haven reminded me that coarse if effective tales of kids about to be slaughtered are as old as the Old Testament. But he doesn’t excuse it, condone it, or brush it aside as an awkward example of other cultures operating in other eras. He faces this absurd parable head-on and takes it down with logic, critical insight and cold satire. Rev. Gage’s sermon, titled Enough is Enough, is here.