08-06-22June 22, 2008
Pentecost 6, Genesis 21:8-21
There is the old story of the man who is working in his garden when someone comes by and begins to admire it. The visitor goes on about what a fine garden it is, and the gardener thanks him for his kind words. The visitor then says, of course this is really God’s garden isn’t it. I suppose he should get the credit. To which the gardener says, I don’t know. It wasn’t much back when God had it by himself.
I am reminded of that story because of an interesting idea I ran across while looking at commentaries about today’s reading from Hebrew scripture. I have spent the last two weeks thinking about these Abraham stories, and especially about the Abraham and Isaac story we will hear next week. There is so much going on in these ancient stories of promise and faith and the difficulties involved in trusting God. I thought I had found a fine direction for today’s sermon in a line from Walter Bruggerman’s commentary on Genesis. It really seemed to sum up what this story of Hagar and Ishmael and Sarah was all about. Bruggerman makes a distinction between Ishmael and Isaac, saying that Ishmael is the child of planning and skillful management and competency while Isaac is the child who is a gift from God. Like the gardener, Bruggerman seems to make a distinction between a miracle! miracle and the kind of miracle that requires a bit of human involvement.
You remember that at the beginning of his journey, God promised Abraham that he would make him the father of many nations, that his children would number like the stars. God promised that Sarah would give Abraham a child.
You probably also remember that when that promise was slow in being fulfilled, Sarah gave Abraham her slave girl Hagar so that Abraham might father a child with her. As our story opens today, though, Hagar and her child have become a problem for Sarah, who realizes that this child born to her slave is now the rightful heir to Abraham. Sarah is jealous, and wants Hagar and Ishmael out of the picture.
Though he was the second of Abraham’s sons, Bruggerman’s distinction between the child of human planning and the miracle child of God’s promise seems to make Isaac into the legitimate heir....the true child of promise. But the rest of the story doesn’t seem to support that line of thinking.
To begin with, God doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two children. God shows up where there is need, and today that need has to do with Ishmael. There is enough blessing to go around. So often we think in terms of limited availability. God can bless this one or that one, but there probably isn’t enough for everyone. Look at the papers. Oil, medicine, food, we are used to being a part of the group who has the best access to limited commodities. We get uncomfortable at the thought of having to spread limited goods too thin. There is a real temptation to think that way about God’s blessings, maybe because we so easily associate God’s blessing with having plenty of all those other things. Our story today says that God can work outside the “favored” group. That God’s blessing and creativity can even follow and take up the work of our best intentions. Long before she became jealous, long before she had her own child, Sarah imagined Hagar’s child as a good answer to the problem of how to bring about God’s promise to Abraham. That good intention....that act of giving and creation that Sarah can no longer support, God picks up, carries forward and blesses. Ishmael too is a child of God’s promise.
And, the blessing was never really about just Abraham’s family. God puts aside Abraham’s concerns early in today’s story by saying, I will make a nation from Ishmael also. The promise in the very beginning was not just one nation, but “nations” “Through you shall all families be blest.” “You shall be the ancestor of many nations.” In the story of Israel choosing a king and building the temple and the city Jerusalem, we are told that Israel asked God to give them a king and make them a nation like other nations. God replied, no, you don’t really want that? Really there are problems there you don’t know about. Are you sure? But the people pressed for what they wanted and God gave in. Just three kings down the line, they were at each other’s throats, they were divided, two nations struggling with each other and finally two nations conquered by their neighbors and exiled from their home. The nationalistic urge to be or become “the” nation among nations can be dangerous. Such exhalation of one nation above all others was never part of God’s plan. The plan in the beginning had been peace...sharing....harmony. When Israel returned to their land after the exile, they were surprised to find foreign kings helping them rebuild their temple. Could blessings really come from God....through foreigners? They were being challenged to learn again what they had heard all their lives in the story of Hagar and Ishmael. God’s blessings are limitless and not confined to those who pride themselves on being blessed by God.
The distinction between the child who is the product of human effort and the one who is the miracle of God breaks down even further as God moves to redeem this story.
Just as things are looking really bleak, when Hagar has set the child to die and moved away so she doesn’t have to watch and hear, God hears the child. Not Hagar, not Abraham, but the child. From that moment on, Ishmael is as much a miracle from God as Isaac. And I can think of no greater gift, no greater promise that God could make to parents than that God will hear and heed the cries of their children. I cannot imagine a better blessing. It is maybe the best blessing anyone could ask for, and it begins among Abraham’s offspring with Ishmael, his firstborn. Maybe Ishmael really does inherit the best of the promise that comes to and through Abraham.
The Abraham stories are stories of faith, of setting out on a journey without knowing the route or the outcome of the adventure. They are stories of what it means to let God lead. They are stories of gaining self knowledge and being surprised...of having assumptions challenged and discovering new possibilities. Many centuries after this story was told, Paul used Abraham as an example of what it means to have faith, what it means to open one’s self to God.
Today, I hear in this story a message about the surprising abundance of God’s love, not just for us, whoever “we” are, but for “them” as well. Sometimes that is the part of this great faith journey that requires the most trust from those of us who are still wondering where this road will lead. Amen.
JB