Genesis 21:8-21
June 22, 2014
Sermon peached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The word, Genesis means, “beginning.” Genesis is not only the story of the beginning of the world but it is also the story of the beginning of a family, a family that was destined by God to be a great blessing to all the families of the world.
Abraham and Sarah are very old and have no children. Because they have no children, as was the custom of the day, Abraham was allowed to have a concubine and to father a sort of substitute child through her. He takes a slave named Hagar as his concubine and they have a child, Ishmael.
Well, the Lord enters the story, makes a promise to Abraham that he and Sarah will have children after all, even though they are quite advanced in years. Though they can hardly believe their good blessing, sure enough, old Sarah bears a child, Isaac.
A child is of course a great blessing, but you don’t have to know much about family life to know that this arrangement is going to go badly. It occurs to Sarah that the child of the slave woman is Abraham’s firstborn son; therefore this boy stands to inherit everything, all the promised land of his father, so Sarah begins to pester Abraham about getting rid of the woman and her child. Though Abraham is reluctant to do such a thing, God tells Abraham that God will take care of Hagar and her son.
Chinese Americans can identify with this story. Split family life, concubines, and even multiple wives were all too common in ancient China. Like Abraham and Sarah, Chinese parents wanted to be sure that there would be plenty of children especially sons to have an inheritance to the family properties. When I did some family genealogy research, I discovered that my grandfather had two wives and my grandmother is the second wife. This meant that when my mother married a son of the second wife and was living in the village home in China; the women of my grandfather’s first wife often disrespected her.
Verse 8 begins the action by giving us background. Abraham throws a “great feast” to celebrate the weaning of the child of Sarah. In verse 9, Sarah glances at the half-brother child playing with her young son Isaac. The conflict of renewed jealousy and animosity toward her slave girl Hagar and her son Ishmael boils over when Sarah pledges, “The son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”
Abraham has an ambivalent response to Sarah’s proposal that the mother and child be “cast out.” God tells Abraham to go along with Sarah, reiterating that the land ought to go to Isaac.
So Sarah gets her way. There is a touching scene where the mother and child are cast into the wilderness. I have been to this Negev desert wilderness and it is still hot, desolate and life threatening. Abraham gives them a skin full of water but how long will that last? Not long. Hagar and her child are being sent away to die.
After wandering in the wilderness of Beer-sheba, the water was gone and Hagar accepted the sad tragedy that her child would soon die. She leaves the child under a bush and went and sat a good way off because she couldn’t bear to see her child’s death. Hagar realizes that she will die soon afterwards.
Just then an angel hears their cry, and God promises not to let Hagar and her child die but rather to preserve them and to make a great nation of them. God showed her where to find water in a well and Hagar gave the boy a drink. The story ends by asserting that “God was with the boy,” who grew up in the wilderness, became an expert bowman, and married a woman from Egypt.
Family Today
Our text is a very believable story. This is not a story of some ideal family—even the Brady Bunch is a blended family. The story begins in human envy and ends in divine graciousness.
The story of this ancient family sounds almost contemporary. In our families there are stepparents and stepchildren, blended families living under the same roof, division, envy and resentment, squabbles with siblings over inheritance and all the rest. I can still remember how important it was for my mother who was probably badly scarred by her “station” in the family that she would always point out to me how she fought hard to be recognized as just as legitimate in the Ng household as the other women even though she was married to a son of the second wife.
We often think that family problems exist in homes that are poor and are not economically stable. But a recent minister was at a very affluent suburban church in the richest part of the city. He got into a discussion with the pastoral staff about the challenges of serving a congregation full of such highly educated, successful, ambitious people.
The minister said, “Quite a challenge to serve among people for whom life has been so good.”
But then the senior pastor said, “You do know, don’t you. Do you know the number one crime that our police must investigate here?”
The minister didn’t. “Its domestic violence,” the pastor replied.
As pastors, we can testify that we spend a great deal of time in our ministries listening to people who have been hurt badly by people in their own family, a hurt that they bear with them for years. We don’t mean to hurt one another. But as we sometimes say, we are “human, all too human.”
There’s a story of two men, brothers both elderly in their late 70s. They were generous when the neighborhood’s children came to their homes for Halloween. The children growing up to becoming adults knew them both. However, the two men never spoke to each other. There was some family argument that had begun over many years ago. Maybe everyone knew at one point what the argument had been about, but the details had grown fuzzy and vague. So they lived side-by-side, merely yards away from each other, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the other’s existence other than by cutting the other out of his life completely. The neighbors wished that they could see the folly of the issue and eventually figured out a way to make up. But they didn’t. First one, and then the other died, mourned by the neighbors who loved them both but apparently not mourned by the other brother or his family.
What If?
What is true of our own very human families is also true of God’s family. This ancient story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, and their sons is seen in Islam as the origin of their faith. God fulfilled God’s promises to Hagar and made a great nation out of her son, the people of Islam. We see today that the tensions in Abraham’s family got worse over the years rather than better!
Have you ever played the game “What If?” “What if Lincoln had not been assassinated?” Or Martin Luther King, Jr. or JFK? What if the automobile had never been invented? What if WWI had really been the war to end all wars? What if we didn’t create modern Israel after WWII because of the guilt that the Allied powers had when the Holocaust happened?
What if Sarah had been more accepting of Hagar and Ismael? What if Isaac and Ismael had grown up as brothers?
Sarah made sure that didn’t happen. In her mind, there was only one way to protect Isaac, to ensure his future and that was to eliminate Ishmael. Maybe it didn’t occur to her that God could find a way to bless both Isaac and Ishmael. Maybe she just couldn’t believe that there was enough blessing, enough love, enough grace to go around.
The way she treated Hagar and Ishmael was shameful. But perhaps some of us understand the trap she fell into. Perhaps some of us have been there, stuck in a place where there didn’t seem to be enough money, enough love, enough blessing to go around. Maybe some times we have thought that if God loves me, that means that God can’t love someone else. Or if God is with me, God has to be against someone else. Or in order for me to be a winner, there has to be a loser.
God doesn’t seem to work that way. We don’t know the story from God’s point of view, but it looks like God’s original plan was about a baby born to Abraham and Sarah. Then Sarah took some initiative perhaps she didn’t trust God’s promises to come true and involved Hagar, which led to Ishmael. Look what God does—God finds a way to keep the original promise as well as to provide for the outcast Hagar and Ishmael. God isn’t limited by all-or-nothing thinking. God is creative and flexible. God works with Sarah despite herself and expands the promise about a great nation, to extend to two great nations. Sarah tries to make Ishmael into a loser so that Isaac can be a winner, but God makes winners out of both of them.
As you know, Ishmael is associated with Islam. The Koran tells of Ishmael going on to Mecca and building a mosque there. He becomes the physical father of the Arab peoples, and spiritual father to the Islamic community. This is like how Abraham is seen as the physical and spiritual father of the Jewish people. We know that the history of Muslims and Jews is not a friendly one. Yet, recorded here within Israel’s story is this fact—that the peoples who are their rivals and enemies are actually part of their family.
We Christians come into the story much later, but this is our story too. Too many Christians and Muslims today regard each other as enemies. I think we would do well to remember this story, to remember that the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Isaac and Rebekah, who is our God is also the God of Hagar and Ishmael, the God who sees and hears, the God who loves and cares for our enemies as well as for us.
Maybe we would do even better if we could regard those others whom God loves, not as our enemies, but as members of our family. American Baptists have been actively engaging in Baptist-Muslim dialogues around the country for the purpose of seeking better understanding about each other and to establish trust and peace. These dialogues have broken down some of the barriers that have been erected over time and tragedies.
I am not suggesting that we should gloss over the real differences between the branches of our religious family tree. I am not suggesting that Judaism and Islam and Christianity can or should be boiled down to some common denominator faith. But the peace of the world may depend on whether or not we can accept each other as distant cousins, as members of the same family, even that species we call the human family.
Ishmael leaves the scene after this story, but he comes back one more time. He comes back for his father’s funeral. Ishmael and Isaac bury their father together. In Genesis 25, it says that God blesses Isaac to settle near Beer Lachai Roi which is the same well that God gave Hagar and Ishmael when they were suffering in the wilderness. We can only imagine that for Isaac to be blessed with a peaceful life at Ishmael’s well, something must have happened at Abraham’s funeral. The two brothers must have reached some reconciliation. This is a picture of the potential for peace between two brothers who have been enemies.
What God Does
What does God do? God continues to work with the families of this earth. God has promised to stick with this wayward family and God will keep God’s promises. God continues to move behind the scenes, blesses, forgives and making possible new beginnings where there was only death and endings.
Perhaps this is the reason why this ancient, rather embarrassing story was lovingly retold and preserved for us here deep in the first book of the Bible. We are meant to hear this story and to take heart. We are a long way from getting it together in our human families or in the family that makes up Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And yet, the good news is that we don’t have to get it together ourselves. Behind the scenes, often unnoticed, there is God, a God who is relentless in keeping God’s promises.
Even after we attempted to send God’s own son out into the wilderness to die on the cross, God was not stumped by us. God was victorious over our limitations. God continued to love and to preserve the family even unto the present day, right now and right here.
We do have family troubles. We fight, argue, split up and are stubborn. At times, we are able to heal and come back together again. We have blended families, broken families, extended families and we still love and be loved by God, even in our foolishness. Hopefully, we are able to hear the promise of God beckoning us forward. It is a promise that God will hear and will respond, offering us new ways, new lands, and new blessings in the families we have.
Let us pray.
Lord, in your wisdom you have placed us in human families. Most of us experience a taste of your love, and receive protection and guidance while in our families. But not always. For some, the family is a place of fear and violence, a place where great harm is done, sometimes in the name of love. And yet, you have promised always to be with us, even if we are in deeply troubled families. While our families may sometimes fail us, you never fail us. You preserve us, help to redeem some of the worst of our family situations, and work to bring your good out of our bad. For this good news and for your constant providential work among us, we give thanks. Amen.