CHRIST CHURCH-June 22, 2008

Genesis 21:8-21

Someone once said, “The Holy Bible is the story of people behaving badly and the God who loves them.”

And today’s story is a perfect example.  It's the story of Hagar and Ishmael; it's tragic, awful, embarrassing. It shouldn’t have happened, it didn’t need to happen, but it did.

To get it into context, let's begin, by looking at the larger story of Abraham. Then we can perhaps better understand how things could have gone so wrong that he would feel forced to send Hagar and his oldest son Ishmael into exile.

Today’s reading is from the 21st chapter of Genesis, but the story of Abraham actually begins back in the 12th chapter. God calls Abraham to leave his father’s house and go with his wife Sarah and the rest of his household into a new land, the land of Canaan. And God promises Abraham that he will bless him and make of him a great nation.  At one point he even takes him outside and says, “Look at the stars, how numerous they are…so shall your descendants be.” 

Abraham believed God's promise. In the 15th chapter it says that, “Abraham believed, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” He believed in the promise of the Lord. And so he set out. He travelled to Canaan and experienced many great adventures along the way, and over that time I think we can assume that he and Sarah were doing their best to fulfill the rest of the promise...the great nation part. The trouble was that time passed and still, nothing happened.

So Sarah thought she’d give God a helping hand. So she says to Abraham, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maid servant; perhaps I can build a family through her.” In those days such a plan was acceptable. Sarah owned Hagar, and so she would also own Hagar’s child.  In her desperation this seemed to Sarah like the next best thing, a fitting consolation, and a human way to fulfill the divine promise.  But like any compromise, it left much to be desired. 

Abraham did as Sarah said and Hagar soon became pregnant, which made it clear to everyone that the couple’s inability to have children for all these years was Sarah’s fault, not Abraham’s, and so Hagar looked down on Sarah, and talked badly about Sarah, and angered and shamed Sarah to the point where she fought back and in turn mistreated Hagar so badly that the pregnant woman fled into the wilderness. But God sent an angel to meet Hagar there in the desert.  The angel promised her that her son too would be the father of a great nation and told her to name the boy Ishmael, meaning “God hearkens”, or “God listens”. The angel sent her back to live with Abraham and Sarah.  And things settled down for awhile, until the day finally arrived about 14 years later, when Sarah, at the age of ninety, finally conceived and bore her one and only child, Isaac.

At last the promise was fulfilled, as the Lord had said that it would be, and it is quite possible that if people had placed more trust in the promise even then, that Abraham’s sons could have grown up together and in time went each in their own way to found their great nations. But it was not to be.  For one day, the scriptures tell us, Sarah saw Ishmael playing with her precious Isaac, possibly mocking her precious  Isaac, and all her old fears and all her old hurts rose to the surface. She realized in that moment that not only did they not need Hagar and Ishmael anymore, Hagar and Ishmael were now a threat, and so she told Abraham to send them away. “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” It was a dark moment, and the weight of it falls hard upon Abraham. For Abrahem loved Ishmael as any father would love his first born son.. So Abraham was reluctant to comply with Sarah’s wishes. But the Lord told him not to worry, only to do what Sarah said and that all would be well.You know, Abraham is famous for being called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac.  We forget sometimes that Abraham had two sons, and that he was called upon to sacrifice them both.

In obedience to the Lord, Abraham woke up early, placed some food and water upon Hagar’s shoulder, and then told them to go.  Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and you know the rest of the story for you heard it just now.

It is not just a dark story, it is not just a story of our Abraham and our Sarah behaving so badly. It is also the story of the beginnings of Islam, and we have evidence right here before us that Ishmael and his descendants were under God’s care from the very beginning and part of God’s plan. Islam, in God's plan, was formed as the other nation God had promised. We would need to read Galatians chapter 4, to see that Ishmael was of the flesh, Isaac of God's promise, and hence the enmity twixt us and Moslems. But that's not the matter for today.

For those of us who feel, like Abraham and Sarah did after the birth of Isaac, that we finally have it altogether, that things are finally as we would have them be, it can be really uncomfortable to come face to face with someone like Hagar, someone who now has less because we finally have more. The world is teeming with people like Hagar, women and men who suffer to the point of not being able to sustain their own children, while others profit from their pain and suffering.  Perhaps because it has been so hard to face the reality and needlessness of human suffering. It has never been easy to look the Hagars of the world in the face.

So, some of us, Hagar’s story can be hard to hear. But for others, Hagar’s story is our story, and we need to hear it, because unlike the Abrahams and Sarahs of the world, we can relate to her pain, we can relate to her sense of isolation, her feelings of helplessness, and we need to know that just as God did not abandon her in her wilderness, so God will not abandon us in ours. 

For we all go through times in life where the pain of our circumstance is such that we do feel alone. People have no idea how to help us, and we don’t know what to tell them. It could be depression, unemployment, grief, illness, disability, failure, or divorce.  There are times in our lives when our pain is so raw, our circumstances so dire, that other people are afraid to come near.  They don’t know how to help us.  They don’t know what to say.  They don’t know how to begin, and so like Hagar we find ourselves alone, unable to care for those we love most, unsure of how we will make it through the afternoon, let alone through tomorrow. 

In Hagar’s story, as awful and tragic as it might be, we actually find hope. Hagar brings us face to face with our God, a God who sees us, a God who hears us, a God who does not, who cannot, who will not, turn away from our pain. We know, through her experience, that our cries do not go unheeded. And when we are suffering that is something we desperately need to know. We need to remember that God hears us as surely as he heard Ishmael. We come to know that God loves us, as surely as he loved Hagar. And we come to know deep down, no matter how desolate we might feel, that we are not alone. God’s love knows no limits. 

In her hour of great desperation, God did not turn away from Hagar and he will not turn away from you.  For where people strove to limit the promise, God extended it.  When Sarah wanted to close ranks, the Lord only widened the circle. In the wilderness when hope had failed, God extended the reach of his providence … for Hagar, for Ishmael, for you.