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"Call Him
Ishmael!"
by the Rev. Rich Smith
June 22, 2008
Genesis 21:8-21
Whenever I revisit the stories found
in what we call the Old Testament, it strikes me that many of them are
not really all that “old!” The people of Iowa must think
they are reliving the story of Noah. David and Goliath happens whenever
a small group of freedom fighters overcomes the tyrrany of
empire. Cain and Abel - it’s lived out in every Civil War or
family argument. David and Bathsehba - we won’t go there...
In today’s story of Hagar and Ishmael, we may
glimpse the beginnings of the Arab/Israeli conflict, with the origins
of two peoples who trace their ancestry to their common patriarch,
Abraham. Or perhaps, we are reminded by the story of a mother
alone, with no food, no water, with a son who’s dying under the hot
sun, of the mothers of Darfur. Maybe there really is nothing new
under the sun, and it’s all right there in holy writ.
Originally, this story was placed in the Bible to
account for the presence of Arabs in the middle of the Promised
Land. The book of Genesis is full of stories explaining why
things are the way they are. There are bedouins, people of a
different complexion and a different way of life because Abraham,
father of the Jewish people, also fathered a child by his wife’s
slave. Anthropologists and historians would no doubt give a
different answer, but that’s okay. Arab and Jew are all of one family,
but family fights are often the worst kind.
The biblical writers say all this in stories – and
this like most of the stories in Genesis is quite a fantastic one: the
characters, the customs, the relationships, the triangle involving
Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.
It all begins a few chapters earlier with a promise
– the promise of God to Abraham that he will be the father of a great
nation. The problem is, both Abraham and Sarah are getting along
in years, she being well past the age of child-bearing – and how can
you start a nation if you can’t produce children to populate it?
Forgetting the power of God who made the promise,
Abraham and Sarah decide to take matters into their own hands.
According to the customs of the time – 1500 to 2000 years before Christ
– a childless woman was allowed to procure a surrogate – usually a
slave – who could bear the child for her. The child was to be in
all respects her own. But the rights of the surrogate mother were
to be protected to the extent that she could not be cast out, disposed
of, when her job was done. They had to continue to take care of
her.
So, Sarah allows Abraham to father a child by her
maid, an Egyptian slave named Hagar. There was only one way to do
it back then – no in vitro fertilization, no artificial
insemination. That was okay, and Sarah may have been able to
handle that part of it, but when Hagar confirms that she is pregnant,
she forgets her place, and starts flaunting her blessed
condition. As Sarah saw it, according to Frederick Buechner’s
fanciful way of putting it, “Hagar no longer walked around the house,
he flounced and whenever she got a craving for bagels and lox,
naturally Abraham went out and got them for her.” Sarah become
livid with jealousy, and while the law protects Hagar from being cast
out, it does not prevent treatment so harsh that Hagar would decide to
leave of her own accord.
That may seem rather short-sighted on Sarah’s
part. Her own issues get in the way of the bigger picture.
No Hagar, no heir, no great nation. But, out in the
wilderness, Hagar comes upon a spring of water, and there is met by an
angel, who tells her that she will have a son and that she should call
him Ishmael, which means “God hears,” for God indeed has heard her in
the midst of her affliction. As the Psalm normally paired with
this lesson puts it,
“Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me,
for I am poor and needy.
Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you;
save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God; be gracious to me, O Lord,
for to you do I cry all day long.”(Psalm 86).
The angel then relates a promise to her from God: that while Ishmael
will never win any popularity contests, he will nonetheless be first in
a multitude of descendants – leading to a whole new people and what one
commentator has called “The twice-promised land.”
Hagar then comes to the realization that she can’t
have the baby out there in the wilderness, and so she returns to
Abraham and Sarah, who by now has cooled down. She gets her old
job back, and after a few months the baby is born.
Then, a bit later, a miracle occurs. Sarah
herself, now in her nineties, becomes pregnant and has a son of her
own, named Isaac. But, who is the true heir? The son born by the
slave, or the biological child? And to make matters worse, these
two boys are not rivals, but best buddies, brothers!
They’ve learned the kindergarten lessons, and share everything.
Sarah is worried: what if they have to share the inheritance?
What if they have equal claim on God’s promises? That just won’t
do. And so she insists that Abraham – in clear violation of law
and custom – send Hagar and Ishmael away again – something
Abraham is reluctant to do, until God assures him that the two will be
taken care of, that there are more than enough promises to go around.
So they depart, and after an initial period of
despair, they hear God’s promises once again; they are led to water, a
new land, Ishmael gains skill with the bow, he gets an Egyptian wife,
and a new race of people is inaugurated, the ones who became Arabs,
many of them eventually followers of Islam. You can’t say they
lived happily ever after, but it could have been worse. The big
thing is, God was looking out for them,
Now, there are many ways for us to find the meaning
and the message of this story for our time. You can employ
biblical criticism; you can look more deeply at the issues that still
plague the Middle East which had their genesis there. All well and
good. But one of my favorites is to simply take a closer look at
each of the characters, because, after all, our lives and our own
stories are made up of characters. We may even be characters and
see ourselves in them.
Sarah, for example, seems to me to be a prototypical
Jewish Mother, a term I use affectionately and without prejudice.
She seems a bit over-protective, over bearing, given to fits of
jealousy. Jewish mothers often rub us the wrong way with their
zeal, but they mean well. They have a big heart. They also
have a hard time letting go, of trusting that the life they’ve helped
to bear and nurture will have a life of its own. The minute
children emerge from the womb, totally dependent upon us for survival,
they begin a quest for independence, which is what childhood and
adolescence is all about. Children are not really ours, not
ultimately. They are simply given us on loan. But a lot of
us, mothers and fathers, Jewish and otherwise, have, as they say,
control issues. And some of us try to live our lives through our
children instead of letting them their own lives. We have
problems with trust. That was Sarah’s problem. God promised
her a child. She thought it was impossible, and so she panicked
and proposed a solution fraught with dangers. She wasn’t patient
enough for God to act. But, then, Jewish mothers are not known
for patience.
Of course, God did take care of things. And
when Sarah learned that in her tenth decade of life that she was going
to be a mother, she laughed out loud, which I suppose is the only
proper response to such news!
A word about Abraham. He is pictured in this story
as rather ineffectual, a sort of bumbling patriarch who runs around
trying to keep the peace, smooth things over and please everybody,
instead of dealing with the issues head-on. Reminds me of the
father in Jesus’ parable we call “The prodigal son.” But
he’s only human. As one commentator put it, there are many
examples of “Abraham’s questionable judgment in matters domestic....an
aspect of the patriarch’s biblical depiction not to be overlooked.
Although Abraham is portrayed with heroic abilities in matters of
faithfulness and trust — his response to God’s call to migrate to an
unknown land, his sustained intercession on behalf of Sodom and
Gomorrah, his unquestioned obedience to the summons to sacrifice Isaac
— he is also shown to be a man of remarkably uncertain constitution in
his own troubled household. The writers of the Bible are unflinching in
their assertion that all human figures, no matter how spiritually
great, ultimately have feet of clay.” It’s disillusioning when
your hero falls off the pedestal. But it’s also empowering, for
it opens up the possibility that we, too, who are so human, so often
fragile and bumbling in our own lives, may do some great things.
If God could work through Abraham, in all his human frailty, then maybe
God can work through me. And you! Abraham may have made a
mess of things, we you and I often do, but that did not prevent God
from getting done what needed to be done! So there is always hope
for us. Especially is there hope for our children!
And that brings us to Hagar. Hagar is a
survivor, a woman who made the best of a bad situation. Without
getting into the choices women today may or may not have in such
matters (and how those choices are threatened), Hagar had no choice
about becoming pregnant. She was a slave. And while the
institution of slavery is not really challenged in the Bible, there are
at least some protections and rights given slaves so that they will not
be treated too badly. Maybe she shouldn’t have provoked Sarah,
but on the other hand, maybe this pregnancy was the first good thing
that ever happened to her, her ticket to a better life.
But when I picture her cast out, wandering so
vulnerably in the desert without protection, I think of all the women
down through history who have been treated unjustly, subject to
institutionalized inequality. Heidi Hartman can give you exact
figures as to how women are faring these days, but I have a cartoon
that pretty much sums it up. It depicts a corporate board of
directors meeting, all men except for one woman. The chair is
addressing her: “In this issue of pay equity we’ve heard everyone’s two
cents worth except for you, Ms. Jones. A penny for your
thoughts...”
As Phyllis Trible in her book Texts of Terror says
about Hagar: “...all sorts of rejected women find their stories in
her. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by
the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate
mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the
runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant
woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the
shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the
indigent relying upon handouts from the power structures, the welfare
mother, the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service
to others.” And she asks, “How does the community of faith
respond to the Hagars of our world?”
She is a survivor. And it is a tribute to her
strength and the strength of all women that she made it. God
indeed heard her. And if her son, named Ishmael, as a testimony
to God’s hearing her, is the father of a nation, then surely she is its
grandmother.
Ishmael himself is also a symbol, not just as the
father of his country, but of the fact that God can redeem even the
most hopeless of situations. Conceived in a breech of faith, so
would say illegitimately, he is a reminder that in God’s eyes no child
is illegitimate. All children are loved by God and should be
loved by us. I have proposed many times that perhaps the measure
of any nation, community, church, is found in how it treats its
children; and that in making decisions, shouldn’t the first and the
last question always be, “What does this mean for children?”
That was always the question posed by my friend Tom
Hunter, a UCC minister, folk-singer, wandering minstrel, and tireless
advocate for children. Tom died this past Friday, after a brief
illness, at 62, far too soon! He had recently become the minister
of the First Congregational Church in Bellingham, Washington, after
years of traveling around the country, singing with children, working
with teachers, writing songs about his experiences, some of which I
have sung with you and with our children. Tom always challenged
us to listen to children, to pay attention to the details of their
lives and what they have to tell us. Had he lived, he no doubt
would have preached about Ishmael today, and said something like,
“Stand up for the Ishamels in the world - the kids on the edge, the
forgotten ones, the marginalized ones, the ones whom God hears and asks
us to hear as well.” And he probably would have sung a song about
one of them, giving voice to their cries, like this one, one of the
last he wrote:
“How can we prepare our children
For a world we cannot yet see?
O I think we work hard so they can become
as human as they can be.”
In the end, that’s what all Bible stories are about
- how we strive with God and one another and in the process become
human, human in all our frailty and all our glory. As Frederick
Buechner writes in summing up this one: “The story of Hagar is the
story of the terrible jealousy of Sarah and the singular ineffectuality
of Abraham and the way Hagar, who knew how to roll with the punches,
managed to survive them both. Above and beyond that, however, it
is the story of how in the midst of the whole unseemly affair the Lord,
half-tipsy with compassion, went around making marvelous promises and
loving everybody, and creating great nations, like the last of the
big-time spenders handing out hundred dollar bills.”
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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