Sermon Text

Today we have one part of the story of Abraham. If it’s been a while since you heard it, here’s a brief summary of the story so far. God called Abraham to leave everything he knew. In return, Abraham was promised land and many descendents.

The catch to this promise was that Abraham and Sarah were both getting on in years, plus Sarah was unable to have children. After some time went by, Sarah took matters into her own hands, and gave her slave woman Hagar to Abraham. Thus Ishmael was born.

All was not easy in the household. There was jealousy and abuse. Finally, 13 years later, Sarah was blessed with her own son named Isaac.

And so we come to the next installment of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Genesis 21:8-21.

The child [Isaac] grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."
The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring."
So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.
When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.
And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him."
Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.
God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really remember learning about Hagar in Sunday school. There was Father Abraham – I know some of you sang that song at church camp: “Father Abraham had seven sons/ seven sons had Father Abraham . . .” Ask Judy Gunn to sing it with you after church. In Sunday school we had Abraham and Sarah, and the wonderful story about them having baby Isaac in their old age. Everybody likes cute babies. But there wasn’t much mention of Hagar or Ishmael. That’s an adult story. It’s not easy to explain to a child why Abraham had two wives, one of whom didn’t have any choice in the matter, or why he sent one son, Ishmael, away to almost die in the wilderness, and later tied the other one up for a burnt offering to God. This family gives the late night news a run for its money.

There are so many different ways we can look at this story, and so many different viewpoints. When you add in the fact that Abraham is an important figure for three world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the many different ways this story is embellished and interpreted, the story gets very, very big. But in some ways it’s also just a story about human beings and God. It’s about family troubles and the give-and-take of relationships.

At its heart is Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar, and their relationships with God. Who is this God that they’re following out into the wilderness? Do they really trust God, and if they do, how is that going to impact their lives?

What stood out for me when I read the story again recently was the time that was involved. The story up to this point spans 25 years. If you go back to Genesis chapter 12 and look at each time God appears in the story, you start to notice how long it takes before God’s promises actually come true. God speaks to Abraham, and then there’s silence. For years at a time.

The promise of Isaac took 25 years. It’s no wonder that Abe and Sarah improvised a little. When a baby didn’t come, Sarah decided to get one anyway, her way. And when Ishmael came, Abraham loved him as the promised son. It wasn’t the original plan, but it worked for him.

When God didn’t show up for long periods of time, they filled in those blanks themselves. They went on with life. Now maybe they believed they were actually doing what God wanted. But I wonder if they just stopped relying on God.

Does that sound at all familiar?

Maybe you can remember a time when you prayed desperately for an answer to a big dilemma. Maybe it was a relationship, a health issue, or a change in jobs – or trying to figure out what you’ll be when you grow up. When we’re hoping for such guidance, we usually have a timeline in mind, a point at which we’d really appreciate a clear directive from God. A letter or a phone call would be great, or at least a text message, but since that doesn’t normally happen, then a strong feeling for which path to choose would be nice, or some sign that we’re on the right path.

Sometimes that guidance comes, and sometimes it doesn’t. We get impatient and forget to listen, or the deadline comes and goes without any answer that we can tell. Maybe we just gradually give up expecting to hear from God at all.

The story doesn’t say why God waited so long with Abraham and Sarah. But I could guess some of the answers people might give. We tend to fill in the blanks, too.

Just imagine Abraham and Sarah at a dinner party, talking about their longing for a child, and the responses they might get.
“Well, you must just not be really ready for a baby yet, so God’s waiting.”
“You must not have enough faith. You’re just not praying hard enough. That’s why God’s not answering.”
“You must be doing something wrong, and so God’s punishing you.”
“Maybe you and Abe need to stop this whole prayer thing and go see some kind of doctor who can help you out.”

Sometimes, when we look back at a situation, we can see that God was at work in our lives and we just didn’t realize it at the time. But sometimes we don’t see much at all. Sometimes God is a mystery to us, and feels silent and unreachable.

At that point, we have a choice. We can give up and go away, leave church, stop reading the Bible, give up on the whole thing because nothing is happening. Or we can choose to be faithful, even if that means having hope when it’s not logical to do so.

We Presbyterians believe in two “p” words: providence and predestination. Providence basically means we believe in God’s good and loving care. Predestination means that at the end of all things, we believe God will be there. And somehow along the way, God is, too. God has a hand in our lives.

We’ve heard that before. The belief that God has a purpose and a promise for our lives can be used in good and bad ways. It can be used like “fate,” as an excuse not to change or try our best. It can also be used in painful ways by well-meaning folks when bad things happen to good people.

Was it really God’s plan that Sarah be childless, that Hagar be a slave, or that Ishmael be banished? The biblical writers might have thought so, in their attempts to explain God. But we’re uncomfortable with those ideas.

To continue that line of thinking, no one wants to hear that God meant for a child to die, or that sickness is part of God’s “plan” for our life. Illness and death are things that happen because the world is not yet the perfect place that God intends it to be. They are byproducts of a sinful world. Just as we do not wish sickness on our own children, so pain and sickness are not part of a loving plan that a loving God has for us.

But is it part of God’s “plan” – or whatever we’d rather call it – that we struggle, feel pain, and doubt? Some would argue yes and some would say no. What we do know is that sometimes those wilderness times of pain and doubt, the feeling that God is absent in our lives, lead to a more mature and profound faith than we had before. In the midst of pain we often discover God’s abiding presence. It doesn’t erase the difficulty, and it doesn’t mean God intended it to happen. But it may feel as though there is some purpose to suffering when we encounter God there.

Leslie D. Weatherhead, who wrote a famous sermon series years ago called “The Will of God,” calls this God’s “circumstantial” will. It wasn’t the original intention of God that bad things happen, but God is still able to work through them for good.
I think there are times we can relate to the frustration that Sarah and Abraham must have felt during their long wait. But on the positive side, we can also see God’s infinite patience with them. God keeps the promise to be part of their lives. They aren’t perfect, but God sticks with them.

In fact, God adds to the original promise. God told Abraham his descendents would be more numerous than the stars in the sky. Eventually, they were. But God also includes Hagar and Ishmael in a promise of life and descendents. Ishmael becomes the father of many nations. Even though he wasn’t part of the original promise, God loves and includes him.
Of course, they couldn’t see any of this coming. Hagar would not have appreciated some well-meaning friend telling her in the middle of the wilderness not to worry so much, because God surely had a plan.
Abraham and Sarah and Hagar remind us that God is in the midst of our stories. God doesn’t give up on us, and works through the changing circumstances of our lives. The trick most of the time is slowing ourselves down enough to look, listen, and see what God has done, and is doing.

I’d like to end with a quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It’s been a very good reminder to me. May it also serve as a prayer for your life.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. Yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow. Let them shape themselves without undue haste. Do not try to force them on as though you could be today what time – that is to say, grace – and circumstances acting on your own good will, will make you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new Spirit gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Above all, trust in the slow work of God, our loving vine-dresser. Amen.