*Due to technical issues, audio does not begin until the choral anthem.*
Over the next two weeks, we will trust the wisdom of the lectionary here in midsummer, amid family beach trips and church camps, and give ourselves over to one of the harder, and at times harsher, narrative arcs in scripture, that of Abraham, particularly when it comes to his two wives and his two sons—this complicated founding family of our faith.
Next Sunday we will meet Abraham and Isaac on the mountain of the Lord, but this week we encounter its parallel story, that of Ishmael and his mother Hagar.
Ishmael is Abraham’s eldest son, born to his second wife, Hagar, who we’re told is the enslaved Egyptian girl of his first wife, Sarah. Some chapters before, we learn how Sarah, despite the promise of God that she would conceive and bear a child, succumbs to the considerable pressure she must have felt to provide Abraham with a child, and suggests that he take Hagar as his wife, “so that she [Sarah] might have a child by her”—an arrangement utterly foreign and repulsive to us, but in those days, sadly customary.1
So Abraham takes Hagar as his wife; she bears him a son, and, to no one’s surprise, the relationship between Sarah and Hagar deteriorates rapidly.
We pick up their story some 13 years later, after God’s promise of a child to Sarah has been fulfilled, at the feast celebrating young Isaac’s third birthday—an important marker in those days, signaling that the child had made it through infancy and was likely to live. It was at this celebration, and not a moment after, that Sarah called for the other son and his mother to be cast away, presumably because, in her mind, they were no longer needed.
Two women with their sons and so much history between them, so much sadness, such atrocities, and there in the middle is father Abraham—whom tradition will remember for this faith and decisive action, but up until now in this family conflict has done nothing but dither, mope, and defer.
I.
Maybe the first thing we can say about this story is the obvious, which is that families are complicated. And not just some families, but all families—no exceptions.
This is one of the first things we make clear when I meet with couples before their weddings. Most of what we talk about is family and their families, and most of them are nervous to do so, especially in front of their fiancé. To do so would risk scaring them off right here before the wedding, but as we all know, you can only hide crazy for so long. So it’s best to get it all out there before the venue is booked, the florist, the caterer, and all the rest of it. And certainly before the vows are made.
But the wider you cast the net and the further back you go, you realize that there are no “dysfunctional families” or “crazy families,” there are just “families.” No family is immune from the hazards of living life in close relationship with others. This is no different in the family tree of the Bible, with its wide cast of characters and stories that range from the sublime to the scandalous. They are proof, as I’ve heard it put, that “God doesn’t wait to perfect us before working through us.”2 God works through all our failures as much as through our successes. Even through those deviating, forgotten branches of our family tree.
As far as the story of the Bible is concerned, this line of Hagar and Ishmael is something of a dead end.3 And for most of Christian history, this is precisely how it has been seen. From our view, as spiritual descendants of the other line —the one that runs through Isaac and Rebekah, then Jacob and Rachel, then Joseph, which eventually leads us to David and then to Jesus—ours, we claim, is the line chosen to carry out divine purpose in the world.
The way generations of the church have seen it, Isaac is the child of promise, and so Hagar and Ishmael should be nothing more than a Biblical footnote. And yet here they are, with their stories being told. Here they are receiving God’s blessing.
II.
Here Hagar is, some chapters before, with child, a child whom she loved with all her heart but that in so many ways had been thrust upon her. She’s run away at Sarah’s threats and found herself there alone in the wilderness preparing to die when an angel of the Lord appears to her, and tells her to go back to her mistress, saying, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted”—a promise remarkably similar to the one given to Abraham given now to her, this enslaved Egyptian girl! And on top of that, this angel gives her another blessing that might also sound familiar: Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
Reminiscent of a certain birth announcement recorded in the gospels—a birth of similar “non-traditional” origins, we can admit.
Theologian Phyllis Trible, in her groundbreaking work lifting up these stories of forgotten women in the Bible, says this:
“As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people. Most especially, all sorts of rejected women find their stories in her. She is the faithful maid exploited…the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young 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…the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others.”
“Hagar,” she points out, is [also] a pivotal figure in biblical theology. She is the first person in scripture whom a divine messenger visits…[She’s] the first woman to hear [an] annunciation, the only [woman] to receive a divine promise of descendants, and the first [woman in scripture] to weep for her dying child. Truly, Hagar the Egyptian, she writes, is the prototype…of all mothers in Israel.”4
And here is Ishmael. The other son. Not the son of promise—a fact of which he was no doubt made well aware through his childhood. But a son all the same, and a valued one at that. “Treasured,” as Walter Brueggemann puts it.5 He is treasured by his father Abraham, who is in anguish at the thought of losing him. And even more, Ishmael is treasured by God—God is concerned about the life of Ishmael. Before his birth, the angel of the Lord promised his mother that he would be blessed and that God would provide for him. And now here, as he lay dying, God hears his cries, comes to his aid, and promises him, too, a great nation. God was “with” him, too, we’re told.
This, too, will be a theme in the pages ahead in the Bible; the tension between sons, one who is “chosen” and the other who is “not chosen” but is nonetheless treasured by God.6 Think Jacob and Esau, think Joseph and his brothers. Think of the man with his two sons in the parable of Jesus, one who is prodigal and celebrated, and the other who is faithful but neglected. On each of these, the light our tradition focuses on one, and yet the other is still there, the story of his life still recorded in the family tree. And it’s left up for us to decide what to do with them. Perhaps even find ourselves within them. To know that we, too, are treasured even when we do not feel chosen.
And when we consider how this family tree maps onto much wider geopolitics, as the origin story of these three faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the need for this wider vision and larger heart becomes even more crucial.
III.
This is another thing that is always true about families: there is no getting past them. Even if we turn away from or distance ourselves from our families, we always do so in reference to them. But what we can do is pay attention to the patterns, values, and behaviors that define our families, so we can make clear decisions about what we’d like to take with us in life and what—in love, care, and compassion—we’d like to leave behind.
It’s important to think about which virtues and values we claim as a family; to be clear about those good things so we can be sure we practice them, keep them close, and hand them down. And on the other hand, without taking the time to see and name the harder things, the bad habits, the patterns, and even pain that has been passed down through the generations, we’re almost guaranteed to perpetuate it. As Richard Rohr has put it, “pain that is not transformed will be transmitted.” Unless we can find a way to turn our pain into something different, something new and life-giving, we will simply continue to pass it down.
And this is so hard to do. But in a sense, this is exactly the life and the work that Jesus calls us to in the gospels. In Hebrew, the word for repentance, teshuvah, literally means “to turn,” to choose a new way. This was the call Jesus made over and over in his ministry: to look back into the family history of our faith, the traditions and teachings and all that had been passed down, and be honest about what was good and right and true and that we should hold onto and be sure to take with us and pass down to our children. But also to be honest about what we need to let go of.
IV.
So he said to take hold of humility and compassion. Take hold of kindness, hospitality, and generosity—hold on tightly to these things. And as you take hold of those things, let go of others: fear and pride and violence. Let love and grace rule the day, not legalism and judgment. Remember the poor and the weak, the children, the vulnerable—remember that God is with them. Be wary of power and influence.
All of these things—the good and the bad and everything in between—are in the history and traditions of scripture; we inherit all of them in this family tree. The command to love your neighbor as yourself is right there along with “an eye for an eye.” The command to care for the vulnerable is right there next to stories like this one, where the vulnerable are cast aside by the ancestors of our faith, but not by our God.
The question is: what will we hold on to? Whose story will we choose to see? Can we accept that the God of Sarah and Isaac is the same God of Hagar and Ishmael?
This is how it must be for this promised blessing to truly extend to all people.
________________________
1 Walter Brueggemann’s treatment of this story in his commentary on Genesis for the Interpretation series has been helpful. 180-184
2 Terence E. Fretheim, The Book of Genesis, New Interpreter’s Commentary, 489
3 Brueggemann, 183
4 Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of the Biblical Narratives, 27-29
5 Brueggemann, 182-184
6 Ibid., 183