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Mamaroneck United Loving God and Neighbor... |
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Methodist Church |
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Sixth Sunday after Pentecost Our Family Tree Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39 The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.
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Funny what you find out about your family history with only a small effort. I was forty or so when I began to explore my own family tree, and in that process came to understand something about my mother’s father. His name was Levi Pinckney Hendrix, although most of his friends called him “Lee.” Oddly, my grandmother always called him “Hendrix.” He died when I was eleven, and when I began asking about him learned that he grew up in a remote South Carolina farming village. He left home when he was about 20 and rarely went back. I cannot remember his talking about that place or his family in my presence.
With some further exploring, I found out at least part of the reason for this generational disconnect. At the beginning of the century a flu epidemic ravaged the area, and on July 10, 1909 Lee Hendrix’s mother, Emma, and Lucy, his younger sister, both died. His father had died six years earlier, so at 19 Lee Hendrix found himself an orphan. He left home, worked for a while in Poukeepsie for the railroad, served in France in World War I, and eventually became a clerk in a general store. From there he took a job traveling about the countryside selling carbide gas lighting systems. He was 30 years old when he came to Woodford, another farming village. He had a new Ford Model-T, but he couldn’t drive. He needed a driver who knew the territory. Fortunately for both of them, he met my grandmother, Marie, and promptly married her.
She was just 20, but Marie’s mother had died only two months before her marriage to Lee. Eager to establish a new home, swept off her feet by Lee and his flashy new car, Marie took on the challenge of learning to drive. Soon she was comfortable driving on rutted dirt roads, and the young couple went on their rounds to bring light to rural Orangeburg County. For his part, Lee never drove the Model-T. Marie enjoyed driving, and she drove until well in her eighties, never using power steering and never, ever, taking a driving test to obtain her license.
Nine months and ten days after Marie and Lee married, their oldest son was born. Six months after this birth, Marie’s father died, and the couple, both now orphans, moved to Columbia. Rural electricity had put Lee Hendrix out of a job, so he began selling used furniture to the families of the young soldiers going through basic training at Fort Jackson. They looked ahead, not back.
Family systems theorists note that members of each new generation must establish their own identities and then find independence. This launching process, often occurring around the time of high school and college graduations, is never truly easy. It is fraught with perils for both parents and children because significant changes occur in families whenever a member of the family leaves. And family theorists also note that even when you leave your family physically, some part of your family continues in your heart, your mind, and your soul. In a sense, families are forever. The same can be said of the families of our ancestors in the faith, including the Abraham’s. The Bible’s families are forever, too.
So we know that Abraham’s family was complex. He and Sarah welcomed God’s promise of a son, an heir. But when Sarah continued childless, she tried to take control. She though she believed God, she supposed that God needed a bit of help. So she gave her slave Hagar to Abraham as a kind of surrogate mother. The plan worked, and soon Ishmael was born to Abraham and Hagar. The boy’s name literally means, “God listens.” To whom is God listening? Perhaps God heard Abraham’s desire for a son and heir; perhaps God heard Sarah in her need for Abraham’s fulfillment; perhaps it is Hagar to whom God listens.
But Sarah’s plan to use Hagar backfires, like most of our efforts to control God. Hagar the slave now feels superior to Sarah. And Sarah is jealous, not proud of Ishmael. Her jealousy becomes all the more intense when her own son, Isaac, is born. So Sarah demands: Hagar and her son have to go.
It is her right, of course; Hagar is her slave. Both God and Abraham concede her authority. But Abraham is distressed. Ishmael is his son, too. When God vouches for the safety of the boy, Abraham complies. Hagar and Ishmael are cast out into the wilderness. Abandoned to the harsh elements of the desert, they are fully, and desperately, in God’s hands.
It is a troubling story, and we wonder why it lingers in our Bible. Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann notes the odd affirmation of Ishmael in the story. He says: “God has this special commitment to Ishmael. For some inscrutable reason, God is not quite prepared to yield easily to his own essential plot.” Then Brueggemann adds: “God cares for this outsider whom the tradition wants to abandon.” (Brueggemann, Genesis, page 183.)
It’s never easy for parents to let sons and daughters go into the world, especially when the launching seems premature. And it is never easy for children to take their place in the world, especially when they think that they don’t have their parents’ blessing. It is an odd and telling thing to notice that in these early chapters of Genesis, the story of who we are as a family of faith, so many sons come into conflict with each other and with their fathers: Cain, Abel, and their father, Adam; Ishmael, Isaac and their father, Abraham; Esau, Jacob and their father, Isaac. And I note that in each of these families, the mother has a place of prominence and power as well.
But here is the promise: God is with them all, together; and God is with each of them individually. Here in our lesson, when Hagar and Ishmael run out of the resources supplied by Abraham, they prepare to die. Hagar abandons Ishmael to death. But, says the text, “God heard the boy.” (Genesis 21:17, New Revised Standard Version) Maybe Ishmael’s name, “God listens,” implies that God hears his cry.
And maybe that is why this very strange lesson remains here, troubling this story about Abraham, Sarah and Isaac. Perhaps every family has its troubles, as well as every life. Perhaps we’re invited to remember through this troubling story that God is there with us, too. We are more deeply related to Ishmael than we might think. Each of us longs to believe that God cares, that God loves, that God hears.
If so, we do well to remember that Ishmael is part of our family, and we are part of his. If God can care for this outsider, then God may indeed care for the world more deeply than we imagine. If God can care for the outcasts of the world, like Ishmael, then there are at least a few implications for us.
First, we do well to remember that God is present whenever, wherever, and however we feel cast aside by our own world, our own problems, or our own families. Jesus says much the same thing in today’s gospel lesson from Matthew. Talking to disciples who may experience hardship, Jesus says: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:29-31) As African-Americans, keepers of hope in spite of hopeless circumstances cherished the notion of God’s final authority. Or, as they remind themselves and us, “God makes a way out of no way.” God is present whenever we’re in the wilderness.
Second, if God cares for those who, like Ishmael, are outcasts in the world of the Bible, then perhaps we are called discern the place and the purpose of the outcasts we see around us – the poor, the fearful, the hungry, the marginalized, and the hopeless. When God listens to Ishmael, I cannot help but remember that Egypt’s Hebrew slaves come to new freedom when God hears their cries as well. Some theologians rightly remind us that God surely prefers the poor and the marginalized to the well-fed and the powerful. Maybe God listens to our enemies, too, and all those whose lives we only barely comprehend. If God cares for outcasts, we may be called to listen as well – to God, and to all those whom we’ve considered god-less.
Third, and finally, I recall that this story reminds us that we have deep kinship with Ishmael’s descendents, too. We who claim Abraham as Christianity’s spiritual father are cousins, in a sense, to Ishmael’s descendents. We know that we are related, through Sarah and Isaac, to our Jewish cousins. But we are also related, deeply connected, to Hagar and Ishmael and their descendents: the 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide. Muslims trace their lineage to Abraham, too, through Ishmael. If Ishmael is the one to whom God listens, we do well to listen both to each other and to the God to whom we both pray.
As a small first step in listening to each other, I regularly participate in a monthly dialogue with a few Christian and Jewish neighbors. During the coming year, our congregation has been invited to share with both Jews and other Christians in studying several Passover seder texts, so that we might write one together and share a Passover meal in the spring. That’s a good first step in deepening relationships with our cousins. Much more, I trust, will be done.
It’s true. You never know what you might discover when you take a look at your family tree. At the very least, we come to a sense of our common humanity. And at best we see that we are more closely related to our world than we thought. Imagine that.
Amen.
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