“Promises, Promises”
Genesis 21-8-21
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/22/14
You know, if one were to stop and really consider God’s
choices of people through whom to be known and through whom to bless the earth,
one might quickly decide, indeed, in less than half of the first book of the
Bible itself, that Yahweh is either terribly naïve, or struggling to figure out
the learning curve of working with human creatures.
Think about Adam and Eve.
In this wonderful story of divine purpose, God creates two human beings
and calls them “good,” but in less time than it will take a fig leaf to wilt,
the pair has become overwhelmed by a snakish hunger to taste for themselves
knowledge and authority meant only for God.
Then, with their sons, that hunger devolves even further. It becomes a ravenous jealousy that compels
the elder son to lure the younger out into the wilderness for a scene straight
out of Criminal Minds.
In two generations, the goodness of God’s creation already
begins to hide behind the scaly skin of pride, envy, fear, and the violence to
which such things inevitably lead.
Fast forward to Abram.
To this random, simple man, God says, “Go to the land that I will show
you. I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you…and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had
told him.” (from Gen. 12:1-4) In
time, Abram becomes “Abraham,” “Father of Many.”
It all sounds so high and holy, but along the way Abraham
keeps finding himself racked with challenges and controversy. For the most part, his problems stem from the
escalating tension between Sarah and Hagar.
Sarah is, of course, the elder, primary wife. Though she is aware of God’s promise to her
husband, she declares herself too old to figure into the blessing. Convinced that God’s promise needs her help,
Sarah offers to Abraham, her slave girl, Hagar, as a kind of surrogate. As the emergency, back-up wife, the youthful
Hagar can provide the children God promises, but whom Sarah decides the she
must guarantee.
Then, when Hagar does conceive, things get ugly. She taunts and sneers at Sarah. The arrangement may be Sarah’s idea, but
suddenly threatened by that conniving, gloating little pregnant Jezebel, Sarah runs straight to Abraham and screams, “This
is all your fault!”
“What?” says a stunned Abraham. “My fault?
But you…I mean… well, she’s your slave girl. You
handle it!”
Go back and look at the stories – Adam, Abraham, Isaac and
so many other patriarchs are masters
at the art of conflict avoidance. As we
have seen, Sarah, like most of the matriarchs,
is not. She deliberately makes Hagar’s
life miserable. When the younger woman
has endured enough abuse, she runs away.
The whole thing is pure drama.
It’s like Survivor, Desperate
Housewives, and Jerry Springer
all rolled into one. It leaves you
crying out for Dr. Phil!
An angel finds Hagar, grieving loudly by a wilderness
spring. “Go on back to the family,” says
the angel. “Your child is going to be
okay. Oh, he’ll be a wild one. He’ll live at odds with just about everyone,
but he’ll be okay. God will see to it.”
Hagar returns, and she gives birth to a son. Grateful to God for delivering her from the
wilderness, she names her son Ishmael,
which means “God hears.”
After all this excitement, God turns and promises a child
to Sarah. She is old. Abraham is older. Sarah laughs off God’s promise the way she
would laugh off a child’s promise to take full responsibility for the new puppy
if he can just have one.
Some months later, though, she laughs again. And Abraham names their son, Isaac: “He Who
Laughs.”
All goes well until, at the celebration on the day that
Isaac is weaned, Sarah sees Isaac playing with his older brother. She knows what happens to younger sons in a
patriarchal culture. They get
nothing. And once again, snakish
jealousy and fear coil up tight in her belly.
Her eyes narrow, and she strikes.
“Abraham,” she hisses, “Get rid of this slave woman and her
filthy son! He will not take my son’s
inheritance!”
“Honey, let’s talk,” pleads Abraham.
“We will talk when they are gone!” snaps Sarah.
Abraham is wearied and crushed, but his actions say, ‘Yes, dear.’
“It’s okay,” God tells Abraham. “Do what Sarah says. I got this.”
It is only now that Abraham learns of God’s prenatal
promise to Ishmael. It sounds similar to
the promise God makes to Abraham himself before he ever leaves the land of
Ur. It even has echoes of the promise
God makes to him and Sarah, the promise at which Sarah laughs.
Promises, promises.
Abraham and his family are both tragic and comic in their
all-too-familiar dysfunction. And in the
midst of their struggles we witness not so much the birth of something new, but
maybe something more like the very first cell division within a fertilized
egg. Two promises emerge in this
story. God makes both promises. And they are, at the same time, very
different and inextricable from one another.
One promise bears witness to the reconstructive power of God’s responsive grace, and the other to
creative purity God’s initiating
grace.
Walter Brueggemann describes the differences this way:
“Ishmael is a child gotten by skillful determination
and planning. As oldest son, Ishmael
is the child of ‘entitlement’ in possessing all natural rights…[while] Isaac is
a gift to be explained in no other way than as a wonder…Hagar and Ishmael…are
located in the kingdom of necessity, coercion, and fate,” says
Brueggemann. “Sarah and Isaac…are
located in the kingdom of gift, freedom, and destiny.”1
The promise to Ishmael represents God’s loving and
redemptive response to all of our
determined, well-planned, and often well-intentioned efforts to control the
present and to try to “coerce” out of it an agreeable future. The story says to us that God surrounds all
of our Ishmaels, all of our hard work, all of our test-tube babies, if you
will, and says, ‘I hear you, but you have
created this out of impatience and pride.
For you, though, I’ll make the best of it. I promise.
And here, here’s a toothpick.
You’ve got some apple stuck in your teeth, again.’
The promise is usually for some “great nation,” for some
level of prosperity, perhaps even for a significant level of prosperity. That prosperity, however, always comes at significant
expense. Cain finds that out. Jacob finds that out, so does King
David. The more the climate changes, the
more that violence entertains us, and the more that fundamentalism crowds out
faith, humankind, if we pay attention, continues to learn that.
Isaac represents the other promise. He becomes the human symbol of the promise of
God’s pristine grace – a gift that comes to us not only undeserved and
unrequested, but unimagined. Isaac, you
see, is the gift that comes from the future of God’s own imagining.
In his book A New Kind of Christianity, Brian
McLaren makes this keen observation about God’s promises and our relationship
with them: “We do not conceive of our faith primarily as a promise to our
ancestors, a vow to dutifully carry on something that was theirs and we have
inherited. No,” says McLaren, “it is
more like God’s promise uttered to us from the future, toward which we reach an
outstretched and hopeful hand – just as our ancestors did. The gospel,” he says, “is for us a beckoning,
a summons, always associated with…verbs like ‘leave,’ ‘come,’ ‘go,’
‘follow.’…the gospel is for us a movement, a pioneering adventure.”2
Perhaps it is fair to say that virtually every nation and
institution in the world, including our nation and our church, are
Ishmaels. And many of them do, indeed,
hold great blessing for us and others, so long as we tend them with humility,
gratitude, love, and community. But it
is the nature of all Ishmaels to live and work over against each other like
great tribes of Sarahs and Hagars – twin mothers of the same son – and like so
many warring kingdoms of Jacobs and Esaus – twin sons of the same mother. Desperate for assurance, we claim God’s
particular blessings on our own nations, or denominations, or political parties,
or whatever else. And our claims often feel justified, because God, being
endlessly gracious, does bless and work with our Ishmaelite efforts. And God does so, I think, for our sake. God blesses our Ishmaels to whatever extent
God must in order to redeem and redirect them, and, thus, to transform them
into lenses through which we recognize, receive, and share the greater promise.
The promise of God’s initiative comes as a gift to all
humankind, for all creation. This
promise still speaks to and beckons us from God’s
future. And regardless of which side of
some Ishmaelite distinction we may occupy, God’s promise, personified in Isaac
and in Jesus, the Christ, remains pristine and open to, for and through every one of us. It is the animating promise of the entire
universe. It always comes as the command
to “leave, come, go, or follow.” It comes as the challenging call to love and
to trust that which we can only see and know, as Paul says, “in a mirror,
dimly.” (1Cor. 13:12a)
And God's promise always comes as a disrupting wonder, as a
gift, as something that we could and would never have imagined on our own.
1Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, (From the Interpretation commentary series). John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 184.
2Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten
Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. Harper One, p. 28.
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