Sermon, June 22, 2008 -- Gen 21:1-21

“Call Me Ishmael” (Gen 21:1-21)
Rick Olson, June 22, 2008

This is a tale of two children. Isaac is a child of the promise, a son of the covenant between God and Abraham. Ishmael is a child of desperation, of barrenness and brokenness and embarrassment . . . Sarah remembers when Ishmael was born, what it felt like when Hagar taunted her and laughed at her, and intimated she was not-quite-woman because she couldn’t give her husband an heir.

And now, after all that, after she laughed in bitter humor at God’s promise she would conceive, after cowering in her tent at God’s voice, we get an answer to the question posed to her in her tent way back at the Oaks of Mamre: “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” And the answer we get is “no.” In stately understatement, we hear the good news: “The LORD dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had promised.” Dealing as said, doing as promised – once again, God speaks – on a dusty road, inside a hot tent – and newness is the result, a new creation is the result. And Abraham is a hundred years old, well past the time of child-birth, and it’s no picnic for Sarah at ninety . . . but Sarah is joyous, she laughs again, this time in delight, and it’s light-years removed from that hot tent by the Oaks of Mamre . . . God has done a brand new thing, opened a new avenue, sewed a new seed. Sarah names her son Yitzak, Isaac, laughter in Hebrew, saying “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

And yet . . . all the hoopla seems . . . muted, somehow. All the laughter, the gratitude, the parties . . . it’s only eight verses long. God did what God promised, gave Sarah a son, she named him laughter, and Abraham threw a party. It’s a simple little scene, with a simple little plot – a child is born, his parents rejoice – and it should remind us of something – that nevertheless changes the world. It’s through these ordinary, day-to-day activities – through births and deaths and the living in between – that God works God’s wondrous ways.
But there’s a cloud hanging over the proceedings, and it’s a cloud with a name. Call it Ishmael. He hovers in the background like a low-grade fever, and finally breaks out into our world. Because Ishmael has to be taken care of, he has to be satisfied . . . after all, he’s the innocent son who hasn’t been chosen, but it’s through no fault of his own. Who knows why God does what God does? I certainly have no idea why it’s Isaac over Ishmael, do you? It is what it is. God is God and does whatever God darn well pleases, and doesn’t have to justify it to us. But God’s own justice – not yours or mine or your Aunt Edna’s – demands that Ishmael be taken care of, and so he breaks into our happy little fantasy about fulfilled promises and offspring like the stars in the sky. There’s unfinished business here – what’s to be done with Ishmael?

And it all starts with Sarah, sitting and chatting with the other women, working on some knitting, and she looks over and sees Ishmael, laughing and playing and running on the playground. She sees him swinging on Isaac’s swings, climbing on Isaac’s jungle-gym, and riding on Isaac’s merry-go-round that takes you round and round until you fall off and throw up. And she just snaps. Ishmael’s laughter brings all Hagar’s taunting words and humiliation back to her, and she goes to Abraham and says “Cast out the slave-woman and her son into the desert, for I won’t have him inheriting along with my son.”

Now, this catches old Abraham off-guard – he’d thought things were going pretty well. After all, he’d worked pretty hard, raised lots of sheep and cattle, and bought quite the household full of slaves. By anybody’s accounts, he was a wealthy man. In addition, he’s got a son, an heir to all his fortune, and a back-up as well, just in case. It seemed to him to be his salad days, where he could just sort of kick back and let things slide . . . and now this happens, and it upsets his equilibrium, it unbalances the his life’s serene stability. The original Hebrew sums it up best – it’s evil in his eyes.

But God says “Don’t sweat it – do whatever she says. Because it’s through Isaac that offspring will be named for you.” It’s like God’s said all along – Isaac’s the one, not Ishmael. And God says, “Besides, I’ll make a nation of him as well, because he is your offspring.” So Abraham, always obedient, gets up early the next morning, gives Hagar Ishmael and a water-skin, and casts them out into the desert.

Now this isn’t the first time Hagar’s gone into the desert. The last time an Angel came to her, but that was before, when she carried Abraham’s only son, and now there’s one heir too many, and the sun beats on her like a hammer, it slashes at her, sweat evaporates off her like steam. She can feel herself withering, drying up as she stumbles over the sand. And all she can see are stunted bushes and scraggly trees, hunched over like skeletons in the glare.

She tries to conserve her water, tries to make it last, but it runs out, and she gives the last little sip to Ishmael and sits him down under a slim shade of a bush, and lurches off a hundred yards or so and sits down to die. She can’t see her son from where she sits, and that’s how she wants it. She can’t bear to see him die. But she can hear him, his cries weaker and weaker as he screams for his mother, and she lifts up her voice to the skies and joins in a wail of despair.

And God hears the child’s cries there in the wilderness and sends an angel saying: “What’s the matter with you, Hagar? Don’t be afraid, God’s heard the boy’s voice where he is. Go pick him up, hold him in your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.”

Suddenly, she sees what she could have sworn wasn’t there before – a well, complete with palm trees and playful breeze, and a maybe a margarita or two, and she runs to it and brings her son a drink. And from that day forward, God is with the boy and he grows up strong and mighty, he can hit a boar’s eye at a hundred paces he’s so good. And he lives in the wilderness and Hagar gets him a wife from her people in Egypt.

And this salvation in the desert is just as miraculous – and much more dramatic – than Isaac’s birth, and maybe even more shocking, because—and this is important!—God saves the un-chosen just like the chosen! There’s no doubt Isaac is the main man, the real deal, that it’s through him God’s people will be born, and yet . . . God saves Ishmael too! God saves the un-chosen!

But it’s not without pain, not without consequence – Ishmael is rescued all right, but only just . . . he’s brought back from annihilation’s brink, from certain death . . . and it’s not all sweetness and light for the chosen, either. We know what Ishmael’s banishment will lead to, we know where that cruelty will end. Twenty-five-hundred years later, another religion will arise from the hot sand, claiming ancestry from Abraham through Ishmael, and there seems to be no end to the conflict . . .

What do we do with Ishmael? He’s haunted us like a bad dream, we wrestle with it endlessly and it’s happening in our denomination even as we speak. That’s what the battle over declaring Jesus the only way to God, the one we wrangled over several years ago, is really all about . . . it’s about what to do with Ishmael, what to do with the “other.” How do we even talk to other faiths – like Islam – if we start by saying “believe what we believe or else?” What do we teach our children about them, how do we get along? What do we do with Ishmael?

What God does with him is take care of him . . . the text is clear about that. Abraham caves in to Sarah – at God’s insistence, mind you – and sends Hagar and Ishmael into Beer-Sheba’s oven. And God does take care of him, he’s saved in the end, and so is that the answer? Do we throw him out into the desert, on a water-skin and a prayer? Do we throw him out and let God take care of him, in all good hope he’ll be rescued? Somehow, I don’t think dumping women and children into the desert is good behavior to model.

Look at the original blessing, the original promise at Haran, way back in chapter 12: Abraham is blessed so that he can be a blessing, and it echoes the original blessing in Genesis one . . . God gave us the earth for our nurture, and for us, in turn, to nurture . . . we are blessed to be a blessing. We are God’s chosen people so we can do God’s work, right alongside God. Our chosen-ness, our election, as we Protestants like to call it, is for a purpose, and that is to be God’s agents in the world. Mission is inextricably linked with our status as chosen people . . . the two are inseparable, opposite sides of the coin. Blessed to be a blessing, chosen to do God’s work.

But God’s work with Ishmael shows us something else, as well. There are hints of it elsewhere – when Abraham told Abimelech’s men that Sarah was his sister, it is God that keeps Abimelech—a Philistine, not one of the chosen—from sin. When Isaac’s servant goes to Laban, Laban greets him saying “Come in, O blessed of the Lord!” If God had only been active in Abraham’s family of the promise, how did Laban know about God? And in Ishmael, we see it all spelled out – God works in the world outside and apart from God’s chosen people. Isaac’s the chosen son, there’s no doubt about it, but God rescues Ishmael the un-chosen anyway. Kind of makes you wonder what it means to be chosen, doesn’t it? If God rescues the un-chosen anyway, what are we chosen for?

The lead character in Moby Dick—arguably the greatest American novel—is called Ishmael, and he begins the book and ends it the same way—alone. He wanders the docks of Manhattan, isolated in the hustle and bustle, and joins the crew of Ahab’s ship. By story’s end he’s alone again, floating on a coffin, exiled even from death’s dark fellowship. Call him Ishmael. And this theme of alienation pervades our arts, our literature and movies and plays . . . we flock to movies about outsiders—Liza Doolittle, Dirty Harry, Shane—people who are apart or shunned or alienated from society. We gobble up mysteries with private-eye-loners and westerns with strong silent types who prevail against all the odds, who are redeemed in the end, like . . . Ishmael. Could it be we identify with these stories? Do we feel on the outside, shunned, cast into the wilderness, do we feel un-chosen? Sometimes – even in all our privilege and comfort and relative wealth—we are the alienated ones, we are the outsiders, we are the “other.” Call us Ishmael . . .

And the glorious fact is that God rescues us just like Ishmael. God comes to us where we are and says “I have heard your cry” and there it is, God’s oasis of love and acceptance. We know we are chosen by God, we know we are heirs to Abraham, children of the promise, grafted into Israel’s covenant through the life and death of Jesus Christ. And we also know that nobody can box God in, nobody can contain the wildness, the utter freedom of God . . . God is working in the world, outside the bounds of what we know, and I for one can’t say in what way. The Spirit blows where it will, and we cannot know from where it comes or where it goes. I’m just glad it stopped here. Amen