God’s Creative Connection, Part 4: Creating Promise out of Pain

Genesis21:8-21

Last week there was an interesting news item from Saudi Arabia. The crown prince was removed from the line of succession. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy that has been ruled by the House of Saud for many generations, a large clan with many princes standing in line waiting for the possible chance to become king. The current king has been on the throne for only two years. Just a few days ago, he removed the crown prince, who is his nephew, in favor of the next-in-line prince – who is his son.

Not a terrible great surprise, of course, that he would want to give this to his own son. But that he actually did it, upending centuries of tradition, that was a surprise. It is an interesting reminder that ancient family rivalries still exist. We haven’t outgrown them.

There are times in the course of studying the book of Genesis I am very aware of what an old, old story it is. But when I consider stories like this one out of Saudi Arabia, I am reminded that some things never change.

Let’s put today’s text into context. For many years, God has promised Abraham a son. But after decades of trying and hoping and praying, Sarah and Abraham were still childless. Remember the story we read last week, where messengers from God came to say Sarah would bear a child in due time – at the age of 90. And neither Abraham nor Sarah could do anything but laugh at the absurdity.

Abraham and Sarah had stopped believing that God would give them a child. So they had taken things into their own hands. Sometime before that visit of the three divine messengers, Sarah had made the decision to give her slave Hagar to Abraham, in the hope that Hagar would become pregnant in her stead. Abraham would have an heir, and Sarah would, by rights of ownership, have a son.

We could tell right away that this was not going to go well. Immediately, Sarah was overcome by jealousy. A pregnant Hagar was simply too much for Sarah to bear, and in her rage she made Hagar’s life hell.

Hagar ran away, out into the wilderness, with no plan, no good options. She couldn’t bear the thought of living under Sarah’s rule anymore.

That was the first time Hagar heard the voice of God speaking to her. Out in the wilderness God told Hagar the plans he had for her. She would bear a son who would be called Ishmael, which means the Lord hears. God tells Hagar that her son Ishmael will live at odds with all his kin. But he will, indeed live. Hagar responds by naming this God whom she has never before heard. She calls him El-Roi, meaning “God sees.”

Hagar does then return to Sarah and in due time gives birth to Abraham’s first born son.  And so, perhaps, they assumed the matter of the promised child had been settled, and they were quite surprised when the mysterious messengers came to them saying Sarah would have a child. By this time, Ishmael was at least ten years old.

When Sarah’s son, Isaac, was old enough to be weaned, probably around two years old, Abraham threw a celebration for him. But, once again, the old rivalry emerged between the two mothers. Once again, Sarah is afraid. She is afraid the child Ishmael will take something away from her son.

This is not a pretty emotion. We don’t admire Sarah for her fear and jealousy and lack of faith she so often exposes. But, even so, we might understand in some small way, the protectiveness. Yes, Sarah’s faith is smaller than it should be, but our faith is often smaller than it should be.

And yes, it might shock us that Sarah seems to care nothing about the welfare of Ishmael or Hagar. But to her, it is a question of survival and the protection of her own blood. Ishmael is not her blood – only Isaac is.

So Hagar and Ishmael are banished to the wilderness, although it seems to grieve Abraham deeply. He gets up early in the morning with her, gives her a skin of water and some bread, which he surely knows is not enough. And with some tenderness, but no real sense of responsibility, sends her on her way. He says goodbye to his son, probably not expecting to see him again.

We are told Hagar wanders about the wilderness – wanders! We have to wonder about this a little. Does she not realize the danger? Or is she already, at the outset, drained of hope? Does Hagar have any expectation that she and Ishmael will survive this journey?

In a way, Hagar is in a situation much like Sarah was. A promise has been given, but it is hard to see how that promise can be fulfilled. How does faith sustain itself in a time and place like this? How do you hold on to hope in a hopeless place?

There are countless stories to be told about women like Hagar, who find themselves in a situation that appears hopeless. One of them, we read in our book club last month – Enrique’s Journey, tells a story about women like Hagar. Central American who find themselves alone with their children, unable to make a living for themselves and their children, are faced with stark choices. They face barriers of economic injustice, sexism, and ageism that prevent them from the possibility of supporting their families. It isn’t about being able to buy the children iPhones – it is about being able to give them food and send them to school.

In an earlier time, it would have been their husbands stealing across borders to find work and support their families back home in Honduras, Guatemala, or Mexico. These journeys made in the hopes that the children would make a better life than their parents ever could. But in an age of broken families, so often now it is the women making the trip. They leave their children behind with grandmothers, aunts, neighbors – or alone. The fathers have disappeared; the mothers are the only ones to go, to make this dangerous journey, for the sake of the children.

Enrique’s mother, Lourdes, made this journey, leaving her daughter with a grandmother, and her son, Enrique, with his father. But soon Enrique’s father abandoned him, and then Enrique was essentially alone, drifting from one relative to another. And every day, Lourdes was faced with the choice of staying in the US where she could earn enough money to support her children, and returning home where she could hold them in her arms. She had to choose between giving them the security of a future and the security of her love. What would you do?

While we have not had to make these kinds of choices, anyone who has ever loved anyone might have some sympathy, some compassion, for the Hagars and the Lourdeses of the world; for the woman who is faced with protecting her child from the harsh world, and finding that she is no match for the harshness of the world; for the woman forced to let go of her child and look for hope somewhere else.

The book of Genesis doesn’t tell us much at all about Hagar. She wanders the wilderness until she runs out of water, then she leaves her child Ishmael in the shade and goes off a way from him, where she gives in to her grief. She cries out – and God hears. God hears Hagar and Ishmael and leads them to water.

We don’t get to know much of anything about Hagar from the book of Genesis – this is the last we hear of her. But Hagar plays a very important role in another religion: Islam. The story told in Islamic tradition is that Hagar did not just sit down and cry after running out of water. She ran up to the top of one mountain, As Safa, to see if there was anyone who could help her. Seeing no one, she ran down and then up a mountain opposite, Al Marwa, to see if there was anyone on that side. Hagar is said to have traced this path seven times, desperately seeking help, before she heard the voice of God speaking to her, guiding her to the source of water that would save Hagar and Ishmael and the generations to come.

Together, the two stories, from Genesis and from Islam, tell us something about survival and hope. Hagar could not save her son without God’s help. I believe she knew that. I think we all have had moments in life when we knew that without God’s help, we ourselves and our loved ones would be without hope. So we pray. We listen and look. We go out in search of what we need, for ourselves and our loved ones, because we believe and we hope that, one way or another, God will provide. God will abide with us, wherever we are. God will be faithful to God’s promises. And for this we are grateful.

All thanks be to God.

Photo: “Riyadh had several days of significant rain earlier in the week, which is why we found pools of water in a gully that leads into the wadi.”  Peter Dowley from Dubai, United Arab Emirates - Water in the desert! https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32187831

God’s Creative Connection, Part 3: Creative Hospitality

Genesis18:1-15

Once my mother forgot that she invited a guest for dinner. We were midway through our meal at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang. There he was, all dressed up and smiling, prepared to be a guest. My mother was acutely embarrassed, as well as panicked. She reacted quickly, though, and gathered us all together to go out to a nearby restaurant with our guest, as though she had planned it that way all along. For the first and only time in my life I was encouraged to eat a second dinner – a special treat. My mother was a delightful hostess all through the meal. I always found it remarkable that she was able to recover so well and turn a near crisis into a very enjoyable evening.

This was an unusual experience, but actually, hospitality was an ordinary everyday thing for my mother. My mother was a generous host. She didn’t have much but she was open-handed with what she had. She worked with many young immigrant women, and she opened our home to them as if they were family. She made sure they always felt loved and wanted and cared for in a strange land.

She always cared about her guests’ comfort, no matter who they were. She was positively scandalized if I ever forgot to offer a guest something to eat and drink. And she wouldn’t offer just anything – she paid attention to what her guests liked, and she would go out of her way to make sure they had it. It gave her pleasure to do so. She managed to treat her guests like royalty without ever making them feel self-conscious.

This was a kind of old fashioned hospitality, maybe. Perhaps even Abrahamic hospitality.

The New Testament book of Hebrews encourages us to show hospitality to strangers because, in doing so, some have entertained angels. We have always understood that verse as a reference to this story of Abraham and Sarah. In the first sentence of this story, we are told the Lord appeared to Abraham. The second sentence says there were three men. Then in the fourth sentence, Abraham addressed the three men as “my lord,” but in this case the term is simply one of respect. It certainly doesn’t seem as though Abraham knew he was standing in front of messengers of the Lord. He just greeted them as travelers deserving of whatever he could offer them.

The moment he saw them, he immediately sprang into action and began over-functioning.  He told Sarah how to make bread, as if she needed him to do that. He personally selected a calf from the herd and had the servant prepare it. They all moved as quickly as possible, because a simple snack was not going to cut it for Abraham. His guests deserved the best.

At last, when they were enjoying the meal prepared for them, and Abraham was standing by closely to be sure that his guests should want for nothing, the strangers begin to give us a glimpse of who they are. They say, “Where is your wife Sarah?” How do they know Sarah’s name? They say, “In due time, Sarah will have a son.” In due time? How do they know that Sarah will have a child – a son even?

Sarah, standing behind the tent wall, laughed into her hand – quietly, politely, surely not wanting to offend these guests, but really – a child? Honestly. The guests say, “Why did she laugh?” How do they know that Sarah laughed?

These strange travelers seem to know everything, which seems a little jarring to me. But Abraham and Sarah don’t appear to be fazed by it. Perhaps they are not unaccustomed to meeting angels on the road – or perhaps it is just that their outrageous announcement takes all the oxygen out of the room. 90-year-old Sarah is going to have a baby.

Of course, she laughed. In the previous chapter, Abraham fell on his face laughing at the suggestion his old wife Sarah should become pregnant. It’s just hard to believe – for both Abraham and Sarah. But the visitors say, “Is anything too wonderful, or too hard, for God?”

Is anything too hard for God?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? How do you want to answer that? Maybe you want to say that the correct answer is no, there is nothing too hard for God. And yet there are certain times and circumstances when it is very hard for you to believe it – that there are some things that really do seem too hard for God.

Neither Abraham nor Sarah found it easy to believe that God could give them a son at this stage of their lives. They had long ago stopped believing this was in the realm of possibility. Yet, neither one of them had an answer to these messengers’ very provocative announcement.

In a little while, they would come to know the truth of it. Sarah would give birth to her son Isaac – whose name means laughter, by the way. He would be the long-delayed but finally delivered promise God made to Abraham. And he would give Sarah immense joy in her old age. And – we wondered at the roundtable: would any of this have happened if Abraham had failed to welcome these three strangers?

What if Abraham had ignored them and let them continue on their journey without any rest or refreshment? What if Abraham had shown no curiosity or care for who they were and what they needed? What if he had turned his back on them because they were not friend or family? How different would things be?

Science has shown us that something as minute as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can lead to dramatic changes in weather patterns in a far time and place. How much might our small actions impact the world we live in? How can a small act of hospitality change the world?

When we think of hospitality we might think of ladies in aprons with trays, but it’s so much more than that. To practice true hospitality is to open yourself to receiving someone just for who they are. And when you do this you open yourself to receiving something you need.  And this is why hospitality is an act of creativity: because you find yourself playing a part in the ongoing creative work of the world, you find yourself getting involved in God’s business of making a way out of no way. And when you do you will always be surprised.

Maybe not as surprised as Abraham and Sarah were, but surprised.

We will never know, of course, if Abraham’s hospitality that day made a difference in the plans God had for their lives. It may very well be that this visit had nothing to do with the birth of Isaac. But it is interesting to take note of what happens at the end of this visit – in the next verses. Abraham walks out with the travelers as they resume their journey, kind of the way you might walk your guests out to their car, and here is where God chooses to confide in him certain plans for the city of Sodom.

Sodom had become a wicked place and, God tells Abraham, there is a plan to destroy it. Just wipe it off the face of the earth. Then Abraham does an extraordinary thing, something we might not have thought possible, except that it is written in the pages of the scriptures. Abraham persuades God to change God’s plan. He negotiates a different outcome.

And so it’s like this: Abraham opened his home, opened his heart, to three wayfaring strangers and he was given an opportunity to change the world.

If we are open to receiving, God will give us what we need. If we are open to taking part in it, God will make us partners in the ongoing creation of this world.

What do you have to give, and what, in return, do you need? we all have both. Are you willing to give it? And are you open to receiving it?