Scripture: Genesis 21: 8-21 and Galatians 4: 21-31
Sermon: Not as Orphans
Topics: Orphans, Fear, Hagar
Preached Sunday August 6 pm 2000 Woodlawn
Rev. Mike Abma
GENESIS 21:8-21
8 The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac.10So she said to Abraham, ‘Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.’11The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.12But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named after you.13As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.’ 14So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.
15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child.’ And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.18Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.’ 19Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.
20 God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. 21He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION — ORPHANS
Have you ever noticed how many of the most popular stories of all time are about orphans:
* Over a hundred years ago the great English serial writer, Charles Dickens, captured people’s imaginations with Oliver Twist and a number of other orphan tales.
* A few decades later the Canadian author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, told the charming story of a talkative red-haired orphan who is reluctantly adopted by an aging brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, in Anne of Green Gables.
* And today, the publishing sensation is another orphan, Harry Potter of Hogwart’s fame, the lightening scarred, wizard prodigy conjured up by Joanne Kathleen Rowling.
Orphans pop up everywhere in our cultural mythology:
Just think of Luke Skywalker in the original STAR WARS movie – he was an orphan.
In another loveable film named BABE, we are introduced to another type of orphan – an orphan pig with an identity crisis. It thinks it is a sheep dog. The list could go on …
We love these orphan stories.
Why?
Partly because they are generally full of hope: a hope that arises out of despair.
Partly because these are stories about how grace manages to triumph in the life of someone with rather shameful and lowly beginnings.
These hopeful, redemptive orphan stories engage us because they soothe and allay some of our deepest fears:
the fear of abandonment, of rejection, fears of being left totally alone in this world.
THE HOUSE OF FEAR
I once got invited to hear Henri Nouwen give a lecture to a small group of people in Toronto. His address was about the two houses people live in: the House of Fear and the House of Love. The House of Fear is filled with all kinds of terrors, said Nouwen, but the deepest fear, the core terror, involve being abandoned and rejected.
Flannery O’Connor illustrates this poignantly in one of her short stories. The story is about a grandfather, Mr Head, and his orphaned son, Nelson, and their trip to the big city of Atlanta Georgia. They get up early in the morning to catch the train to Atlanta. When they arrive, the grandfather tries to keep close to the train station, but as the day wears on, he begins losing his bearing. Nelson, the 10 year old grandson, gets tired of walking and complains to his grandfather that he has got them lost. But the grandfather is too proud to admit they are lost and angry with Nelson for saying it.
So, in the middle of the day when Nelson is taking a nap, Mr. Head decides to teach his grandson a lesson he won’t forget. He stands up, walks around a corner into an alley way, and hides there waiting for Nelson to wake up alone.
Nelson does wake up and when he does he can’t find his grandfather anywhere. He goes into a panic. He begins to run wildly down the street looking fiercely this way and that for his grandfather.
His grandfather, meanwhile, realizes this lesson isn’t turning out quite the way he thought. So he runs as fast as he can, after his frenzied grandson. As he does so, he sees a commotion up the street a ways. He slows down because a small crowd has gathered. There, sprawled on the pavement is Nelson and a few feet away is an elderly woman, her groceries scattered all around her. Obviously Nelson had bowled her over. The old woman is clutching her ankle and she is shouting, “My ankle! You’ve broken my ankle. Why, you’re daddy is gonna pay for every last nickel! Every nickel! Police! Police!”
By this time Nelson has spotted his grandfather. He springs up. Runs to him. Clutches him around his hips where he hangs panting.
The elderly woman looks at Mr. Head and shouts, “You sir! That boy of yours is a juve-nile delinquent. You’ll pay. You’ll pay every cent of my doctor’s bill. Somebody get that man’s name and address.”
At that moment Mr. Head does an impulsive but terrible thing.
He says, “That’s not my boy. I’ve never seen him before.”
The small crowd gathered suddenly goes quiet.
Mr. Head feeling the police must be close by says again, “That’s not my boy,” then continues to walk on.
And young Nelson’s fingers fall off his flesh.
There is a certain terror to that story — the terror of witnessing a person abandoning their own flesh and blood.
TERROR OF THE HAGAR STORY
That sense of terror is also here in the story of Hagar and Ishmael.
It hits us in the pit of our stomach.
And it raises many disturbing questions:
How could Sarah ask Abraham to do such a thing?
How could Abraham disown Hagar his wife?
How could he abandon Ishmael his flesh and blood
How could Abraham give them such paltry provisions and then point them in the direction of the desert?
And how could God allow for all this to happen?
This story is terrifying to us because it resonates with our own deepest fears – the fear of being abandoned, rejected, left alone, left as orphans.
There is one rather cool and detached tradition of reading this story.
It is the tradition of not asking all those questions of the story.
It is the tradition of simply regarding Sarah and Isaac as elect and Hagar and Ishmael as reprobate – cut and dried.
In this tradition of reading the story the most is made of how Hagar and Ishmael deserve what they get: Hagar because she is too proud and uppity; Ishmael because he treats his little brother badly.
In this tradition reference is often made to the one New Testament passage which refers to Hagar, namely what Paul says about her in Galatians 4.
Let me say there are many problems with this detached way of reading the story but this evening I will only point out the two major ones:
1. it doesn’t pay attention to the actual story in Genesis 21
2. and it misreads Paul in Galatians 4.
Let me say something about Galatians 4 first. In that passage Paul uses Hagar and Sarah as a sermon illustration. By his own admission, Paul is taking these historical figures and using them figuratively or allegorically. In other words, Paul admits he isn’t providing commentary on how to understand Genesis 21.
But even in his sermon illustration, we have to see what Paul is really saying. We are so conditioned to hear the Hagar story in terms of the longest family feud in history –the feud between Isaac and Ishmael, the feud between Arabs and Jews — that we assume that this must be what Paul is talking about. But that is dead wrong. When Paul uses Hagar and Ishmael as a sermon illustration, they do not represent Arabs. The way Paul uses Hagar and Ishmael, they actually represent the Jews, the covenant of the law, those who are slaves to the law.
Likewise, Sarah and Isaac do not represent Jews. Instead Paul uses them in the opposite way to represent not Jews but Gentiles, the covenant of grace, and those who are free from the law.
And so there is no way to use Galatians 4 as a warrant to coolly dismiss Hagar and Ishmael as rejected and reprobate and Sarah and Isaac as elect.
Reading this story as simply illustrating the line drawn in the sand between elect and reprobate does an injustice to it. Martin Luther knew this. Luther neither dismisses nor remains detached from this story. The opposite is true. Luther became absorbed by the passion and pathos of this story. He spent 85 pages trying to come to terms with the many questions embedded within its disturbing details:
Who can justify Sarah’s raging jealousy of Hagar and Ishmael when all Ishmael was doing was playing with his little brother?
(I know the NIV translates the word as “mocking” but this puts the
worst possible spin on a word that more naturally reads simply
“playing” which is what the NRSV has.)
And how about Abraham?
He caves in to pressure from Sarah but also from God.
But maybe his actions are a little more acceptable. This is the man, after all, who will, in the very next chapter, again listen to the voice of God and lead his other son up Mt. Moriah with a knife in his hand.
And then there is God, himself.
How can we find peace in what God allows to happen?
And why shouldn’t Hagar and Ishmael think Abraham and Sarah hate them?
Why shouldn’t they believe that God has abandoned them since he allowed, even aided and abetted driving Hagar from her husband and Ishmael from his father?
Luther admits this is a tough story, “One I can hardly read with dry eyes” he writes.
HOW TO HANDLE THE TERROR
So why does God allow this to happen?
Does God in fact hate Hagar and Ishmael?
To answer that question properly,
we need to look again at the story’s details.
Do the details of the story show a God who is indifferent,
who has attached his love only to Isaac and has left Ishmael dangling?
No … that is not how this story reads.
We know that the future force of the Abraham narrative will follow Isaac.
We know that the force of the whole Jewish tradition wants to dismiss Ishmael.
But Hagar and Ishmael are not simply dismissed.
They are not entirely deserted.
In the moving conclusion to this story,
God sends an angel to respond to Ishmael’s crying prayer.
This angel greets Hagar with these well-known words, heavy with meaning,
“Do not be afraid.”
Then come words of life and promise in the words of the first covenant given to a woman “Lift the boy up and take him by the hand for I will make him into a great nation.”
And still… still God does not abandon the scene.
With these words, “And God was with the boy” we realize God refuses to abandon Ishmael.
God himself becomes a father to this fatherless boy, to this orphan.
That is what we want to be reassured about, isn’t it.
We need to know that God does not abandon his people.
* When we have just buried our mother, our father, when we feel all alone in this world because we are in fact orphans, we need to know that God does not abandon us.
* When we have children who have wandered far away from us and seemingly far away from God – who from all appearances live as orphans – we need to know that God has not rejected them.
* As we get older, and spend hours and hours in the silence of our room, feeling somewhat isolated even sidelined from the busyness of this world, we need to know that God has not forgotten us.
* When we get overwhelmed by the pressures of life,
when this world seems as inhospitable as a desert, and we live with an inner emptiness because our spiritual provisions for this pilgrimage of life are exhausted,
we need to know God hears our cries and pays attention to our prayers.
* When we are at our lowest moments, in our darkest days feeling like spiritual orphans – afraid that we have been abandoned and forgotten by God — we need to hear the words, “Do not be afraid.”
CONCLUSION
People of God, we do not have a brother who causes us to be driven us away.
Rather we have a brother, Jesus Christ, who beckons us to change our address, and take up residence with him in the House of Love.
Through this brother we are adopted into a family, an amazing family in fact in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.
And if we belong to Jesus, then we are, by adoption, Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
We receive the sign and seal of our adoption when we are baptized.
As children of God, God sends the Spirit of his Son into our trembling and often panic stricken hearts so that we are always able to call out “Abba, Father.”
This same Spirit fills us with comfort – the comfort that we have not nor never will be left as orphans. Amen
Prayer:
Lord, in the times when we cry out How Long,
Remind us of your steadfast love, your unfailing care,
So that we may be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer.
Amen.
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