A sermon preached by Deacon Richard Hurst, June 22, 2008
Abraham, Sarah and Hagar lived in a tent a long time ago in the middle of the desert, but their lives have resonances still. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise—Abraham is the father of three faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is through Sarah’s son Isaac the twelve tribes of Israel are traced. It is through Hagar’s son Ishmael, another twelve tribes are traced, whom Muslims count as their ancestors. I’ll divide the resonances from Abraham’s Tent this morning into three; namely family, freedom and faith.
I’ll start with family. You’ll remember in the story that Abraham, Sarah and Hagar have what might be generously called unique domestic problems; but as they say, unhappy families are each unique, while happy families are all the same. That said, I’m sure at least some of the dysfunctions of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar might be familiar to many of us. So, let me start with a modern story, which is completely made up, except that it has to do with my own life, so I’ve changed the names.
Buck, Allison and I were all in the Italian Department together at Georgetown in the mid-80s. Buck and I owned a home together in Arlington, and were partners for nearly six years. Allison, as it turned out, was Canadian, so very exotic as you know, and grew up in suburban Toronto in a split-level at the end of a cul-de-sac; her father was a lawyer. One day I noticed our Bell Atlantic bill had changed; apparently we now had flat-rate service for all of the United States and Canada, rather than for just the United States. Great, now I can call my cousin in Winnipeg. Wait, I don’t have a cousin in Winnipeg. It seemed Buck wanted to remain in touch with Allison when she was back at home in Toronto for weekends and such; Canadian Thanksgiving Day, the Queen’s Birthday, whatever those people do, so the two could keep up on Italian Department gossip.
Allison and I barely knew each other; in fact, she would only speak with Buck. When I would answer the phone, she would ask for Buck only; she would fail to greet me in any way. But obviously she knew who I was. Needless to say, I would find this strange, bordering on annoying. So I would insist on greeting Allison before passing the call along to Buck. This didn’t seem to go over well.
Buck would explain, given the “vast cultural differences” amongst our North American folkways, that Canadians did not say “hello,” and that this explained Allison’s behavior toward me. My laughter followed. Really, no one in Canada says hello? How interesting. I told of the woman Maria from Mexico who consistently, while emptying the trash at work, says hello to me—so what you’re telling me, Buck, is that immigrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan know how to say hello, but upper-middle class suburbanites from Ontario are unfamiliar with the custom, and that this explains why Allison doesn’t acknowledge my existence? Sure, I have an idea, let’s call the Canadian Embassy and ask. Oddly, a Pubic Information Officer indicated that most Canadians say hello, and would have said hello under the circumstances I described.
One day, driving, out of the blue, Buck told me he was leaving me. For Allison. I was alternatively incredulous and dizzy, an odd combination; of course what really angered me was the whole Canadians-don’t-say-hello story, when for all my snarking about it, I knew all along why Allison didn’t like me, which was that she was jealous of me. It just hadn’t occurred to me that she would get her way; I doubt Buck did either; I’m fairly certain that Buck did not foresee it when he changed our Bell Atlantic service to the flat-rate Canadian plan. But all the same, as I liked to say at the time, even if they don’t know how to say “hello,” they do know how to say “goodbye” in Canada.
I suppose it’s cowardly to cast myself as the Hagar of the story here—the one used and cast out; not the one who is manipulative and jealous like Sarah, nor the one who is spineless like Abraham. All of us have likely been Sarah, Abraham and Hagar at one time or another; in fact, in wouldn’t take too long to comb through even this story to find me behaving as each one of those.
Abraham is reckoned the first Muslim according to Islamic tradition; we count Abraham and Sarah as among the first of Hebrews; Christians still use the phrase the “God of Abraham” to identify the God whom we worship. And looking back to earliest “comrades” in faith, we are forced to see ourselves in all of our turmoil, in all our very human drama, in all of our terribly flawed ways of working through life and love. The world into which we were born, in which families are dysfunctional and in which children sometimes are used as pawns in larger battles, or merely as creatures onto whom we project our dreams, is hardly new.
But nor is the search for God and transcendence new either; we find that when we think we cannot possibly live without all that means so much to us; our families, our loved ones, our children, our homes; that the Universe’s unconquerable love so often provides for us all the same. So often in surrendering to our helplessness, in calling out for help, we find angels by our side, ready to see us through it. So often we are all Hagar in the wilderness-- more times than we’d every care to admit in our society that values rugged individualism; so often an angel of God is there to provide for us.
Let us move onto freedom. It cannot hurt to remember too often that Abraham and Sarah had slaves, and that Hagar was one of their slave girls. Hagar's relationship with Abraham and Sarah was complicated by the fact that Hagar was the mother of Abraham's first son Ishmael—though perhaps to say that this "complicated" the relationship is a tremendous understatement. It cannot hurt to remember too often that Hagar begins the story as a slave but ends the story as a free woman, even if accidentally.
We might ask ourselves when exactly does Hagar become free—when she decides the first time to run away from the desert tent of Abraham? When she bears a son for Abraham? When Sarah bears Abraham her own son? When Hagar and Ishmael incur the wrath of Sarah’s jealousy? When Abraham relents to Sarah's pressure, and casts Hagar and Ishmael out of their home, into the wilderness? Or does Hagar become free when she gives up all hope, when she runs away from the cries of her child Ishmael whom she abandons to perish alone in the desert without food or water?
There's a certain freedom in giving up hope, and giving into fate. The struggle ends, the muscles relax, a peace of sort—to the extent defeat can be peace-- comes over us.
Or we could ask, does freedom come when the angel of God appears, saving Hagar and Ishmael both? Certainly God's intervention represents freedom from defeat, a particular kind of freedom. Or does perhaps freedom not come until Hagar, through her son Ishmael, establishes another nation, another covenanted people of God, another twelve tribes? There is yet another kind of freedom that comes over us when we take charge of our own destinies, when we learn our own efforts can make a difference.
This is a long journey from being a slave-girl in the tent of Abraham and Sarah, in essence forced to bear the child of another woman, to becoming matriarch of a nation. Amazing still is that Hagar, we should recall, is a foreigner to the writers of the Hebrew Bible—and yet her story, and the story of Ishmael and the nation he founds, is carried forth through centuries all the same in the text of Genesis. One wonders what including the story of the rise of a slave-girl, non-Israelite, a foreigner, a substitute birth mother, to that of a matriarch in her own right might mean to us. The arc of this life is quite a dramatic one, and unexpected given that we're well outside the history of Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs when we speak of Hagar and Ishmael. We can only be led to think that for the earliest writers of the Hebrew Bible that freedom, even freedom for foreigners, even freedom for those who threatened the “sacred” line of succession, was important enough to them to bear mentioning in their scriptures. Certainly all three of them—Abraham, Sarah and Hagar—had escaped from Pharoah, and no doubt remembered that passage while dwelling together.
Only this past week we in this country remembered Juneteeneth, a day recalling when slaves, particularly in Texas, learned, if belatedly, of their newfound freedom. That said, I read recently a suggestion by a self-described fifth generation descendant of an American slave, that a better holiday might be July 2, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. His argument is that the Emancipation Proclamation, as important was it may have been, was freedom granted to slaves largely by others; the freedoms of the Civil Rights Act, speaking of the unexpected and the unintended, were hard fought and won by African Americans themselves. Hagar, a slave, a foreigner, herself goes through a similar passage, from freedom thrust upon her, to freedom won, particularly through the life of her son.
We here say that ours is a free and freeing faith, a liberal and a liberating faith, but we know that liberation does not and cannot happen all at once. We see in the life of Hagar a story of freedom, unintended, nearly accidental freedom for a slave-girl impregnated by her owner, and we see degrees and degrees of freedom descend upon her. And we see her take step after step toward freedom. We must ask ourselves when we read her story, where are we in helping others gain their freedom, and where are we in our own journeys of freedom.
Let us move onto one to faith. Hagar and Ishmael are claimed by Muslims as the founders of their nation of believers, from whom they are descended in a literal and figurative sense. During the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Muslim pilgrims re-enact Hagar's search for water for the child Ishmael in one of most important rituals of the yearly event. Pilgrims run between two mountains in the desert, finally resting at waterhole called, appropriately enough, Zum-zum, where they take their fill to drink.
We can retrace the steps of these pilgrims back in time to the tent of Abraham; we read today that Sarah's jealousy led to the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, and that in particular it was Ishmael's laughing at Isaac that prompted Sarah to get rid of slave-girl and her child. This might be the ultimate of all unintended consequences—a wife's jealousy and a half-brother teasing his half-brother leading to centuries of Jewish and Muslim conflict.
Perhaps I'm being too glib; no, I am being too glib. But it is not too glib to say that the dysfunction in Abraham's tent matches the situation today in some ways, and it's not too glib to say that the existence of these two separate faiths, at least as understood in terms of their biblical and quranic retellings, can be traced to these very small, very personal, essentially domestic disputes. The personal is the political, the political is the personal, we might say.
Life and politics and scripture can intersect in strange and, dare I say it, unexpected and wholly unintended ways.
Because Christians themselves worship the God of Abraham and Isaac, we too share in the faith of Jews and Muslims. We find the story of Hagar retold in the New Testament. Paul tells us that Sarah represents the New Covenant with Christ, and that Hagar represents the law of the Old Testament being cast out and superseded by Christ. Paul's allegory does not put Christians in the best light with respect to either Jews or Muslims. We co-opt Sarah for our own purposes, and we denigrate Hagar into near nothingness. One can only wonder what our neighbors in faith think about Paul's representation of tent of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, were they to contemplate it seriously. We can remember Christ, and his teachings that we love God and that we love our neighbors as ourselves, without assigning relative value to the womanhood of Sarah and Hagar.
Something about this story of a slave obviously is quite powerful. We might see in the separation of Abraham's child and wives, Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, Sarah and Isaac remaining in his tent, the primordial conflict between Jews and Muslims in our own time. We might see as well the connection of Christians to both faiths, and how Christians have both lifted up the faith of the Jews, and let them down in tragic and horrific ways. It's tempting to read the Bible as both a book of history, and perhaps of book of property titles when discussing the Middle East, but we know that Bible is more than anything a book a faith.
Yet the debt that Christians owe to the Jewish people comes not so much from the text of scripture but from the lived experience of Christians and Jews, and the covenant-shattering ways, too many to count, in which Christians have sinned against their Jewish neighbors. Thus we have gained a special obligation in the protection of what the Hebrew Bible calls God's chosen people.
We can only ask ourselves how best to carry out that obligation remembering God’s covenant with Hagar and Isaac and God’s other twelve tribes. Christians, Jews and Muslims find themselves, unexpectedly, back under the tent of Abraham, each bearing the wounds of their jealousies, their fears; each so often showing their ability to manipulate, the other often spineless in the face of other’s sins, yet each with hopes and desires of freedom. How can the latter-day folks under the tent of Abraham work toward wholeness and happiness and peace without casting out the “other,” without engaging the lowest sorts of fear mongering?
I am not a Washington policy-wonk; I don’t know the answers, other than to point out our responsibilities to one another. But I do know as well that these same responsibilities existed so long ago in a certain desert family, and these dysfunctions haunt us still in our own families. Though the world around us deserves our attention and every ounce of energy we can spare on it, our most intimate relationships deserve nothing else. The personal is the political, the political is the personal, and unintended consequences so often spring from what is closest to us. May God and all of God’s angels us provide for each us when any of us fails. Amin and Amen.
Lectionary Readings: Genesis 21:8-21, Psalm 86:1-7; Other Readings: Quran 19:54-55, “The Way of Love Is Not a Subtle Argument,” Rumi.