Genesis 21:8-21
8 The child grew, and was weaned;
and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah
saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with
her son Isaac. 10 So 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." 11 The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his
son. 12 But 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 for you. 13 As for
the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is
your offspring." 14 So 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. 16 Then 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. 17 And 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. 18 Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make
a great nation of him." 19 Then 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. 21 He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got
a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Doug Pitt is a relatively successful
man, but I’d wager that you’ve likely never heard of him. He owns ServiceWorld
Computer Center, a company that specializes in business networks and
communication technology. He serves on the board of WorldServe International, one
of the largest water drilling companies in East Africa, which has given clean
water to almost two million people since Doug joined the board. He also founded
the child health organization Care to Learn. The mission of Care to Learn is to
fund child health, hunger, and hygiene needs, and it currently serves twelve
school districts and funds over 125,000 children in the Ozarks. Because of his
extensive work in Africa, particularly the United Republic of Tanzania, Doug
was named the Goodwill Ambassador to Tanzania in 2010 by the country’s
president. In 2011, Doug was honored by the Starkey Hearing Foundation along
with President Bill Clinton with their Humanitarian Leadership Award for all of
his work in Africa and domestically with his Care To Learn organization. As if
his list of humanitarian awards were not impressive enough, in 2011, Doug also
became the first American to descend Mount Kilimanjaro (the highest mountain in
Africa and the highest, free-standing mountain in the world) on a mountain
bike.[1]
Doug Pitt just might be the guy on
whom the Mexican beer company Dos Equis has based their fictitious
spokesperson, “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” So, why haven’t most of
us heard of Doug Pitt? Well, I don’t think there’s any sort of conspiracy at
work, because, you see, it might be just a bit difficult for Doug Pitt to
become a household name with his brother Brad casting a pretty big shadow in
the spotlight. See, Doug Pitt is the brother of one of the biggest movie stars
(and, to be fair, equally philanthropic) of this generation, Brad Pitt. I
imagine it’s hard for Doug to get any sort of traction in terms of fame when
his brother is so easily recognizable (though I have a feeling Doug does just
fine without all that recognition).
I imagine it might be a little
annoying being the less famous, but equally important sibling of a super star.
You don’t get the kind of recognition, your story isn’t as widely told or
known, and you likely don’t get stopped by strangers on the street asking for a
picture and an autograph. And when it comes to stories of less famous siblings
in Scripture, well we’ve certainly come to one this morning—the story of
Ishmael.
Most of us with any sort of
relationship with the Bible likely know Ishmael’s younger, more famous,
half-brother Isaac. Isaac is one of the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible, the
father of Jacob, the grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel. Isaac was the
first born son of Abraham AND Sarah; he was the fulfilment of God’s promise to
Abraham. Isaac was also the one whom God called Abraham to sacrifice, a story
so familiar to many Christians because we cannot help but see the foreshadowing
of God’s sacrifice of his son Jesus. We know Isaac’s story because in many ways
the following chapters of Genesis focus on Isaac’s story, because the rest of
the Bible is an unwinding ribbon of the story of Isaac and God’s promise to him
and his father.
But Ishmael…well we just sort of
forget him once Isaac comes along. After all, he’s not really the promised son
of Abraham and Sarah. No, he is quite literally the bastardized version of
God’s promise, a forced outcome brought on by the growing impatience of two,
aging, childless people. He is the offspring of a likely unwilling slave-woman
from Egypt (he’s not even a full-blooded Herbew!); he’s the result of a forced
pregnancy, and he’s scorned by his father’s wife, the woman who should have
acted like his mother and treated him as her own son. Ishmael is not a
patriarch; he is not the kind of person the Hebrew Bible builds much of a
narrative around, yet Ishmael and his mother Hagar may teach us more about the
ways of God and how they are far higher than our own ways than possibly even
the story of his more famous sibling.
You see, the story we’ve read today
in some ways could be called “the sacrifice of Ishmael,” for it parallels the
familiar story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham is told to
cast out his son, Ishmael, along with the child’s mother, an act that will
certainly lead to death, yet just before death comes, God intervenes and saves
the child’s life. But what led us to this point? What brought us to this scene
where a child and his mother are driven out into the wilderness, driven out
into certain death? What is it that could lead to such a dire situation that a
mother throws her child under a bush to die in the desert? What could possibly
cause this called man of God, Abraham, to act so cruelly, heartlessly, to perform such an act of injustice?
In order to understand these
actions, we need to go back to the beginning, back to when Abraham and Sarah
took God’s plan into their own hands. Back in chapter fifteen of Genesis, God
tells Abraham that he will give him an heir of his own seed and descendants
like the stars in the sky. In the first verse of chapter sixteen, however, we
are told that Sarai (Sarah), Abraham’s wife had borne no children for Abraham, so
she devised a plan to have Abraham impregnate her Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar.
Sarai says in verse 2 of chapter
sixteen: “You see that the Lord has
prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I
shall obtain children by her." Sarah had come up with her own plan for
fulfilling God’s promise, and as you can imagine Abraham was all too willing to
oblige his wife’s wishes. They were impatient. God had promised them something,
and when it didn’t come to them in the time they wanted, they took matters into
their own hands. This first act of impatience was the first step towards
cruelty and injustice. In fact, it could be argued that Sarai’s plan was its
own act of cruelty and injustice imposed on Hagar as she was forced to have
relations with Abraham and bear his child for nine months.
It was during those nine months of
Hagar’s pregnancy that further steps were taken towards cruelty and injustice.
We’re told in verses four through
sixteen of chapter sixteen that Sarai becomes jealous of Hagar. She begins
to regret her decision and treats Hagar harshly, so much so in fact that Hagar
runs away into the wilderness where she is met by an angel of the Lord and told
to return to her mistress and given a promise similar to that given to Abraham (it
is a scene that foreshadows the one in our text from chapter twenty-one). We
don’t hear much more from Hagar, but we are told in chapter seventeen and
eighteen that God is still going to provide Abraham and Sarah with their own
child, a promise seemingly so absurd that it makes Sarah laugh. She doubts that
she and her husband will bear any children now that they were about to enter
their second century of life. We can read, however, that Sarah and Abraham do
indeed have a son in the first verses of chapter twenty-one, and when they do,
Sarah once again decides she’s had enough of Hagar and Ishmael and tells
Abraham to send them away into the wilderness. She couldn’t care less about
their fate, for she had her promised son; she and Abraham now had what they
wanted and the slave-girl and her son (notice Sarah doesn’t call them by name
or mention Ishmael as Abraham’s son), well, they were unnecessary now.
What led to this act of
dehumanization, this act of cruelty, this injustice, are the same things that
lead to such sinful treatment of others today: impatience, jealousy, disbelief,
apathy, and selfishness. It was the impatience of Abraham and Sarah that led
them to take matters into their own hands and force Hagar to bear a son form
Abraham; they were not content with the Lord’s promise, but felt that they had
to have what they were promised when they wanted it. Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar
and her fertility led to the abuse and cruel treatment of the woman who had no
part to play in the decision that led to her pregnancy. Sarah’s disbelief in
the promise of God only fed her hurt, her anger at her apparent barrenness, so
she looked on Hagar and her son with even greater contempt. Abraham, who might
be misunderstood as some passive player in this Ancient Near Eastern soap
opera, contributed more than his fair share to this injustice as he simply sat
by and let it happen; his apathy towards Hagar and Ishmael was itself an act of
cruelty, for Abraham the patriarch of the family in an overwhelmingly patriarchal
culture could have simply said “no” to his wife’s desires and that would have
been the end of it. Abraham could have rejected his wife’s plan to highjack the
Most High’s promise; he could have protected Hagar in her pregnancy; he could
have refused to turn them out into the wilderness to face their doom in the
desert. But Abraham does none of this; he just lets it all happen. Because of
their selfishness—selfishness to have things their way, in their time—Abraham
and Sarah became perpetrators of cruelty and injustice to a mother and her
child.
That is the heart of injustice, to
allow our selfishness, our desires, our impatience, our jealousy, our apathy,
our ignorance to blind us to the humanity of others. Cruelty and injustice are
not always things done out of hatred or actions of intentional malice; they can
be those things we simply allow to happen because our comfort and our needs and
desires might be jeopardized if we take a stand for what is right. But here is
the good news: even in the midst of cruelty and injustice, even when those who
are called by God decide to do nothing, even when it seems that oppression will
have the victory and death is inevitable…God is there. God is there with the
victims of cruelty and oppression. God is there with those who breathe the air
of injustice. God is there with those who have been turned away, turned down,
and turned over to death. Just as Scripture tells us that God was there in the
desert with hopeless Hagar, hearing the cries of her hungry child, God is there
with those millions of children in this country who go to bed hungry every
night because there are those in this country too concerned with their own
comfort to give a damn about them. Just as Scripture tells us that God was with
that abandoned mother in the wilderness as she cried out, God is with those
girls all across this world who have been thrown out of their homes or sold
into the sex-slave trade because their families are ashamed by them or can’t
afford to care for them. Just as God was with that mother who had no food for
her child because she was thrown out for the comfort of others, God is with whose
stand in unemployment lines because their company let them go so the CEO could
still get a bonus this year.
God is with all of those who are
victims of cruelty and injustice. God is with those who fall through the
cracks, those who are victims of a system designed to reward the rich and
oppress the poor, those who are cut off and cast out because of their race,
class, gender, or orientation. God is with those who don’t have clean water to
drink, those who can’t read, those who live in the forgotten slums of this
world, those who can’t rise up because someone else is keeping them tied down.
God is with those who have been cast out and there is coming a day when God
will lift them up! And here’s the thing: God’s calling us to help! God is
calling us to break the cycles of cruelty and injustice, to not give in to the
sins and temptations that trapped Sarah and Abraham. God is calling us to trust
in the calling of God that leads through Christ and Calvary’s selfless cross;
God is calling us to rid ourselves of jealousy and to look at our global
neighbors with love, to see everyone as the sister or brother they are created
in the image of God. God is calling us not to simply sit and do nothing while
our neighbors across our community and across our world go hungry, are victims
of cruelty, and suffer great injustices. God is calling us, in the words of
Christ’s prayer in the gospels, to do God’s will, to bring God’s kingdom on
earth as it is in heaven.
May we learn this lesson from the
sacrifice of Hagar and Ishmael. May we begin to be the people God calls us to
be, people who will not stand for cruelty and injustice. May we be people who
do the will of God by loving all of our neighbors, seeking to raise them up
even though they may be cast out. May you hear the voice of God calling your
name this day and respond in faith.
Amen.
