Dead or Alive?
Jun 17th, 2008 by Bryan
Here is the text of the sermon I preached on June 15th, Father’s Day. The text is Genesis 21:8-21 and Romans 6:1-11.
“Dead or Alive”
Bryan Bibb
June 15, 2008
John Knox Presbyterian Church
Something I love about the Old Testament is that the people we meet there are so real, so true to life. I encourage you to sit down one evening and read through the ancestral narratives in Genesis- stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons. The story is not one of those fairy tales in which there are clear boundaries between the good guys and the bad guys, in which the hero always makes good and noble decisions. On the contrary, characters like Abraham are complex, so human in their fear, uncertainty, and selfishness. The amazing part is that God uses these imperfect people to build his kingdom, the means through which God accomplishes his plans for the world. These stories are wonderful witnesses to the Gospel. They teach us that God works in and through human community, and in the process brings triumph out of failure, hope out of despair, and life out of death.
Abraham might not be an obvious choice for a message on Father’s Day. He is an imperfect father and husband who time and again makes decisions in view of his own safety and comfort. A few times he comes perilously close to bringing the whole biblical story to a tragic end. For example, did you know that Abraham passed his wife off as his marriageable sister to save his own hide, not once but twice? It’s true! This morning I want to look at one of Abraham’s challenging fatherhood moments, a sad story involving his other wife and son, the ones who do not end up in the Israelite genealogy, Hagar and Ishmael.
In Genesis 15, God promises Abraham that his offspring will become a family more numerous than the stars in the sky. In the next chapter, however, Abraham grows uncertain and consents to Sarah’s demand that he father a child with his slave Hagar. The result of that union — Hagar becoming pregnant with a boy — becomes something of a problem in Abraham’s household, as it locks Sarah and Hagar in a web of jealousy; Hagar’s passive-aggressive hostility leads to Sarah’s outright abuse and Hagar runs away into the desert. While in the wilderness, God appears to Hagar and tells her to return to her abusive mistress, but not before God bestows a blessing on Hagar’s pregnancy. Her son Ishmael will grow into a powerful man, although one continually at odds with those around him.
After Hagar’s return to Abraham’s household, Sarah herself becomes pregnant with the child who will fulfill the promise to Abraham, Isaac. In our chapter this morning, Isaac and Ishmael, so close in age, are playing together one day when Sarah suddenly realizes how much a threat Ishmael, the oldest son of Abraham, is to her son’s birthright and inheritance. She demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham is initially apalled at the idea, and the text literally says that the suggestion is “exceedingly evil in the eyes of Abraham.” God, however, tells him what the reader already knows, that God had made a promise and a plan for Ishmael as well as Isaac. God says that Sarah’s command should not “be evil” in Abraham’s eyes and that he should do whatever Sarah tells him. Listen to the voice of your jealous wife, God says.
This is where we start to have some doubts about this story. Is God being complicit in an act of cruelty, injustice, even potential murder? It is important to notice, however, that it is not God’s idea to send the mother and child into the wilderness, but Sarah’s. God says for Abraham to do whatever Sarah says but he does not say himself that Hagar should be sent away. It appears that God’s assurance to Abraham is that he and Sarah cannot derail the divine plan no matter what selfish or cruel plot they devise. It certainly wasn’t God’s idea for Abraham to impregnate Hagar to begin with, but now God is committed to providing for all of Abraham’s children, no matter who their mothers are. His words are more of a concession to the mixed up mess that Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar have created than a reassurance that Abraham is doing the right thing.
So, Abraham gets up early in the morning and sends his wife and child away with some bread and water. The text says that she wanders in the wilderness, using the verb “to wander” that also means to go wrong, to stray morally, to make an error. This turn of events is all wrong.
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Hagar in the wilderness quickly faces a terrible motherhood moment. When the water is gone, she casts her son under a bush to die and withdraws far from him so that she doesn’t have to watch. We know that under extreme exposure the body can die after only a few hours without water. In this bleak moment, Hagar lifts up her voice and weeps.
At that moment, God hears the voice of the boy crying out (not Hagar’s voice, but the boy’s voice) and he appears to Hagar with the message, “Do not fear!” He tells Hagar what he had earlier told Abraham, that Ishmael himself will become the father of a great nation. God did not need for Sarah and Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael for this to happen, but that is what they did, and so God now works to overcome that obstacle to his plan. And what does he do in this difficult situation? He opens Hagar’s eyes.
Seeing is in fact a central theme throughout the Hagar story. In chapter 16, during her first stint as a runaway slave in the wilderness, God responds to her cry for help and in gratitude she gives God a name (the only person in the Bible to give a name to God, by the way): she calls him, El Roi “God who sees.” This time, God lets Hagar see the means of her salvation, a water well. Notice, he did not suddenly create a water source for her, but rather opened her eyes to the resource that was already there, that had evidently been there all along!
From this point, the biblical narrative loses track of Hagar and Ishmael, but we do learn that God is “with the boy” and that Hagar reconnects with the people of her ancestry in Egypt. The Israelite genealogical tradition identifies Ishmael as the ancestor of the Arab tribes. So even here at the beginning of the Israelite story is the affirmation that God’s providential plan guides the origins and development of nations other than Israel.
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What are we to make of this story about Abraham’s severely dysfunctional family? There are a handful of terrible family scenes in the Bible that always make me wince, and Abraham is involved in two of them. One is today’s lesson in which Abraham gets up early in the morning and sends his wife and son out to fend for themselves in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the other is in the very next chapter in which God tells Abraham to take his knife and kill Isaac as a human sacrifice, the boy whose arrival was the source of all the tension in our passage this morning. Genesis 22 is called “the Akedah,” the “binding” of Isaac. As an aside, other painful family stories include Cain killing Abel in Genesis 4, the sending away of the Israelite wives and children in Ezra 10, David’s son Amnon’s rape of his sister Tamar in 2 Sam 13, just for a sampling.
When I put myself as a father in Abraham’s place, on one hand I think I could have done better than he did. I don’t think I would have sent Hagar and Ishmael away to the desert, even if my wife wanted me to. At the same time, I would never have been able to follow God’s command to kill my son. Never. Am I more faithful or less faithful than Abraham? My favorite artistic portrayal of Abraham’s binding of Isaac is that of early 17th century Italian painter Caravaggio, in which Abraham’s arm is being forcefully restrained by an angel, all of Abraham’s muscles flexed to drive the knife across Isaac’s neck. Caravaggio shows the strength of Abraham’s faith; unlike like some other portraits of Abraham standing there with the knife by his side sort of waiting for God to intervene, Caravaggio’s Abraham is in the decisive act of killing his son when the angel intervenes physically and forcefully. God provides a ram for the sacrifice, and indeed God later permits the killing of his own son, as a sacrifice but also as a victim of human violence, greed, and fear.
This is the world that the ancestral stories describe, a world fraught with human weakness, selfishness, and sin, and a world in which the the most famous act of faith is a father’s attempted killing of his own son. The world of the ancestors is twisted and mixed up, murky and hard to fathom. And yet, read carefully as a whole, these narratives show us God working tirelessly to bring out the best in a broken world; God working to purify and cleanse what is filthy; God working to overcome our doubt and sometimes even our faith in the process of revealing his perfect plan; God working to realize his dreams for his family, his people, and his kingdom in the midst of a violent, troubled human community.
That sounds like a God we need in our world, doesn’t it? The message of the gospel is that this is exactly the God we have. Fathers and mothers may rely on God to redeem their best efforts at flawed parenting; churches may trust in God to use us cracked vessels to carry the message of salvation to the world. The details of our lives and our history often suggest failure, despair, and death; believe the good news of the Gospel: the God who is writing our story turns failure, despair, and death into triumph, hope, and life.
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In our New Testament lesson this morning, Paul addresses this situation of living in a broken and mixed-up world, now after the death and resurrection of Christ. He wonders whether now after Christ sin and death still have dominion over our lives and over this world. Paul argues that God has turned the most horrible event imaginable, the crucifixion and death of his only son, into a moment of triumph and hope by means of the resurrection.
Paul claims that the triumph of Christ’s resurrection means at least three things for us.
First, the death and resurrection of Christ means that those who have died with Christ will also be raised with him. Ishmael’s life is spared in the wilderness as a testament to God’s power over death, but the fact is that death is still a reality for us all, and often a painful reality. Christ’s resurrection is a promise that death is not the end and that all of us – dead or alive – will be reunited in Christ at his coming. As he says in 1 Corinthians 15, O Death, where is thy sting?
That is very much a comforting message but for us here now, the gospel is more immediate and pressing; for Paul the second meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection is that we are dead to sin and alive to God. Whoever has died with Christ is now free from the power of sin. We affirm this every week after the prayer of confession. This morning we rejoiced that “the past is finished and gone; all things become fresh and new!” The good news of the Gospel is that we are no longer under the power of sin, even though it still works on our bodies and tempts our weak flesh. These weaknesses are human, and the Bible does not whitewash the sinful flaws out of characters like Abraham. To be free from the power of sin does not mean that we will be perfect, and it does not grant permission for uncontrolled sinful behavior. Rather, it means that in Christ’s death, God has now made sin the least of our worries. Instead of worrying about sin we should focus on recognizing and developing the Fruit of the Spirit: love joy peace patience kindness generosity faithfulness gentleness and self-control.
Third, in this world that you and I live in, despite the troubles that suggest otherwise, death no longer has dominion. Watching the news these days makes me feel like Hagar in the wilderness, sitting in grief as her son is dying under a bush in the far distance. We know the reality of despair and yet we wait for God to open our eyes to the resources that he has given to sustain us, to the means by which God is working to deliver our world from the power of death.
Let me say it again. The details of our lives often suggest failure, despair, and death; believe the good news of the Gospel: the God who is writing our story turns failure, despair, and death into triumph, hope, and life. And we all say, amen, may it be so.
