Unsparing

Midweek Evensong

The Week of the Third Sunday After Pentecost

A Reading from the Book of Genesis:

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. 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." The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.

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. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring." 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.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 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. 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. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him."

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. God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The plot thickens.

For the last few Wednesdays we’ve been reading the story of Father Abraham from the Book of Genesis: how God called an old man, “as good as dead” in the words of St Paul, to be the father of many nations, and of a special priestly people. This promise came to Abraham at the age of 75, and wasn’t fulfilled until he hit 100, as though to prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that this was the work of the Lord and not merely a quirk of the flesh.

Yet in that intervening quarter-century, one could hardly blame the chosen couple for growing a tad impatient. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is far beyond menopause, and for a woman to die childless some 4000 years ago was considered a great shame. She thinks, quite sensibly, that there is no way for her to bear a son to carry on the family name. So she does the next best thing: she arranges for a surrogate.

Sarah has a handmaiden, an Egyptian servant girl—a slave, really—whom she gives to Abraham as a concubine; that is, as a wife of lesser social status. The Egyptian’s name is Hagar, and Sarah imagines that any children of her handmaid shall be considered as her own: own the mother, own the child, after all. Yet this backfires spectacularly.

Hagar indeed bears Abraham a son, Ishmael by name. And given that she has been able to accomplish what her mistress never could, Hagar not unreasonably considers her status now to have been elevated above that of Sarah. Should the primary wife not be the one who bears the husband his heir? This leads to rather a great deal of friction between the two. Note that the Hebrew Bible contains many stories dealing with polygamy and slavery—none of them happy.

God, however, is not terribly amused with Sarah’s little workaround. The point of the promise is its impossibility: that only a miracle, only the working of God, could make of this withered and wizened couple a family through whom to bless the earth. And so a barren woman conceives by her centenarian man and bears the child of promise, a life arisen from the dead: Isaac. Isaac is the fulfillment of all of Sarah’s hopes and dreams. She is a mother at last, young again at last, and she laughs with joy.

But Hagar and Ishmael now appear superfluous. They were the back-up plan, the spare before the heir. Though Ishmael is the elder brother, Sarah does not want him usurping Isaac’s inheritance. Her son alone shall be the firstborn here. Thus, Sarah casts them out. She will brook no threat to the son for whom she’s waited all her life. And Abraham, though he loves Ishmael, rather spinelessly relents.

It is at this point in the narrative that we might expect to never hear of Ishmael again. He has served his purpose in the story: to drive home that Isaac’s birth is miraculous, that Isaac is the child of the promise, and that one can neither cheat nor thwart the purposes of God. But now the story shifts to follow Hagar—the handmaid to whom, quite frankly, I’m surprised that they’d given a name. Concubines rarely rate historical note.

Yet the Bible upends expectations, and Genesis inverts the priorities of the Mesopotamian mythologies around it. Hagar and Ishmael go off into the wilderness fully expecting to die, outcast and abandoned. They are expendable people, forgettable people. But God does not forget them. In a heart-wrenching scene, Hagar places her son beneath the shade of a bush and walks away because she cannot stand to watch her child die of thirst and heat.

Such pathos for disposable people. Who would have seen that coming?

At this point God sends an angel, a messenger from heaven, not to a king or a lord or a conqueror but to a discarded slave, a mother mourning in despair. And here she too, Hagar, receives impossible, ridiculous, superabundant promises. Yes, Isaac shall be Abraham’s heir. But Ishmael too is blessed, and in no small measure.  He shall be made into a great nation, and shall carry on Abraham’s name.

Once again, God comes to those who are of no account: a rejected slave and a bastardized boy, alone in the desert, dying of thirst, bones soon to be bleached in the sun. And He says, “Not only shall you live, but I shall make you great. Take each other’s hands, for you have nothing to fear anymore. Behold: water. Drink.” And Ishmael grows and thrives and becomes a great nation, the father of all the Bedouins, the ancestral sire of all of Arabian culture and civilization.

This is the part that should shock us, that would shock the ancient hearers of this tale. Not the slavery or the concubinage or the abandonment. Those were sadly all too common. But to give the nameless a name, to recast the outcast an heir, to take a boy and his mother dying in the wilderness and make of them lords of the desert—these things were shocking to the Ancient Near East.

And not only do we know Hagar’s name, some 4000 years after she lived, but she is also the only character in the entirety of the Bible—male or female, Gentile or Jew—to give a name to God. “El Roi,” she names Him, “the God Who Sees Me.” Let us remember that those we forget are never forgotten by God. Those we cast off shall rise up in Him, to glory we could not foresee.

Such a peculiar desert deity, who champions the old, who liberates the slave, who makes of us sinners His saints. Now that might be a story worth retelling all these years. That might be a promise worth the wait.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

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