Fourth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 12], rcl yr a, 2023
GENESIS 21:8-21; PSALM 86:1-10, 16-17; ROMANS 6:1b-11; MATT 10:24-39
It will be a slightly shorter sermon this morning: a homily on the breadth of God’s care, the ways we find evidence of God’s care for us in rather odd places in Scripture. This morning we will find evidence of the breadth of God’s care for us in a story about resentfulness.
At first look, our story from Genesis is not a story about care at all, but a story of jealousy and of cruel abandonment in Abraham and Sarah’s household. Abraham’s household, at that particular time and in that particular culture, included slaves—and slave women that would, under certain conditions, produce an heir for the patriarch. And this was true of a slave woman named Hagar in Abraham’s camp, a slave-woman with whom Abraham had fathered a child named Ishmael at a time when Sarah seemed unable to produce an heir for Abraham.
But with Sarah now having miraculously, in her old age, produced an heir—her son Isaac—Sarah appears to become jealous and resentful of Hagar, and Hagar’s son Ishmael. And so Sarah, in an effort to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael, tells Abraham to cast the two of them out into the wilderness: a casting out that would have a very a high likelihood of killing the two of them—mother and child together.
Sarah, it seems, wanted to get rid of them, and get rid of them completely. God even tells Abraham, “do as your wife says!” And so Abraham does, and one morning, Abraham casts Hagar and Ishmael out into the crackling heat where they will run out of water, and very nearly die. Isaac was now the heir, and the slave-woman’s child was no longer necessary; Hagar and Ishmael no longer mattered.
There are other ways that we can say that Hagar and Ishmael did not really matter. God’s chosen people, Israel, would come through Abraham’s son Isaac, and not through Abraham’s son Ishmael. Isaac is a forebear of Israel, the Israel through whom all the nations of the world will be blessed—first and foremost in Jesus, the Holy One of Israel.
In the history of salvation it is Isaac that matters, not Ishmael. God may well have promised to make a nation from Ishmael, but that nation—as opposed to the Israel that would rise from Isaac—Ishmael’s nation would have nothing really to do with the God’s saving purposes. Isaac was the key to the future: it would be through Isaac that Jacob would be born, and then Joseph, and it would be from that tribe that Moses would come, and the judges, and the kings, and the prophets, and John the Baptist and finally Jesus.
Isaac is the one who is important to our salvation: the blessing given to all nations will come through him, not the child of a slave-woman. So maybe Sarah has it right—cast them out. Hagar and Ishmael don’t really matter. Not to us. Not to our salvation.
But this is not the breadth of God’s goodness and care. God does tell Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out. And Abraham casts them out. And it is is the end Sarah seems to have wanted for this unwanted mother and child. Because the water runs out, and the child is near to dying. And here is where we come to the breadth of God’s care. What could be bigger than the salvation of the world? A salvation that would come through Isaac—safe, and back in the camp with his mother? Whether Hagar and Ishmael die it is of no matter to that plan of God’s.
Hagar and Ishmael don’t matter. They don’t matter to Sarah; they don’t matter enough to Abraham that he would defy Sarah; and they don’t matter to the nations that would rise from Abraham through Isaac; they don’t even matter to us, really, at least if our only concern is our own individual salvation.
So I figure we should be at least a little bit surprised that God cares about Hagar the slave-woman, and Ishmael the child born into slavery. They don’t really matter. But God hears the voice of Ishmael, God hears the prayer of the child born in slavery. This God is a God that listens to the ones that don’t really matter. Because the breadth of this God’s care includes even the ones that don’t matter—and not just the Ishmaels and the Hagars of the world.
If God’s care extends to slaves and those born into slavery, then God cares too for those who are trafficked and exploited; if God’s care extends to people that aren’t really part of the plan, then God cares too for the users and the drunks, and all those who don’t “contribute to the economy”; if God’s care extends to people that don’t really matter, then God cares too for all of us who find ourselves on the outside, looking in.
There are any number of ways that we find ourselves within the breadth of God’s care and concern. Because none of us are Abrahams, or Sarahs, or Isaacs in this story either. The salvation of the world doesn’t hinge on our lives or our deaths, our productiveness and our fertility, our political clout or our spending power.
We are all, here, the dependent ones: dependent on one another, dependent on God’s creation, dependent on God and God’s mercy, dependent on what God accomplishes for us in Jesus, the Holy One God has in mind in his preservation of Abraham and Isaac. Don’t let your relative wealth fool you into thinking otherwise; we are all Hagars, all Ishmaels, we are all crossing the crackling heat of the day, searching for water—the living water provided by God in Christ, and the sustenance waiting for us here at this altar.