6 PENTECOST, YEAR A
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE STANLEY
22 JUNE 2008
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Genesis 21:8-21: Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Mt. 10:24-39
Today’s gospel reading is a continuation of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples. One saying after another. A list of them. As we heard the first installment of these instructions last Sunday.
The first reading today, on the other hand, is a story. Part of the string of stories in Genesis about one of the earliest families in scripture, Abraham’s family.
Let me add here that if anyone talks to you about the Bible and its family values, tell them about Abraham, for starters. Tell them today’s story. And there are many other stories as well. The “family values” we hear so much about in our time—one man, one woman, 2.5 children, a white picket fence and a dog and a cat—have no roots in scripture. Biblical family values? What are they? Tell them about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar.
In today’s episode, we need to remember that, back in those early days, bearing children was a mark of God’s favor. For a woman to be infertile, on the other hand, meant that the woman (not the man, it seems) had somehow incurred God’s extreme disfavor. A woman’s status depended on her ability to have a child. The Bible is full of stories about barren women and their desperation. Early examples are Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel. “Give me children or I shall die!” we hear Rachel cry out to God a little later in Genesis.
In her own desperation, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, called on her servant-girl Hagar to go in to Abraham and get pregnant by him, so Hagar would bear a child, a child Sarah could then claim for herself. (The idea of surrogate parenting goes way back). Hagar did as her mistress ordered (Abraham had no say in all of this, it seems), and Ishmael was born. Ishmael: meaning God has hearkened, or God has heard. A child at last. And for awhile things were happy.
Then one day God informed Abraham that his wife Sarah herself would finally conceive. “Me? At my age?” Sarah listened, stunned, to what God’s angel was announcing. Small wonder that she burst out laughing. And when she did give birth, she named her son Isaac, which means laughter or laughing boy. As Sarah said, “Everyone who hears will laugh with me.”
And so again, in Abraham’s household, in this family, things seemed to go along fairly well: with Abraham, the women, the two sons. Until one day at the party to celebrate Isaac’s weaning, Sarah caught sight of the two boys playing together. Ishmael and Isaac. Jealousy exploded in Sarah’s heart and all hell broke out.
Which son would inherit the “stuff” when Abraham died? Who was Abraham’s real heir? Which woman, Hagar the slave-girl or Sarah, would end up secure in her old age, with the son who “counted” to take care of her? Which son “counted,” anyway? And which son would inherit the kingdom, the “great nation,” which God had promised old Father Abraham once upon a time?
So Sarah devised a plan, a plan to get rid of her rivals, Hagar and her little boy. God went along with Sarah’s scheme, and Abraham, too, this passive husband who always seemed to go with the flow. Out into the wilderness went the hapless maid and her boy. And when the water ran out, it was obvious that they would die. What can be more agonizing than watching one’s own child die? Today we hear Hagar’s grief rising to the heavens as she watched her little son at a distance (she couldn’t bear to watch close-up), watched him as he lay under a bush, and waited for certain death.
In the end, of course, God’s master plan kicked in. God’s plan which is to help all of God’s beloved children—those with the silver spoons in their mouths, like Isaac, and those with no spoons, the ones at the margins, like Ishmael. In the end, we know, both sons inherit and become ancestors of a kingdom: Isaac the ancestor of the nation of Israel, Ishmael the ancestor of the Arabs, who were in those days Bedouins to the south.
Once again, things seemed to be resolved, with the two peoples living in relatively calm coexistence, as neighbors.
But then, as we well know from recent history and current events, conflict arose between Palestinians and Jews. Jealously and vitriol and violence.
Fighting and jealously between whole peoples, as within families.
How can we live with the tension of our differences and at the same time resolve the differences so we can live in harmony? That’s the basic question.
Resolution and harmony are musical terms. I ran across a description the other day of music with its competing melodies and themes---and the ultimate resolution into coexistence.
The author (Robert Roth) reminds us in his article that in jazz, the goal isn’t to make a trumpet sound like a saxophone or a drum set mimic an acoustic bass. It is, he says, for the instruments and the players to coexist in a peaceful, creative tension. “With a measure of respect and compassion—love, perhaps--it makes for some incredible music.”….and he goes on to describe something that the trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis once said about this needed tension: “A piece of improvisational music demonstrates a conflict being worked out because the players have different things to say and to do. They each play their solos, riffing and bouncing off one another until the whole matter is beautifully resolved. Conflict? Cooperation? Both?”
Jesus, of course, recognized this tension. Tension among groups of people, tension among nations, tension within families. The tension that can be caused in our relationships with others when we tell them we have decided to follow Jesus and we are picking up our crosses and losing our life now for his sake.
Jesus I think recognizes the necessity of this tension, because it is a means for us to riff and bounce off one another, to listen to one another, to hear one another, to coexist without trying to mimic each other’s voice but honoring our differences while dwelling with respect and compassion and love, hard as that may be. Just as making good musical sound with other instruments is hard and it takes hard practice to pull it off, so it is also, human to human.
Jesus recognizes this tension. But he is also clear: We have to make it work. We have to pull it off—it’s our job. God’s master plan is for all of us to be brought together in harmony. Those whose voices are like our own, and those who sound very different. Those we like, and those we don’t. Those who are born with the silver spoons, like Isaac, and those who find themselves cast out on the margins, like Hagar and Ishmael. We have to work especially hard for those on the margins of our communities, the edges of things. God’s master plan is for all voices, not simply our own, to be heard, to blend, and to make incredible music together.