Fear Not: The Laughing, Harkening God of Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday After Pentecost, June 21, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.
Today, I’d like to ponder with you the story of Hagar and Ishmael, which has deep resonances for our contemporary moment and the life of Christian discipleship. You remember the backstory, of course. Sarah, knowing that she is unable to birth a child with Abraham and desiring to fulfill God’s promise, tells Abraham to take their servant Hagar as a surrogate. (Whether Hagar entered willingly into this arrangement we don’t know, but the power dynamics between master and servant are troubling to say the least). Hagar promptly gives birth to a son. Then, Sarah miraculously conceives and gives birth to Isaac. And in the opening of today’s passage we see Isaac and the unnamed (because he is of lower status) Ishmael playing and laughing together.
Perhaps a little etymology is in order. The name Isaac in Hebrew means “laughter,” and it speaks both to Isaac’s joyful disposition and the God’s capacity to draw new life from apparent dead ends, to eke fruitfulness, joy, and laughter from barrenness, lack, and emptiness. In this sense, the impossible Isaac is God’s laughter at our human-all-too-human ways of navigating the world. “Your thoughts are not my thoughts, nor your ways my ways says the Lord” as Isaiah reminds us. Part of what it means to deepen in the Christian faith means that we get practiced in catching how we box up God, creation, ourselves, and other people in fixed and static concepts and old stories. Deepening in the Christian faith is learning to name, inquire into, and gently release the ways we’ve told God how God should be and how God acts--how we make God in our own image--and let God be God.
Isaac, the laughter of God, is a sign for us that even when our powers of imaging an alternate future and more just social arrangements seem to have come to a standstill, when hope is at a low ebb God is always doing something new. Often hidden from our ordinary perception, God is ceaselessly breaking through our fixed, static, and calcified ways of seeing and being in the world in order to fashion for Godself a people of boundary-crossing love, indiscriminate hospitality, and radical welcome—a community of love for oneself, each other, God, and all of creation. Who would have thought that during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd could have awakened the cross generational, rainbow coalition conscience of a nation? Wouldn’t it have made more sense that people would have been too concerned with their own health, too huddled in fear of the other, that that gross injustice would have passed unnoticed as have so many thousands before?
But that’s not what is happening, is it? Instead we have white people beginning to listen to the painful stories of the harsh, dangerous realities of what it means to be a person of color in this country. We have the beginnings of a real dialogue between police departments and community advocates about how to make policing more about life-giving relationships with the community and less about the militarized use of force. We have people talking about reshaping our budgets to address the need for more addiction counselors, mental health professionals, better access to health care, and more resources poured into the community like after-school programs and boys’ and girls’ clubs. That’s God breaking through, in the midst of dire and apparently hopeless times, to do a new thing. That’s God’s laughter. That’s the great fire of Pentecost spreading across the world, burning down everything that gets in the way of love and teaching us, guiding us, leading us, into a more just and equitable world with the love of Christ for all peoples without exception at the center.
So the story begins with this lovely picture of Isaac and Ishmael playing in the dirt, laughing together—a symbol of the two lines that emerge from Abraham enjoying each other, communing with each other. But that doesn’t last long. Sarah gets nervous and suspicious. Perhaps this woman Hagar is a threat? Perhaps this Ishmael will unseat Isaac as the apple of Abraham’s eye? Perhaps there won’t be enough to go around? Even after experiencing the boundless, gracious laughter of God in the person of her son, she falls back into that trap of scarcity and lack. She thinks that if she can just expel this Hagar and her son, things will be ok. It’s the old scapegoating dynamic that we talk so much about emerging again: Sarah seeks the peace that comes from God and God alone through human means: the expulsion of a perceived threat.
And this is where the story gets really juicy. Hagar is cast out. Certain death is near. She places Ishmael under a tree and retreats. Sitting opposite him a good way off she’s wracked with grief and prepares herself for the worst. All seems lost. The hot sun reaches its blazing zenith. The water in the skin is all gone. And she raises her plaintive, broken-hearted cry to the Lord: “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” Isn’t that the same prayer people of faith, all faiths, have been uttering these past few weeks? Don’t let us look on the death of another child of God created in your image and likeness, Lord. Please, Lord, no more of this!
The angel of God replies with something totally unexpected, unimaginable—impossible according to our human ways of making sense of things: “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.” A little more etymology is in order. The name of Hagar’s son, Ishamel, means “God harkens,” or “God listens,” or “God has heard” in Hebrew. No matter how cut off, isolated, fearful, or alone, God harkens to us. God bows down God’s ear to us in the words of our psalm. We are never alone and God not only hears our cries, but takes them into Godself and transfigures them as evidenced by the well of water that suddenly appears before Hagar’s opened eyes.
When all was lost, all was dried up, when the end seemed certain, God harkened to Hagar’s cries, God laughed at the mess, and provided in the midst apparent barrenness and lack. The water of tears becomes a well of life—living water in the blazing heat of the desert. And interestingly, God says to Hagar that he will, “make a great nation” of Ishmael. The cast out one, the one left to die, the unnamed child of a servant, the ultimate other and marginalized outsider himself becomes the vehicle for God’s transforming grace and love in an unplanned and unexpected way. The Laughing God, the Harkening God, the One who companions us in our troubles and makes a way where there was once no way—that’s what our story from Genesis reminds us of. If we can remember to root and ground ourselves and our community in that story, rather than stories of fear, lack, scarcity, scapegoating violence or isolation, if we can recollect who and whose we are, unexpected wells that we never noticed before start to dot the landscape of our lives. Water water everywhere. Grace abounding..
You’ll have noticed, no doubt, that in both the epistle and the Gospel, we have references to dying and rising, losing one’s life in order to find it, old selves and new selves. Who dies and who rises? What life gets lost and what life gets found? Simply put, it’s the life of me—my wants, my desires, my requirements, my prejudices—that goes under the waters. The life with power, possessions, and prestige at the center falls to the ground. The life with “me” at the center gets surrendered, is let go of, so that the life of Christ, the life of love, can come and make its home in us, can live its life in and through us. The life with us having everything—God included—pinned down and figured out slowly drops away and we discover that we are, in fact, already standing in grace, that grace abounds beyond our wildest dreams. This requires a radical re-orientation of our lives—a turning, and a returning to the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. We center ourselves on Jesus and let everything that’s not the love we see revealed in his person and work, fall away. As Bishop Curry is fond of reminding us—“If it’s not love, it’s not God.” But that’s the journey of discipleship, isn’t it? To see, name, inquire into, and release everything that gets in the way of love, the love that with our consent and through our co-operation with grace, spreads out like a wildfire across the globe.
The essential thing, the transformative thing, is to have Jesus at the center of everything we do. That’s why we get those rather difficult sayings about loving a son or daughter more than Jesus getting us in trouble. Is Jesus really anti-family? Perhaps he’s spent too much time with his own family during lockdown and we’ve caught him at a weak moment? Joking aside, Jesus isn’t against the family by any stretch of the imagination. What he is calling for is a deep seeing into the true nature of family. Too often our notion of family devolves into bloodlines, race, or us and them: Hatfields and McCoys, regal Sarahs and beggarly Hagars, Jews and Greeks. That’s not what family means when it’s seen with the eye of love. “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Jesus asks in Matthew 12. “And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!’” He explodes and enlarges our cramped, exclusive, and claustrophobic understanding of family for something so expansive and inclusive that it is literally without boundary. We are members of one another. We are one boundaryless body with the welcoming, life-giving love of Christ coursing through our common veins.
That truth becoming a living reality, and not just nice talk, is the work of the people of God. Realizing the one body and working to heal and reintegrate those parts of society and God’s good creation that have been cut off, excluded, diminished, or destroyed is the work we have been given to do in this time. Daunting stuff. But only if we think God’s thoughts are our thoughts and God’s ways are our ways. Daunting stuff, but only if we contract in fear. Fear not the angel says to Hagar. Do not be afraid Jesus tells the disciples. The Laughing God, the Harkening God, the God of new life is beckoning. He’s gotten down in the mud and wants to play, to laugh the world right into love. The only question is whether we’ll play too. Right here and right now.