Fears, Foes and Family
(Sermon for Rutgers, June 20, 1999)
Genesis 21.8-21; Matthew 10:24-39
Today is Father's Day, and what better day could the be to preach a sermon about good old-fashioned family values, and I mean biblical family values. And who better to focus on than our father Abraham, the father of the nations, the father of the multitude, the father of the faithful, the one to whom God said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.... So shall your descendants be." And here we are. We Christians, along with our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters, count Abraham as our father. And every now and then it behooves us to look at this father of ours and his family to learn from them how we might be more faithful to God.
Let me just review a little of the family history with you. Abraham was married to his half-sister, Sarah, the daughter of his father, but not his mother. Sarah was very beautiful, so beautiful that her beauty put Abraham's safety at risk. Twice he gave her to other men to appease them, once to the Pharaoh of Egypt, once to King Abinalech, telling each a half-truth, that Sarah was his sister. he neglected to tell them that she was also his wife. Sarah spent a good period of time living in each of these men's harems until Abraham managed to straighten things out and get her back.
Sarah was well aware of God's promise to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations, and she and Abraham tried for decades to have a child. We have no indication that Abraham ever blamed Sarah for her inability to conceive, but in that culture and time it was considered entirely Sarah's fault and Sarah's problem. In her desperation to have children, Sarah resorted to what was then a fairly common practice: that of obtaining a surrogate wife and mother. She gave Abraham one of her slave-women, Hagar, saying, "You see that the Lord has obtain children by her." And the Bible tells us that Abraham "listened to the voice of Sorai."
It is likely that Sarah saw this as a simple, practical solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem. her intention was that if Hagar bore children, she, Sarah, would claim them and raise them as her own. What the slave-woman Hagar might have thought of this arrangement, Sarah never paused to consider.
She was also clearly unprepared for her own feelings. After all these many years of trying to conceive, Sarah stands by and watches Hagar become immediately pregnant with Abraham's child. And although this is what she had planned for and hoped for, instead of joy, she feels devastation. Hagar's joy and pride in her pregnancy are so unbearable for Sarah that the goal of bringing a child to life is now forgotten. Sarah turns on Abraham saying "I gave my slave girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt." Sarah had so discounted Hagar's involvement in the process that she is enraged to find her emotionally involved with the child she is to bear.
And how does Abraham respond concerning the mother of his unborn child? "Your slave girl is in your power, " he tells Sarah. "Do to her as you please." Then Sarah torments this pregnant woman, over whom she has absolute power, until Hagar can bear it no longer and runs away into the wilderness. An angel of the Lord intervenes and convinces Hagar to return to Sarah. she does, and she bears Abraham his first-born son: Ishmael.
fourteen long years later, God finally opens Sarah's womb, and at the age of ninety, she gives birth to her son Isaac. Sarah is filled with joy. "God has brought laughter for me," she says. "Everyone who hears will laugh with me... Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age." this is truly a miraculous, long-awaited birth and Sarah is filled with joy at the magnificent grace and bounty of God.
It is a wonderful state to be in, but Sarah, like most humans, is unable to sustain it. At the feast to celebrate Isaac's weaning, Sarah sees Ishmael, the son of Hagar, playing with his younger brother, the son of Sarah. She feels no regard for this boy, Ishmael, who exists only because she engineered his birth. She feels no affection for him as the child she had long ago hoped to claim as her own; no respect for him as the brother of her son, and the son of her husband, and even less for his mother, her slave. Sarah sees Ishmael only as an interloper, a threat to her son Isaac, one who might well usurp Isaac's rights as Abraham's heir, and rightly so. Ishmael's birth was legitimate; he would have been recognized as a rightful heir, and as first-born. Sarah's joy at the grace of God has dissipated; she is now so jealous and territorial that there is no room in her heart for compassion.
And so she says 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." And Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael.
This is what we might refer to today as a dysfunctional family. It is certainly not your Hallmark brand of family: a living, devoted father and mother gathered with their children to celebrate the peace and warmth of their familial relations. the dynamics between Abraham, Sarah and Hagar are charged with power differentials, and everything ranging from mild tension to full-blown abuse.
there are other stressors as well. Fatherhood does not come easily to Abraham, the father of the nations. Motherhood does not come easily to Sarah or Hagar. Love, faith, hope, affection, duty, respect and passion wrestle with jealousy, apathy, cruelty, rage, confusion, despair and grief in this biblical family drama.
Biblical family values. We hear that term thrown around a lot these days, often as a form of condemnation of family arrangements that differ from the two heterosexual parents, and 2.5 children model. What comes to mind when we hear biblical family values is usually not the example of the family composed of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac. But here they are, an honest-to-God biblical family, the founding family as it were, the ones who received God's promise that "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."
What are we supposed to make of them? Are we supposed to emulate these people? It's hard enough work being a family, whether it's a nuclear family, an extended family, or a church family. You would think that god would have provided us with some decent role models to show us how it's supposed to work. But instead God gives us this deeply flowed couple: Abraham and Sarah, the terribly abused slave woman Hagar, the two half-brothers, Ishmael and Isaac, and from them, the nations, us. These people are our heritage.
Perhaps we need to examine our concept of family life, in light of Abraham's family, and to explore what God expects from us, and hopes for us in relation to our families.
First question: How high a value is it to god that our families have one father, one mother, and 2.5 children? Based on this model biblical family, we can conclude: not very high. That is not so difficult a conclusion to reach. We know that god's wide-embracing love could not possibly be stifled by this particular contemporary conservative notion of family.
Second question: How high a value is it to God that our families live peacefully together, that they avoid conflict, that the members of the family all get along? Based on this model family, whom God chose to bless so abundantly, we can conclude: not very high. Is this harder to accept? I think so.
I began preparing this sermon wrestling with the New Testament lesson today which includes some of scripture's most disturbing words about families. Jesus, instructing his disciples in how to be faithful to him, says this:
"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me."
These words are deeply troubling to any of us who believe that following Jesus will strengthen and nurture our family relations. Surely God wants us to have living families. Surely charity starts at home. Surely we are to respect our mother and father, to lovingly raise our children, to keep the family bonds strong. What can these words of Jesus mean?
When we're unsure what something can mean, it's always helpful to address the context, and in this case there are two contexts. In the first context, Jesus is addressing his original disciples. In the second, Matthew is addressing a community of Jesus' followers, a generation or two after Jesus' death. Both these communities followed Jesus at enormous risk and at enormous cost, and one of the things that cost the most, was their family life.
Jesus' first followers radically altered their family dynamics when they left their homes to follow Jesus. Jesus was a dangerous character to be associating with. He made the religious authorities angry. He made the political authorities angry. What father would be pleased to see his son leave behind everything he had been brought up to hold dear so he could go off to follow Jesus? What living daughter would not try to stop her mother from abandoning safety and respectability to go off to follow Jesus? what mother-in-law would not do everything in her power to dissuade her daughter-in-law from disrupting the family she had entered by going off to follow Jesus?
Jesus was not merely telling his disciples what would happen. He was telling them what had happened. Families had been split up because some individuals chose to follow Jesus. Many of Jesus' disciples had been admonished, disowned, vilified by those they loved. Many just lived with the knowledge that they had caused those dearest to them unbearable pain. family upheaval may not be the goal when one seeks to live a life of faith, to be true to one's own calling form God. It may not be the goal, but it very well may be the result.
As disturbing as these words are, it may be hard to see them as words of comfort. But they actually are words of comfort. how many of us, at one time or another, have not had foes within our won families? How many of us have not, at one time or another, had enemies within our own household? How many of us have not been deeply wounded by those on whom we are dependent, by those whom we trust and love? And how many of us, at one time or another, have not deeply wounded those we love the most?
conflict, division, pain, distress within families. It can be devastating for us. But God can handle it. God can handle it. God does not shy away from conflict. god does not insist on a Hallmark version of reality. god does not demand that we be picture perfect. That is not God's goal for us.
What is God's goal for us? From birth to death, it is the same: to grow closer to God. God calls us to bridge that separation, that distance between us and God that is so painful to us. God does not call us to be content. God does not call us to live in peace and harmony, at all cost. God does not call us to avoid conflict with those we love. God calls us to grow closer to God, to put our trust in God and to live in God's promise for us. And this call from God to follow God should affect how we live every minute of our lives. And it should affect every relationship in our lives. And it may very well cause conflict.
And conflict is okay with God. the dynamics of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar's family may be too confusing and upsetting for us to handle, but they're not too confusing or upsetting for God. The divisions we feel among our loved ones may be unbearably painful for us, but god can handle them, and so can we, if we put our trust in God. If, in the process of trying to be true to God, of trying to be whom God calls us to be, and do what God calls us to do, we find our family lives disrupted, conflicted, and painful, we should feel no shame before God. We can trust that God prefers us to seek painful truth, rather than false peace, that God prefers us to follow the difficult, but honest path towards God, as well as we are able to discern it, rather than follow the path of harmonious appearances. God can handle the discord, the differences, and the divisions within our families. God can handle it.
How did God handle that first family of faith, the first family to live in God's promise? How did God handle the grief, the distress, the dishonestly, the abuse, the manipulation, the despair, the lack of awareness and understanding, the apathy, the cruelty, the longing, the struggling that were so much a part of Abraham's family? With grace. God handled this family with grace.
God looked on Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac, and God found each of them, and all of them, righteous, and God blessed them all abundantly. Does it seem impossible? It was not: God blessed them. And if it was not impossible for God to bless each member of that family, it will not be impossible for God to bless each member of our families.
God promised Abraham that through him all families of the earth would be blessed. We are heirs to that promise. And so it is fitting, on this Father's Day, to remember with gratitude our father Abraham and his family, who sought to be true to God, who sought to live in God's promise, who were all deeply flawed, and all greatly blessed by our loving and gracious and merciful God.
Let Us Pray:
Gracious God, we thank you for our families, and we entrust them to your living care. Guide us all, as individuals and as families, to be true to you, to answer your call, and to live in your promise. In Jesus' name.
Amen
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