Proper 7
| Genesis 21:8-21 | ||
| Psalm86:1-10,16-17 | ||
| Romans 6:1b-11 | ||
|
Matthew 10:24-39 |
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your lovingkindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen
I once flew on Pakistan Airways
between Paris and New York. What fascinated me on that trip was watching the
young fathers rush frantically back and forth between their multiple families
during the long flight. While the women ate, braided their hair, and chatted
together, the fathers roamed the plane, first holding one wife’s fussy baby and
then spooning cereal into the mouth of his second wife’s toddler. I’m sure that the women did their share of
parenting, too, but by the time we reached New York, I could definitely tell
that the fathers looked the worse for the wear. Being busy with child care is
one thing, but what would these fathers have done, I wondered, if the plane had
started to go down, and they could only save one family? How would they choose?
I thought about that scene as I read
today’s first lesson. Poor Abraham, caught between two families and two women, forced
to choose between two sons whom he loves, told by none other than Almighty God
to listen to Sarah’s cruel voice. How
can he cast his first-born son Ishmael and Ishmael’s mother Hagar out into the
desert alone? Yet how can he ignore Sarah’s fear that young Isaac might someday
be disinherited or mistreated by his older half-brother, should she die and
leave him unprotected? How his heart must have ached as he got up and, obeying
God, handed Hagar a morsel of bread and a jug of water and placed their beloved
baby on her back, thinking that he would never see either of them again. He
must have felt the same kind of horror that he would feel later, holding a
knife over the heart of his other son Isaac, bound as a sacrifice to God.
“But wait!” some of you might argue.
Why feel sorry for Abraham? Isn’t Hagar the pitiful one who ends up nearly dying
of thirst in the desert? Isn’t she the foreign slave who is used and abused?
Isn’t she the one who ends up in such despair that she casts her baby away
under a bush so that she won’t have to see or hear him die? Yes, I do get upset
with our text over what happens to Hagar and Ishmael. But my deepest sympathies
are with Abraham today. As I listen to the news, I often feel caught, too, in
the impossible trap of having to choose between baby Ishmael and sweet,
laughing Isaac.
You see, Isaac, as you know, is the
inheritor of God’s covenant with Israel and a father of the Jewish people. You
may not know, though, that the “great nation” descended from Ishmael--that
nomadic nation born in the wilderness of Paran--is the Arab nation. You may not
know that Muslims still visit what they believe is the saving well of water
from which Hagar drinks. They find it in the sacred city of Mecca. Muslims,
Jews and Christians—a family still torn asunder. Ever since Sarah felt as if she had to protect
her own little family, no matter what the cost, tribal loyalties rule with
violence in our common Holy Land.
Loving God, how many Arab babies died
in the desert when Christian Crusaders drove them from their homes? What about
the Muslim grandfather from Iraq, arriving in Louisville after years as a
refugee in the no-man’s-land of the Syrian desert, who told me how he was
driven out as a little boy from Palestine into Iraq, asking me wistfully what
his native country looks like? What about the little Arab boy who dashes from
his home in the West Bank into the desert night as Israeli bulldozers come
crashing through his bedroom walls? What about the little Jewish girl who
enters the desert of life without her parents when Palestinian suicide bombers
kill her mother and father in the market square? What about the Arab Christian
family at KRM, driven from their home into the desert by Muslims in Syria? And
what about, O God, all of the Muslim and Christian Iraqi women and children who
are now being driven from their homes into the desert sands by Arab tribalism
and fundamentalist ISIS troops? Troops who menacingly post all over the
Internet, “We are coming, Baghdad.”[1]
Why do you let this happen, God? What
do you expect of me, as an American Christian who stands, like Abraham, amidst
and within a cruel and violent struggle for survival? Where do my loyalties lie?
Which child do I save? Which child do I banish? It seems as if there is no good
answer that will bring peace. Jesus, what is a peace-loving Christian to do?
Checking with Jesus is always a good idea, of course-- but
good grief, Jesus, you are not much help in today’s Gospel!
"Do not think that I have come
to bring peace to the earth [he answers, cryptically;] 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 father or
mother more than me is not worthy of me; and 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.”
Seriously?! What kind of Good News is this? Does even Jesus
incite and subject us to constant violence? Was he standing there egging on his
Father when God told Abraham to pack little Ishmael up and send him out to die?
Muslim scholar Reza Aslan, in his best-selling book The Zealot argues on the basis of verses like ours that Jesus is
indeed a violent Revolutionary, inciting his followers to rebel against Rome
and to establish God’s Kingdom with the sword.
I, however, disagree. To attribute these words to Jesus in a
literal way goes against the Jesus we see in the rest of the Gospels: against
the Jesus who tells the disciples to put away their swords when the Roman
soldiers come to arrest him; against the Jesus who tells the violent crowds
that “he who is without sin should throw the first stone;” against the Jesus
who tells us to “love our enemies.” Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas holds
what I believe is the best interpretation of today’s difficult reading. Instead of telling his disciples to pick up
the sword, says Hauerwas, Jesus is warning them that they live in a violent
world, and that if they are going to follow a crucified Lord, they need to be
prepared to lose their own lives to the same violent powers that kill Jesus.
The sword that Jesus brings is the cross. The cross comes to the disciple, not to
some enemy out there somewhere. The kind of family loyalties that cause Sarah
to banish Hagar have no place in the Kingdom in which God loves every human
being, declares Jesus. Christians have no business putting tribal loyalties,
national loyalties, family loyalties above the call to follow Jesus, loving
each of our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus’ words to his
disciples were meant to train them–and the church that followed–for faithful
and patient endurance, just as Jesus demonstrated in his own life and death.[2]
While I want to relate to Abraham, it’s interesting that the
grace in the story comes not to Abraham in his tough choices, but to Hagar, the
outcast. Hagar, the object of violence, is given the grace to see God in the
midst of her violent world. God hears little Ishmael’s pitiful and thirsty
cries underneath that bush in the desert, and God comes to his frantic mother.
“Have no fear,” God whispers to her. And God opens Hagar’s eyes so that she can
see water in the desert. God helps her to hear the crazy promise that God will
make a great nation even from one who has been cast out to die. Hagar and
Ishmael live when, by the grace of God, they are able to see through scarcity
into abundance. They are able to see water in the desert. They are able to hear
promise as they sit alone on the sand. They are able to trade their fear for
trust in God’s loving care. I can almost hear Jesus whispering to her, and to us:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the
ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted.
So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Today we hear a difficult Gospel. The temptation to live into
the world’s closed tribal and nationalistic systems is great. The temptation to
live and die in fear that someone else is going to get what I need, someone else
is going to hurt my interests, is a powerful one. Our lessons today remind us that
in God, resources are not limited. God brings water in the desert and life from
a cross. In God, Love is not rationed. Inheritance is boundless. In God’s Kingdom,
the Pakistani fathers on that airplane would not have to choose which child to save
in a crash—because everyone would risk his or her own life to save the stranger’s
child sitting nearby.
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