Abraham 3: God Has Heard

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Scripture: Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39

"What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast with you hand: for I wilt make him a great nation."

-- Genesis 21:18

"Call me Ishmael," begins the best-known American novel of the 19th century; and it continues, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." I'm sure it is significant that the protagonist of Moby Dick is named Ishmael, and that his pagan pal Queequeg's religious exercise is called his Ramadan, but I cannot go into that now. It is amusing, however, to note that when the hiring captains Bildad and Peleg demand to know if Queequeg is a Christian, Ishmael assures them that he is a born member of the First Congregational Church, "...the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some crochets noways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands. " By now, I hope it is clear that our sermon is about the original Ishmael and not his derivative, even though no American can hear the name without thinking of captain Ahab and the great white whale. If there is a segue from one Ishmael to the other it must be that we wish more of us could see that we do all belong to that "great and everlasting First Congregation" and that our common humanity outweighs in importance our religious and cultural differences.

Moby Dick is like our biblical sagas, or yarns, as Melville's sailors would have called them, in several ways. It takes place on two levels, a deeper level where the matters of good and evil are adjudicated, and a surface level where things seem to unfold as in the normal world; the surface level is shocking in its cruelty; and the meaning of names is important. Last Sunday we saw how important it is to know that the name Isaac means "God has made me laugh," and today it is important to know that Ishmael means "God has heard." Let us try to hear what God has to say to us in the yam of Hagar and Ishmael. I remind you that the Bible tells stories because the things it teaches are so closely interwoven with life that only a story and not a set of propositions can adequately communicate it. So I invite you to meditate on the story of Hagar and Ishmael, and to be aware of both levels.

At one level it is an astonishingly frank presentation of Sarah's jealousy, Abraham's weakness and Hagar's despair. At the celebration of the birth of Isaac Sarah sees Hagar's son and decides he must go. We are not told the reason. Was it resurgent jealousy of Hagar the rival wife? Was it racism, or social prejudice? Abraham is very reluctant to expel them but yields to his first wife's demand and sends the slave woman and her son off into the desert with a skin of water and a loaf of bread. Hagar in turn wanders in the wasteland until, exhausted with thirst, she abandons the child under a bush and goes to sit far enough away so as not to be able to witness his death. At this level of the story no one behaves well, no one is heroic.

There is, however, another level, the level of God's action. It is God who tells Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael, because in this way He intends to make Ishmael a great nation. Presumably, since Isaac was also to become a great nation, the two nations had to be separated as early as possible lest they got in each other's way. At this level Abraham behaves well and becomes again an exemplar of faith. He obeys God rather than his own desire. Abraham appears weak before his wife, but is in fact strong before God. It must have been a great burden and sorrow for him to send Hagar and their son into the desert with only a skin of water and a loaf of bread, _ I wonder what he said to Hagar as he sent her away - but God commands it and so he does it. It is part of God's plan to make Ishmael a great nation too, an indirect offspring of Abraham whose direct line was to run through Isaac.

We are not told that Sarah's jealous demand or Hagar's giving up the fight for survival were inspired by God; perhaps these are examples of how God uses even our basest instincts and our feeblest efforts to do His will. Clearly, these less than admirable actions by the two women are essential to carrying out God's plan, so even in their sin they can be made to serve him. I do not know if this is the proper interpretation, but it seems plausible and if it is right it is surely a comfort to most of us to know that God's plan can use even our weakness and perversity, as long as we intend to remain within the plan.

Thus the story shapes up as an account of the work not of human beings but of God, and this work is a work of love for the salvation of the world. But it is a very mysterious, deeply paradoxical work, involving stunning cruelty on the part of the father, venomous jealousy on the part of the senior wife, and supine irresponsibility on the part of the junior wife. It foreshadows next week's story, in which Abraham tries to offer Isaac as a sacrifice to God, and it says something about God that we might not want to hear. It says that God's ways are not our ways, that we do not understand the half of what is really going on with us and with the world, and that our moral categories are not the last word on right and wrong. I can just imagine what Dear Abby would say about a person like Sarah, whose name by the way means, "Princess." Abby would be sympathetic to Hagar the victim telling her that the problem is not hers but Sarah's and advising her to invite Sarah to join her in seeing a professional counselor. All of this is quite helpful in its place, but that place is not here in this biblical account of divine revelation. Here we are all, even Abby, out of our depth, and the suffering of Hagar and Ishmael, the harshness of Sarah and the weakness of Abraham serve a purpose deeper than we can discern, unless the Bible reveals it to us.

Abraham is the exemplar of faith in God: his experience reveals to us what it is like to live in utter dependence on God. Sometimes in faith we find ourselves compelled to do things that are cruel to ourselves and to others, and even outrageous by the light of human moral codes. Abraham behaved despicably with reference to Hagar and Ishmael, and she must have left the encampment heartbroken. Her listless capitulation suggests she had given up hope for herself and the child. Then God intervened and revealed to her the purpose of all this suffering. Her son, who must have been a toddler, or perhaps even a five year-old, sat in the shade of a bush thirsty and abandoned by his mommy, - how many mommies have not thought of leaving a child whining for a drink of water under a handy bush? - and he screamed. God comes to Hagar and says, "What troubles you Hagar? Fear not: for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast with your hand; for I will make him a great nation.' So she recovers her will, no longer a quitter, and takes him by the hand to walk on further; and then she sees a water source.

What shall we make of this? The God who caused him to be out in the desert and thirsty in the first place hears the cries of Ishmael and comes to his aid. God is at the beginning and at the end of his story, so how can he doubt that God will fulfill His promise to make him a great nation. His mother had only to persevere to find water, and he had only to call on God to be heard. What does this say to your faith? Dare we expect that God will be equally faithful to us when we are faithful to Him, or even when we aren't?

  Ishmael means, 'God has heard,' and he did become a great nation. The Arabs regard themselves as the descendents of Ishmael, and one is tempted to reflect ruefully that the bad relations between Arabs and Jews go back to the very beginning, to the time when Isaac's mother expelled Ishmael's mother and sent them to die. Is it only poetry to reflect that the ongoing war between the Jews and the Arabs goes back all the away to Isaac and Ishmael, to Sarah's spite against Hagar, and Abraham's faith? Have the two nations been acting out the mutual hatred of their mothers through all these generations? Here I have only questions and poetic associations, no answers. Meditate on the story for yourself; it repays reflection.

  What a mixed bag of emotions and impressions! I cannot sort out the contents, but I can appreciate two things. One is that obedience to God can be very hard and alienating, and the other is that we cannot know what God is doing, we can only believe, and that means trust Him and when the time comes, to do what we believe he commands us to do, however strange it might appear.

  And perhaps a third lesson, Always remember that we are not Abraham, and be modest, even tentative when we think God has commanded us to do something special!

  Amen.