Sermon based on Genesis 21:8-21 at Community of Christ, Whitehouse, OH on June 25, 2023
In pre-marital counseling, one common exercise has each person naming some patterns of behavior they want to bring with them from their family of origin into the marriage, and some that they know they want to leave behind. We name those things beforehand because it takes recognizing it, naming it and choosing over and over again to establish new patterns. When we are stressed, we slip into the patterns we know best. It takes so much effort to try to change those behaviors! We probably ought to be doing the same exercise with our faith “family of origin” stories and patterns. Which brings us to today’s mess of an ancestor story. There’s plenty in here to recognize, to describe with judgment or compassion, or to heal from.
Pastor and author Sandhya Jha writes:
“It matters that we have as our spiritual ancestors a man who pretends he has no agency in the conflict between his wife and the woman they have enslaved, when we know he had all the power in that dynamic. It also matters that we have as a spiritual ancestor a woman whom God helped not just survive but thrive far away from the place of her enslavement. We are the spiritual descendants of both of them as well as Sarah, a woman who had little power and what little she had she used at someone else’s expense. All of those stories give us a window into who we are, who we could be, and who we want to be.”
So let’s make some choices. First, God knows families are complicated and we visit our unprocessed trauma upon the next generations. Now, that’s a whole Word right there, but there are about 15 sermons this text is begging to preach, so we’ll let that just be our first point.
Sarah laughed when God’s messengers told her she would bear Abram a child in their old age. But I don’t know that it was peals of joyful laughter. There was probably some bitterness in that laughter. She’s been through a lot by this point, and is not a blank slate for this part of the story to be written upon. None of us are. Sarah was an elderly childless woman in a time when bearing children was the pinnacle of importance, finally then going through the life-threatening ordeal of childbirth – at her age – … to see the son she birthed share his inheritance with her son by surrogacy, whom she never fully bonded with because they did not define boundaries well at all in that social contract (and maybe there should be some guilt in there with her jealousy). There’s so much going on here we cannot possibly tease it out, but let us say this: God knows families are complicated. We hurt each other all the time by doing what we think is the right thing to do, but then it wasn’t.
We can make some choices here in interpretation. We can either read God’s words to Abraham from the perspective of “chosen ones” and claim that once God had Isaac in place, God was pleased to get Ishmael out of the way. Our ancestor Isaac is the chosen one, we could say.
Or we could understand that God knows this isn’t going to work, all of them in the same household. Sometimes we can only heal from the trauma we’ve caused each other with space. Maybe the separation was God’s way of salvaging more life for everyone.
How can we take that kind of ancestor story into our life in a congregation?
How about clearly and repeatedly expressing compassion for parents and co-parents who aren’t together anymore, and marriages that are broken or were never not broken? Because it’s always been complicated and God knows, we’re doing the best we can. God wants life and love for you. I’m sorry it’s been so difficult.
We can, faithfully, defend the people who are trying to break the cycles of trauma, whoever they are. Whatever their households look like.
Here’s a promise rising up out of this complicated mess of a family, our spiritual ancestors: God rewrites the plan, the promises, as quickly as we can mess them up with our jealousy and bitterness and trauma. God hopes for a different life for us than we impose upon one another, for Ishmael and Hagar, as well as Isaac and Sarah… oh, and Abraham. God can re-write the way forward for you every step of the way too, Child of God.
There’s good news for those we harm as well: God hears the cries of those who are vulnerable and hurt by our failures. Our indignities will not determine who they are. Ishmael too will be a child of promise, despite his father’s cowardice, his birth mother’s status or desperation, his adopted mother’s failure to bond. That family is a mess. And God hears the cries of the child. God hears, over all the accusations and blaming and avoidance of responsibility, and God responds. Now if that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.
Strangely, painfully, God does not seem to hear Hagar; God only hears the child. For generations women descended from Africans who were enslaved have identified with Hagar in this story: experiencing abuses of power, being overlooked, but putting everything into the survival of their children. Hagar is an embodied reminder of all the people we (faithful people) do not listen to, or refuse to hear. She haunts the family gatherings pointing out those who are missing. Eventually, for the sake of the child, a messenger of God speaks promises to Hagar about her son, that sound awfully similar to the promises God made to Abraham about Isaac. She and hers are also enveloped in God’s plans.Our family of faith can make choices so that all who are struggling caregivers for the next generation will be seen (by us, by God) with compassion and potential instead of judgment. We can advocate for them, share their burdens, and value their perspectives even when they are critical of us. Yes, there’s drama that comes from trauma. But God’s loving response is even more enduring than the trauma we endure or cause one another. God can redeem even our kinds of family drama. Thanks be to God.
Lee Ann M. Pomrenke 