God in the messiness of life- Gen 21
Genesis begins with God creating a beautiful world. It is a
world where human beings live in harmony with each other, with animals, with
creation, and with God. It is the world we were all created to live in. It is a
world where our talents and capacities find their perfect match, and where we would
know work but not toil. It is a world of continuous and developing
contemplation of the infinite God and the bliss that goes along with it. The
first couple, we are told, eat from the forbidden tree. It is a rejection of
God’s leadership. They have decided that they know better. They eat the fruit
of the knowledge of good and bad, and to gain knowledge of the “bad” they must
leave paradise. This is what we know as the Fall.
To bring human beings back into full relationship with Him, God
puts in motion a plan. That plan begins with a man and his wife- Abraham and
Sarah. In their old age God calls them away from the land of their ancestors to
wander and follow God’s leading. God makes
a promise to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s
house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great
nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses
you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”
(Gen 12:1-3). God’s plan to draw humanity back to Himself runs through Abraham
and Sarah’s family.
When we look at Abraham we don’t exactly find a perfect
example to follow. He and Sarah don’t seem like people God is going to use to
recreate the world. In some ways Abraham seems like a real person of faith- an
example to follow. He leaves and follows God’s command not knowing where God is
leading him. … But, then we read that out of fear he lies to an important person
of authority saying that Sarah is his sister in order to save his own skin
thinking that person might want to kill him and take her if he told the truth
and said she was his wife. And, Abraham does this not once, but twice (Gen
20:1-18; 12:10-20). He is not exactly an image of chivalry.
God had promised Abraham and Sarah a child, but over a decade
later Sarah approaches Abraham and tells him to sleep with her servant, Hagar,
to produce a child. Sarah decided that maybe they had to help God out with the
promise. Abraham doesn’t argue at all and sleeps with Hagar and she becomes
pregnant. Hagar gets upset with Sarah because she made her become a surrogate
mother for them and then Sarah approaches Abraham, “May the wrong done to me be
on you! I gave my slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had
conceived, she looked on me with contempt” (Gen 16:5). Sarah mistreats Hagar
and Hagar runs away. She is brought back by an encounter with an angel.
In today’s Genesis reading, Hagar’s son, Ishmael, is probably
a teenager. Sarah has now given birth in her old age. Her child, Isaac, is the
child of the promise. He is the one who carries the promise God made to
Abraham. Ishmael seems to have been making fun of little Isaac as he was
learning to eat solid food for the first time and Sarah suddenly realizes the
potential for competition between Isaac and Ishmael and Sarah tells Abraham to
send Hagar and Ishmael away. Hagar is loaded up with water and they are sent
into the wilderness. Soon they run out of water and Ishmael is placed under the
shade of a bush exhausted and about to die of thirst. Hagar is off at a
distance crying, unwilling to watch her son die.
This is the situation where God’s promise finds root in human
life. This is not life as it should be. This is the messiness of ordinary life.
Once in a while I’ll meet people who think they have to have their lives
together before they can come to church, or they think that unless they are
doing everything God wants them to do that God will not notice them, or hear
their prayers. God’s people are people living real lives and that often means
messy lives. They are people who sometimes make bad choices. They are people
who have to deal with the consequences of other people’s bad choices.
This is us. Our lives are messy. Look into the lives of our
families and our friends and we see messy lives. We make bad decisions. We try
to decide for ourselves what us right and wrong rather than following God’s
direction. We are sometimes recipients of the bad decisions of others and
through no fault of our own our lives are made complicated and messy.
I wonder sometimes how this makes God feel. Once in a while I
will have someone in my study who is having a problem. I come to believe that
the problem would be helped by taking on a particular spiritual practice, so I
will suggest it. I will meet again with the person only to find out that they
haven’t tried the spiritual practice, and (surprise surprise) the problem they
are having persists. After a few of these visits I will think to myself that
they must not want this problem to be solved and that really there is no point
in us meeting until they are willing to follow my suggestion and take on the
spiritual practice. These practices are the containers for the grace of God.
Like water in a glass, grace usually comes through some sort of container to
carry it. To deny the glass is to deny the water. To deny the spiritual
practice is to deny the grace of God that would be delivered through it. To
complain about the disease, but refuse to take the medication is Ludacris.
And if you spoke to my spiritual director (and he ignored the
rule of confidentiality between us) he would tell you that I am no different. I
will come to him with a problem, and he will suggest a practice, and the next
month I will come to him with the same problem. He is very gracious, but there
must be some part of him saying “we have already had this discussion Chris”.
You know what you need to do, but you aren’t doing it.
If I imagine myself as God I would be continuously frustrated
by the refusal to receive the healing grace offered, and I would be tempted to
say to Abraham and Sarah and all those leading messy lives, “Come back to me
when you figure out what you really want. There’s a plan to rescue the world,
and I’d like you to be a part of it, but you’re being really inconsistent. So I’ll
give you some space to think and when you figure out if you want to be a part
of what I’m doing and you’re ready to live it, then let me know”. … But that’s
not what God does. God is right in the thick of it with us. He is even working
through us in spite of our faults- our pride and ingratitude, our
judgementalism, our cowardice and greed, our gossip, and back-biting. God still
works through us and is lovingly present to us.
Ishmael, through no fault of his own or of his mother, was an
accident. Ishmael was conceived because Abraham and Sarah didn’t believe that
Sarah would become pregnant and so they made Hagar be their surrogate to give
them a child. And then, when Sarah finally does give birth to Isaac, Hagar and
Ishmael are cast aside. They are victims of the powerful. They have been
shamefully mistreated and used, then cast aside when they were no longer needed
to provide an heir for the promise.
The book of Genesis (and we could say the entire Bible) is
about God’s promise. God’s promise to bless the world through Abraham’s family
flows through Isaac. Really as far as the story of the promise is concerned
Hagar and Ishmael could have been dismissed and we could have not heard about
what happened to either of them because what we are really concerned about is
Isaac and this promise. Surprisingly there is more included about Hagar and her
son. We are off the main story now. We meet Hagar and Ishmael dying of thirst
in the wilderness. They are victims of those with power. I look up to Abraham
in many ways, but this is a shameful episode. Hagar and Ishmael are victims of
the power of Abraham and Sarah and now they are dying of thirst. She has laid
her son under a bush for shade and goes off a distance because she can’t stand
to witness the death of her son.
The name Ishmael means “God hears”, and God does indeed hear
the cries of the boy. An angel speaks to Hagar saying, "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." And then we read that “God opened her eyes and she saw a
well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a
drink. God was with the boy, and he grew up”.
Ishmael was not the one to carry the particular promise. In
one way of thinking he was a consequence of Abraham and Sarah’s lack of faith.
But, God works in spite of us. And he will use what we give him. He can work
even in the midst of our character defects and the messiness we make of the
world and our lives.
This is one of my favorite stories about God and the
messiness of the world. One day there was a little girl and her mother. It was a big day, they were going to a fancy wedding
later that day and so they had both bought new dresses. It was still early in
the day but the little girl couldn't stop thinking about the wedding and her
special dress she was going to wear. She would run into the house from the
backyard, then up to her mother and ask "is it time to go to the party
yet?" And her mother would reply, "no, not until later today,
dear". The little girl would go back outside to play. Periodically, the
little girl would run up to her mother and repeat her question, and the mother
would repeat her answer.
Eventually
the little girl thought that it must be getting closer to the time for the
party, and thought that perhaps she would finally be allowed to wear her dress.
So her questions stopped being about the wedding and instead she started asking
if she could put on her dress. Her mother would reply, "I don't think
that's a good idea hunny, you might get it dirty before the party". Soon
the little girl's questioning became begging, "pleeeease Mom! Can I put on
my dress? I won't get it dirty, I promise". Eventually, the mother gave in
to the girl's begging, and the girl was allowed to put her dress on, on the
condition that she would promise not to get it dirty. She put her dress on and
marched outside very pleased. She began playing. Eventually she became wrapped
up in her play and wasn't as careful as she should have been. As she was
playing she tripped and fell in a mud puddle. Mud was all over her new white
dress. She sat in the mud, her mouth opened in shock and horror. Just then her
mother walked out the back door all fancied up in her new dress. It was time
for the wedding. The girl looked up at her mother and then down at her muddy
white dress- and she burst into tears. She remembered her promise. She couldn't
stand to even look her mother in the face. She knew she was in trouble. She sat
in the mud puddle her face in her hands and cried. The mother slowly walked
over to the little girl in her fancy new dress and sat in the mud right beside
her little girl. Her daughter looked up into her mother's smiling face with
tears in her eyes. They were both filthy, and they both started laughing.
And that is
the incarnation. God has come into our messy lives. God has entered the mess.
We have made such a mess of things. In the incarnation, God has come among us,
God came to sit in the mud with us, not to wallow in it with us, but to show us
that God will not abandon us. God has come to sit in the mud with us in order
to pick us up out of it and clean us off. We can sometimes think that God is
not in our lives when they get messy, but that is just a lack of ability to see
in the midst of the mess. The cross was a s messy as it gets and Theologians
tell is that nowhere was God more open and present to us than on the cross.
Hagar and Ishmael and Abraham and Isaac and Sarah were living messy, imperfect
lives (like ours), but we are told God was there and was doing something
amazing. In that mess God was drawing all humanity back to himself.
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