Pentecost +6

Genesis 21:8-21

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said 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.” The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “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.” Then 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; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.


I spent this past week in Athens at the North Georgia Annual Conference. The week was a roller coaster for me of ups and downs emotionally and spiritually. There are always some very enjoyable parts of the annual meeting of clergy and lay delegates from every church and ministry in the conference, like seeing the people who are to be ordained at the evening worship service on the first day of the conference. Last week got off to a particularly good start with the opening worship service on Tuesday afternoon. It was a memorial service in which we remembered the clergy and clergy spouses who have died since the last time we gathered for conferencing. The preacher for that service was our own district superintendent, the Rev. Jim Cantrell. He challenged us to remember why we were gathered there: to celebrate and give thanks for the ministry we have been able to do in the name of Jesus in the past year and to look forward to what is to come. He said, “I hope we are not here to pat ourselves on our Methodist backs for all the good we’ve done; I hope we are here to hear the call of Christ to continue to be in ministry in our communities in every way that we can.”

It was a really good way to set the tone for the conference: looking to the future and having great faith and hope for what God is calling us to do together that is new and exciting. I was reminded of St. Paul and the possibilities that we face for ministry in our community, and I was excited and invigorated for the work of the year ahead. We have a diversity of people, situations, and needs in this community, and I continue to pinch myself when I wake up to prepare to come here for worship and prayer. What an incredible opportunity we have here to bridge gaps that we human beings have created among and between ourselves based on how we are different and how those differences make us uncomfortable! What welcome we offer here to those who aren’t necessarily like us in every way! That is a gift that not every Christian congregation can claim. Our commitment to inclusiveness and the embracing of diversity are things of which I am very proud when I think of all the reasons I am blessed to be the pastor of this real-life congregation.

And then I attended the ordination service at Annual Conference last Tuesday night. The preacher for the night was a retired United Methodist elder who spent many years as president of a seminary in Kentucky. He has written lots of books and is known to be theologically pretty conservative. Not considering myself to fall into that category, I went to the service with as much of an open mind as I could muster, hoping he’d have some things to say that would encourage me to look upon him as a brother and not as an enemy. You see, I am aware of the great danger we are in as we continue to draw lines in the sand from both sides marking where the correct theology stands and the incorrect continues to be misguided. And most of what he preached was interesting and not offensive to me; I thought I was safe in getting away with listening to his sermon without feeling alienated from him and his pronouncements about what the Christian faith should be. But toward the end I was saddened to hear him say to the ordinands to be careful of theology and practices of ministry that would lead them away from the heart of the Christian faith and the true call of Jesus. “Ministers who are concerned with diversity and inclusiveness are being led away from the true meaning of the gospel,” I heard him say. I was immediately sad and angry at the same time. How did he and I come from the same church, the same polity, the same theological traditions? How do we claim to have relationship with the same God and the same Jesus Christ and the same Holy Spirit? I could hardly stand to listen to it; had I not had friends who were being ordained, I might not have stayed for the rest of the service.

I thought about his words all week: we shouldn’t be concerned with fostering diversity or inclusiveness, and we shouldn’t even be friendly toward other religions that steer us away from the true heart and ministry of God. I thought about how differently I consider the practice of hospitality toward people of other faiths, people who are different than I, people who are otherwise excluded from many parts of the life of faith in the church. I realized that I wished that this preacher had never opened his mouth and spread that kind of thinking to the thousand or more people who were gathered in that room. What better faith and theology I have! What poor interpretation of the Word of God he has! I am a part of the real church, and the church he proclaims is some kind of an imposter. Surely there is no gray area here; only black and white.

And then I attended the breakfast meeting of the Methodist Federation for Social Action where I heard a young woman speak about her experience in advocacy for Palestinians in the midst of the war and strife of the Middle East, particularly those living in the West Bank. Beth Corrie’s cousin, Rachel, was killed in 2003 while standing in front of the home of a Palestinian in the West Bank, challenging a bulldozer meant to bring the house down. After several retreats, the bulldozer seemed to back off before it took one last charge toward the house and ran over Rachel Corrie twice in its path to demolishing the Palestinian home. Beth spoke about the difference between being anti-Israel and being sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians losing their homes in the occupation of the West Bank by Israel. It is possible, she said, to fight for the rights of Palestinians and to have respect for the story of the people of Israel. Has God ultimately shown favor for one people over another?

For generations we have read this passage for today as the story of the singling out of Isaac to be the continuing patriarch of the people of God after Abraham. Taking care of the struggle between his 2 sons, Abraham is convinced to send the troublemaker, Ishmael, away with his mother—possibly to die alone in the wilderness, away from the place where they had made a home for themselves and their family. And for what cause? Because Ishmael dared to have a relationship with his half-brother Isaac. I know that sibling relationships are not all happy days and flowers, but we learn important life lessons through struggling with and growing with our siblings. We learn how to approach difference, how to hear the story of someone who is living a different life from our own, how to live with someone whom you don’t love all the time, and how to make a life that is worth something together with another who may not be worth very much to you from time to time.

Two days after the ordination service, I sat in the business session in which the conference was to be addressed briefly by the new dean of the Candler School of Theology, Dr. Jan Love. Always excited to hear her speak, I was looking forward to seeing her. I looked down the row from where I sat and saw her one row in front of me sitting with none other than the preacher from the ordination service who had made me so angry, whom I had decided was not even worthy of being called by the same name of Christ by which I call myself. They were chatting and laughing together, looking as if they were long lost friends. Now, I’m not naive: I know there is not much love lost between the two schools they represent and probably, therefore, between themselves. But could they come together in the spirit of Christian conference and conversation to see each other as rooted in the same God, the same Mercy, the same Steadfast Love, and the same Forgiveness? Could the living God and the compassionate Christ actually have sent the Holy Spirit into the world to bind us together when we want to pull each other apart?

Friends, I chose this passage from the lectionary today so that it could serve as a reminder to us that God is a bigger God than we can name, imagine, describe, or even fight over. The love of God who sent Jesus to us sends us each to each other so that we can learn from each other lessons of grace, forgiveness, diversity (even when we don’t see its value!), inclusiveness (even when we preach against it), and mercy. The God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, the sons of Paran, and Jacob…the God of us here at St. Paul is not a God we contain here or control here. Our God does not even agree with us all the time. But our God does love us all the time, and not just us but all people—even the ones who turn against God in word or in deed, and we have all found ourselves among those numbers at one time or another in our lives.

I believe it is time to stop calling each other names and pointing our fingers in one another’s faces; I believe it is time to let our children play and struggle together, not to separate them into homogenous groups as we have done ourselves as we grow into adulthood. I believe it is time to recognize that as much as we preach and teach the love of God here, it does not only exist here. It exists in the worshiping community to which my brother from the other seminary belongs; it exists in the congregations whose theological beliefs seem to be completely opposite and maybe even competing with our own. I believe that God has made a great nation out of Ishmael—a nation that rivals only every other nation created in the eyes and heart of God on the earth. We are brothers and sisters, friends, not bosses and servants.

How do we live this out? How do I go to my brother who preaches what is in my opinion such offensive Christian theology and make peace with his spirit so that we can begin to see the Spirit of God in one another? How do we join hands with other congregations in our community or extended community whose theological beliefs and practices are so different from our own that we can hardly recognize the prayers they pray as directed at the God to whom we pray?

How can we do it? How can we quit patting ourselves on our Methodist backs? On our theologically-open backs? On our open-to-diversity-and-inclusiveness-as-long-as-it-comes-to-us-first backs? On our mission-oriented- but-not-as-active-as-we-could-be backs? On our we’re-open-to-them-but-they’re-not-open-to-us backs?

How are we going to do it, friends? How are we going to do it?