Pentecost 4 Year A

Genesis 21.8-21; Psalm 86.1-10, 16-17; Romans 6.1b-11; Matthew 10.24-39

We’ve begun, these last few weeks, to read our way through parts of the great story of Abraham in the book of Genesis. This is the founding story of faith in the great traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Two weeks ago we heard God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants, more in number than the stars, will fill the earth and bless it. Here is the most fundamental relationship – covenant – between God and God’s people: the promise by God to be with them, us, and that through that relationship they, we, will be blessed and be a blessing.

We then missed out the initial threats to that promise. Sarah and Abraham remain childless, and so they have the idea to ‘use’ Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant, Hagar, as a surrogate mother. It’s a suggestion that initially at least Abraham appears to have little difficulty with, but in the course of time perhaps unsurprisingly it ends in mutual recrimination, as the now pregnant Hagar is cast out for the first time by a frustrated and jealous Sarah. Prompted by God she returns to the household, asked by the angel of God to ‘submit’ to Sarah, she gives birth to Ishmael. Thirteen years pass, and Ishmael grows up the seeming heir of Abraham, the child promised.

We then heard last week the renewal of the promise: as the Vice Provost emphasised, Abraham’s hospitality to strangers brings news that Abraham and Sarah will indeed have a child. Much to Sarah’s astonishment - she had laughed at the prospect - the seemingly impossible does indeed happen and Sarah gives birth to Isaac. And so we reach this morning’s troubling story; when at a great feast to celebrate Isaac’s weaning, his older half-brother Ishmael is spotted playing with him, and Sarah and Abraham respond to the blessing of a child with a fit of jealousy, turfing out the potential rival to Isaac’s inheritance, banishing Hagar and her son Ishmael. This story of the blessing of all the families of the earth through the progeny of Abraham starts unpromisingly.

Our Old Testament reading finds Hagar and Ishmael forced out to wander in the wilderness, and there to come close to death. Hagar places the boy under a bush and then moves a bow shot away so that, as she says, she does not have to look on the death of the child. It’s an example of the bible’s ability in a single sentence to encapsulate heartbreak, the limits of imaginable human suffering. And yet there, in the midst of this moment of agony, God responds: Hagar finds, even in the desert, with God’s prompting, a well of water from which she and Ishmael are replenished. And so they wander out of the pages of our bible.

The promise of blessing, to Abraham, the father of faith, and through him to all the families of the earth, has had a troubled and troubling start. And yet it’s a pattern we have seen before: the primordial blessing of the Garden of Eden is disturbed as Adam and Eve find themselves cast out; that first family then finds itself undone by jealousy as Cain turns on, and murders, his brother, Abel. Our scriptures are very clear eyed in their depiction of the jealousies and rivalries that threaten to undo the blessing of God that they also attest to. Abraham and Sarah’s blessing – both the covenant that promises to bless the earth through them and their descendants, and the blessing of this child, Isaac, given to them even in old age – Abraham and Sarah’s blessing does not unleash generosity of heart and action, but a casting out of the one who, they think, is no longer needed for this story, is indeed a potential rival. Hagar is superfluous. Never mind that the story was supposed to be one of blessing, blessing for all people, the whole earth.

That honesty is perhaps what is most important however. We don’t always recognise the same jealousies and protectiveness in ourselves, or in the church, called to be the proclaimer and enactor of God’s blessing. We must know, however, that we are not immune to such behaviour. The church, that community of flawed human beings like you and me, both lives in an awareness of God’s blessing, and sells that blessing short. It’s a pattern played out all too often: the blessing of God is narrowed, and becomes a possession for me and mine; the outsider and the other is superfluous to the blessing, their wellbeing and blessing somehow not part of the gift. We recognize ourselves in this account of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar.

But the story also recognises that God is not limited by such behaviour. Abraham may be the centre of this story, the primary recipient and means of blessing, but his failures to see a different future for Hagar and Ishmael, do not determine their fate. God is bigger than that, God’s promised blessing is faithful, and Hagar not forgotten. She may wander out of the pages of Genesis, but the hint is there that God does not desert her: ‘I will make a nation of him also’, says God before providing the well in the desert to replenish and renew. Muslims trace their religious ancestry to Abraham back through Ishmael and Hagar. Hagar is the mother of the Islamic faith: the well in the desert where she finds water is traditionally thought to still spring in the desert, a short distance from the Kaaba at Mecca. When Muslims perform the Haj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, many will journey between the Kaaba and the well to replicate Hagar and Ishmael’s search for water. To drink from the well is to re-find blessing.

Our first reading explores the gap between God’s promised blessing, and our reaction and enaction of that blessing. It reminds us that God’s blessing is always bigger than we imagine, always at work to enlarge our flawed living out of the blessing.

‘Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ Those words at the end of our Gospel today, describe the dynamic of God’s blessing. At the heart of Jesus’ challenging words to his disciples in today’s gospel, are two fundamental exhortations. The first is the repeated instruction to the disciples, Do not be afraid; an instruction found again and again in the gospels. Fear is what makes us hold the blessing tight to ourselves – fear of our potential rivals, fear of the other. And second are those hard words of Jesus, “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.” That recognition of potential conflict only make sense in a world where family loyalty is everything; where the protection of me and mine is the over-riding loyalty. That is the loyalty which caused Sarah and Abraham to drive Hagar out. Family bonds, the bonds we share with those we love, or are familiar, or are like us, those bonds are important and a blessing, of course, but they can become oppressive of the outsider, and a limiter of the blessing. Jesus words are a recognition of the costliness of widening the circle of blessing; of living out that truth that to hug the blessing tight is to lose it. To find ways to share it may feel costly, but is the means by which God’s blessing to all the people of the earth is known and lived out. We discover the depth of God’s blessing as we share it. Amen.