James D. Brown
Pastor, Market Square Presbyterian Church
Harrisburg, PA
March 23, 2003
Genesis 21:11-20 and 25:7-11
Romans 11:25-36
Note: This is the second in a sermon series; the previous sermon was "Abraham, Sarah and Hagar."
A month or so ago the Trustees of our congregation completed a task they had been talking about for several years. Our church tower and steeple had become home to a huge flock of pigeons. It goes without saying that the pigeons were making a terrible mess inside the tower. It had become both a full-scale pigeon bathroom and graveyard. As the kids say, it was pretty yucky.
Ken Mayer, Jim Mumper, Chris McClure and Jim Queeley scoped out the project, and we then hired a man who cleared everything up and then put in place tough wire screening to keep the pigeons from coming back to one of their favorite Harrisburg haunts. Well done, good and faithful servants.
The other day when the garage was extra full, I parked on the roof. Our church steeple is at eye level from this vantage point, and I noticed a large number of pigeons wheeling about. What's this, I thought? Has the Harrisburg Hilton for Pigeons reopened for business?
I ambled up to the edge of the roof and watched an unfolding drama with amazement and even a little sadness. You see, the pigeons were seeking to go home, and couldn't. The heart of the drama was an opening high up on the steeple. Pigeons were taking turns lighting on a small ledge and peering into what had been their resting place, but which was now blocked on the inside with state-of-the-art wire mesh.
They stuck their heads under the louvered woodwork, bobbing back and forth as pigeons do, then looking askance at their compatriots flying behind them, as if to say,
"The ordered world we have known is now in disarray. The ebb and flow of our days-nesting on eggs, flying out for food and then coming home to roost-all this is gone, and now we can only peer anxiously into the darkness, longing for the past and unsure about what the future holds."
There is a parable in this for those of us watching the nightly news as another homeland is being rocked and blasted with a fury like that of the cauldrons of fire within the sun itself. We too have to be wondering what the future holds as the numbing power of modern weaponry is unleashed in the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. We worry about our own sons and daughters who are there on our behalf, and we worry about the enemy so vastly outnumbered and overpowered, especially the women and children. I nodded my head in agreement when CNN showed a Marine chaplain admonishing the platoon assembled before him:
"Pray not only for yourself, but for your enemies as well. After all, they are just soldiers, like you, doing what they are ordered to do."[1]
At times like this Scripture cries out to us, echoing the experiences of other men and women who were up against excruciating realities like ours. The story of Abraham and Hagar and Sarah and Ishmael and Isaac has much to offer as we seek our way forward.
Last week we dealt with the birth of Ishmael to Abraham and the slave-girl Hagar, and then the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah. Today we will continue exploring the saga of the origins of Islam through Ishmael, and those of Judaism through Isaac. Strangely enough, the roots of today's conflict in the Middle East can be traced back to the day when Isaac was weaned. Phyllis Trible, for many years Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York, calls what I will now read a text of terror found in the Bible.
The child [Isaac] 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." (Genesis 21:8-10)
Let this sink in. Sarah forces Abraham to choose between his two sons: one is to be the winner and one the loser. And irony of ironies, in the Hebrew there is a play on the word Isaac and the verb playing -- Yitzhak and metzahhek are both are grounded in the idea of laughter and playfulness. Rabbi Norman Cohen makes this telling connection:
Isaac and Ishmael, the two brothers from different mothers, nevertheless bear the same description.Sarah, seeing the two brothers together, suddenly realized the close affinity that would develop between them and became extremely concerned about Isaac's future. If they were too much alike, then Ishmael would pose a threat to Isaac's inheritance. She knew Abraham's positive feelings toward his firstborn son. Isaac's clear identity was at stake, and in Sarah's eyes Isaac could not grow up to be himself if Ishmael, his other side, was a constant presence.[2]
The terror unfolds quickly. Abraham is told (by God, mind you!) to do whatever Sarah tells him, as distressing as it might be to Abraham. He dutifully banishes Hagar and Ishmael, giving Hagar bread and a skin of water, and sent them on their way into the wilderness of Beer-sheba. Soon the water was gone. Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and then went off some distance and "lifted up her voice and wept," not wanting to look on the death of her son.
Here the story takes a strange twist. Hagar has done all the crying, and yet we read, "God heard the voice of the boy." An angel of God called to Hagar from heaven,
"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. (Genesis 21:17-21)
Ishmael begins to recede from view at this point, with Isaac becoming the central figure in the family tree that will ultimately blossom into the twelve tribes of Israel. It will not be until the prophet Muhammad comes along in the 7th century after the life of Jesus that the definitive linkage will be made between Ishmael and the Bedouin tribes that are to be the locus of Islam.
How hauntingly real this text is for the present moment. It lays bare the brokenness of human families and the human family. Rabbi Norman Cohen touches on both levels. He speaks candidly of his own family:
Almost every one of us, either because we are one of several children in a family or we ourselves have more than one child, knows the pain when children receive different treatment from their parents. This is especially true for those of us who live in families blended from two separate marriages. How do our stepchildren feel when they do not get the same love, attention and privileges as those conceived by us? What goes through the minds and hearts of our own children when they see a stepbrother or sister enjoy a more lavish Bar or Bar Mitzvah celebration because their other parent can afford and wants an expensive party? Each one of us knows such moments.[3]
This needs no further commentary, nor does his perception of how this relates to the current mayhem in the Middle East between Jews and Muslims:
[Hagar and Ishmael] are not unlike their descendants, today's Ishmaelites, who feel that they, too, have been driven from their homes by the heirs to Abraham's covenant.The refugees who live in the camps in Gaza and the West Bank, not far from where Abraham dwelt with Sarah and Isaac, can only feel that their land and homes have been taken from them and they have been driven unjustly into the wilderness, there to struggle for survival like Hagar and Ishmael with little hope for the future.[4]
There it is in stark relief, a drama embedded in the cradle of civilization that has been playing itself out for nearly 4000 years according to our text from Genesis. Nothing has driven this home more poignantly for me in recent days than the story of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist who was killed a week ago by an Israeli army bulldozer knocking down a Palestinian building in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
Corrie was a 23-year-old student at Evergreen State College in her hometown of Olympia, Washington. She had gone to the Gaza Strip to work with an international organization trying to stop the demolition of homes and the destruction of wells. She died last Sunday while wearing an orange fluorescent jacket to alert the bulldozer drivers of her presence as she stood in their way in front of the dwelling they had come to demolish.
What has stirred my soul is the last e-mail exchange between Corrie and her dad dated March 11 and 12, 2003. Her dad wrote first:
Rachel,
I find writing to you hard, but not thinking about you impossible.I am afraid for you, and I think I have reason to be. But I'm also proud of you -- very proud. But as Don Remfert says: I'd just as soon be proud of somebody's else's daughter. That's how fathers are: we're hard wired not to want our children, no matter how old they are, no matter how brave they are, and no matter how much good they are doing, to be subject to so much threat or even witness so much suffering. You may say (have said) that it is wrong for me to stick my head in the sand; but I say I am only trying to (or just wishing I could) stick your head in the sand -- and that's different. Hard wired. Can't be changed on that aspect of the issue. I love you, and please take care!
Dad
The next day Rachel wrote back:
Hi papa, thank you for your email. I feel like sometimes I spend all my time propagandizing mom, and assuming she'll pass stuff on to you, so you get neglected. Don't worry about me too much, right now I am most concerned that we are not being effective. I still don't feel particularly at risk. Rafah has seemed calmer lately, maybe because the military is preoccupied with incursions in the north -- still shootings and house demolitions -- one death this week that I know of, but not any large incursions. Still can't say who this will change if and when war with Iraq comes.
Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with
the rest of my life. I love you very much. If you want you can
write to me as if I was on vacation at a camp on the big island
of Hawaii learning to weave. One thing I do to make things easier
here is to utterly retreat into fantasies that I am in a Hollywood
movie or a sitcom starring Michael J Fox. So feel free to make
something up and I'll be happy to play along. Much love poppy.
Rachel
Two days later Rachel was run over by an armored Israeli army bulldozer plowing into a building, and shortly after died in the hospital from her injuries. Her dad told the Associated Press:
"We've tried to bring up our children to have a sense of community, a sense of community that everybody in the world belonged to. Rachel believed that -- with her life, now.She gave her life trying to protect those who could not protect themselves."
Rachel's death pushes us back to our text for the day -- a text of terror that links us to the terrors of our own world. For me, the end of the lesson I read this morning contains a glimmer of hope. It too is about death -- the death of Abraham.
Abraham breathed his last and died in good old age, an old man full of years, and was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. (Genesis 25:8-10)
These two sons and their descendants were to go their very separate ways, but the image of the two of them carrying their father to his final resting place in the cave of Machpelah is one to which I will cling in the days ahead -- an image of the sons of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar moving as one.
Bruce Feiler concludes his best-selling book on Abraham with words we need to read when we awake and as we lie down after watching the gore and mayhem of war on the evening news:
The Abraham I long for would be a bridge between humanity and the divine, who demonstrates what it means to be faithful but who also delivers to us God's blessing on earth. And this Abraham conveys God's grace through his children, through Ishmael, through Isaac, and who then has so much hallowedness left over that he doles out some to all the members of his household.This Abraham is not Jew, Christain, or Muslim. He is not flawless .But he is the best vessel we've got . I choose him.[5]
So do I, and I hope you will too.
Notes:
[1} Quoted by Uwe E. Reinhardt in
The New York Times, "Innocents in Uniform," March
22, 2003
Return to text.
[2] Norman Cohen, Self, Struggle
and Change, Jewish Lights Publishing, © 1995, pp. 71-2
Return to text.
[3] Norman Cohen, pp. 70-71
Return to text.
[4] Norman Cohen, p. 76
Return to text.
[5] Bruce Feiler, Abraham, A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths, William Morrow, © 2002, pp. 217-18
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