How Wide Is God's Love?

Genesis 21:8-21

If your family is a little dysfunctional, or a lot dysfunctional, well . . . welcome to the club. 

He that has no fools, knaves nor beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.

– Thomas Fuller

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

– George Burns

Some family trees bear an enormous crop of nuts

- Anonymous

We’ll read today’s text from Genesis 21 in a minute, but I’ll take a few minutes to set things up.

 

The story that Genesis tells about how God blesses the world is a strange story.  Two things make it strange.  First, God chooses to deal with one specific family (Abraham’s family), and that family is pretty dysfunctional.  And second, by choosing this one family, God leaves out lots of others.

Both Jews and Christians claim Genesis as a family story.  In other words, this isn’t someone else’s story.  This is YOUR story, YOUR family tree.  It’s a family line that extends all the way to Jesus and to all of us called together in Jesus’ name as part of God’s new family.  So we listen to this story about Abraham, Sarah, and their offspring, not as if we’re reading someone else’s story.  We listen like kids lolling on the front porch, drinking lemonade and listening in as our parents and grandparents tell the family stories that make us who we are.

Abraham and Sarah are people of faith and courage, called by God to a very special role.  But today, in this specific story, I am afraid you will not have a very good first impression.  They are hard to like and respect.  But that’s ok I guess.  Because the story about their troubled, dysfunctional family is really a story about the God who loves and blesses both them, and now us.  So a little background on Abraham . . .

Abraham’s family moved around a lot.  He grew up way over East in Ur of the Chaldees.  Later the family moved westward toward Haran.  That’s when God first appeared to Abraham and announced a blessing on all Abraham’s descendants.  Then Abraham continued West to the land of Canaan – the land God promised to his family.  But drought and famine in Canaan forced his family to migrate down South into Egypt.  Some of you have moved around a lot.  And you know that can be stressful for a family.

Abraham’s family was poor at first, but they eventually became wealthy.  Traveling as nomads, moving from place to place early in life, they didn’t have much.  They were unsettled, just subsisting.  But after God blessed Abraham, they began to prosper.  It happened during their stay in Egypt really.  Abraham’s family began to amass herds of livestock, and a swelling number of Egyptian servants.  They got rich.  When Abraham’s family eventually left Egypt to return Northward to Canaan, there wasn’t even room for all they owned.  Abraham and his nephew Lot owned so many cattle and slaves they had to part ways and settle in different areas.

Oh, and Abraham’s family was dysfunctional, full of secrets, lies, deceit, fear, anxiety, and jealousy.  Abraham’s father had children by different women.  One of Abraham’s younger half-sisters was a girl named Sarah.  She became his wife.  Just imagine if you layered together in one relationship the fights you have with siblings and the fights married people have! 

But Sarah was jaw-droppingly beautiful.  And Sarah’s natural beauty and smashing good looks caused a problem.  As sometimes happens, she relied on her physical beauty in a way that kept her from becoming a person with beautiful character.  She wasn’t very kind or thoughtful.  And the people around her just enabled her, including her husband.

Let me give you one example of Sarah’s character issues.  I told you that God appeared to Abraham and promised to bless him with many descendants.  What I didn’t tell you is that Sarah was barren, unable to have children.  To be childless in an ancient culture was a terrible burden and shame.  And now imagine what happens to that difficulty when your husband is told he will father a great tribe.

When Abraham and Sarah were in Egypt, one of the many slaves they accumulated was a young Egyptian woman named Hagar.  Who knows how Hagar got sold into slavery, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a pretty story.  But Hagar moves north to Canaan with her owners Abraham and Sarah.  And she becomes Sarah’s personal servant.  So Hagar’s job was to be the round the clock, personal servant of beautiful, angry, unkind Sarah.

The story of the problems between Sarah and her servant Hagar are told in Genesis 16.  Late in life, when Abraham is 86 and Sarah is 76, Sarah fears that God’s promise to bless Abraham is never going to come true.  And Sarah is ashamed and angry about her own inability to produce a child.  And so she gives Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman, to Abraham as a wife.  Her exact words to Abraham were, “Go, sleep with my servant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”

Hagar the slave has been used and mistreated her whole life.  But when she becomes pregnant, the stress and animosity with Sarah become unbearable.  So Hagar runs away into the desert.  But an angel visits her, and counsels her to return to the home of Abraham and Sarah.  She gives birth to a son named Ishmael.

Now flash forward 14 years.  Abraham is 100.  Sarah is 90.  And the God who promised to bless Abraham’s family line through a special son appears to Abraham and Sarah to announce that the time has come.  They both laugh a disbelieving laugh.  They are as good as dead.  How can they have a child together now?  But Sarah becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son named Isaac.  When Isaac was weaned of his mother’s milk at one or two, and when Ishmael was 14 or 15, here’s what happened.

Reading of Text

There’s a party

The entire plot of the story drives to the joy of this celebration.  Finally, after long waiting, God has finally realized the promise made to Abraham.  Against all odds, God brings to life the dead womb of Sarah and she gives birth to Isaac.  This party was a full expression of gladness for these parents.  And a time for them to begin dreaming about the future.  Sarah is buoyant, joyous, elated at her good fortune.

There’s a problem

Abraham already has a son, Ishmael, his first-born.  And at the party, Sarah pulls her husband aside to tell him that the teenager Ishmael is “mocking.”  We have no way of knowing whether her charge is true.  She seems like the kind of vengeful person who could have manufactured such a charge.  But maybe there was something to it.  Ishmael was old enough to know that his mother was treated cruelly and without mercy by Sarah.  And Sarah’s child Isaac was the son promised by God to be the line of blessing to future generations.  So maybe he did smirk or roll his eyes during the celebration. 

Sarah says to her husband: “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac” (21:9-10).  (I told you she was hard to like).

There’s a send-off

In an act so cruel it’s hard to imagine, Abraham grants Sarah’s hateful wish and sends Hagar his wife and his first-born son Ishmael, out into the desert.  She and the boy have a little food and water.  But that’s it.  And it appears that God condones this cruelty by telling Abraham to do what Sarah says.

Hagar and Ishmael wander under the brilliantly hot sun of the desert.  And before long, their water gone, they give up hope.  It looks as if they will die of dehydration and exposure.  And we are given a front row seat to their terrible suffering.

What we witness is Hagar’s visceral grief as a mother.  She has come to grips with the fact that they will both die.  But she cannot bear to watch her son die.  So she walks away from him.  All is lost.  God has chosen Isaac for the family tree of blessing, and Ishmael and his mother Hagar aren’t part of that line. 

Now if the story stopped here . . . you would likely agree with me that this isn’t the kind of God that you would want to love, worship, and serve.

There’s a rescue.

God hears the sobbing of Hagar and Ishmael and sends an angel to them.  The angel alerts Hagar and Ishmael to a well of fresh water nearby.  They drink, and live.  And God blesses Ishmael with a family tree of his own.

How wide is God’s love?  How wide do you draw the boundaries of God’s love?  Who gets left outside the boundary lines where you draw them?

This strange story can help us reflect on God’s love for those who are not insiders, those not connected to the church.  And what we discover is that God’s love is transgressive.  God’s love flows out of bounds, out beyond Israel’s borders, out beyond the borders of those of us who are followers of Jesus.  God’s love makes its way to those who walk on other paths.

What this story suggests is that there isn’t anyone outside the scope of God’s love and care.  There isn’t anyone who lives without a future in the world God is working to bring about.  All those on paths that run alongside or outside the path of the church are also God’s beloved creatures.

God’s enduring love for Hagar and Ishmael reminds us that God loves Arabs and Muslims and Asian farmers and Guatemalan mothers and Romanian gypsies and Wall Street bankers and communist Cubans as well as our neighbors and family members who are not part of any church – just like God loves those of us who belong to Jesus Christ in an explicit way by faith.

So is there nothing special about being part of God’s people connected to Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus?  Of course there is.  We have been chosen, elected to live with gladness in the full view of the watching world.  We have received God’s Spirit.  We have been given the gift of Scripture as guidance and wisdom.  We’ve received a wealthy inheritance of wise practices to nurture and sustain us: singing, praying, eating, caring, serving, learning, and celebrating.

The specialness of being God’s people is not that we are the objects of God’s love and others are not.  Our job as insiders is to live with joy and gratitude to God on behalf of all those whom God loves.

The good news is that God keeps showing up in families and congregations like ours.  In all our messy woundedness and quirky dysfunction – God is still at work, calling all of us into the new family of Jesus, but refusing to abandon those not yet here.