21/6/26
Today, the Mothers union has a birthday of 150 years. It’s an organisation that is especially concerned with family life in all its trickiness and sparkle. Today's Old Testament lesson is all about one such family with a smorgasbord of messes.
We learn… sometimes…
Today’s first lesson about Hagar and her child Ishmael requires a bit of a backstory to properly understand it in its rightful context.
So let’s skip back a bit.
God made a covenant with Abraham. Having led him out of his homeland to an unknown foreign land, God now enters into a relationship with Abraham, promising him descendants outnumbering the sands of the seashore or the stars of heaven (Genesis 15:5-7) in the land God was giving him (vv. 18-21). God makes this covenant with Abraham, who has complained that — despite what God has given him — he has nobody to whom to pass those gifts on:
‘No,’ promises God. Abraham’s descendants will outnumber the stars of heaven.
But, in Abraham’s case, there remains the question: that God’s promise will be fulfilled, he has no doubt; how it will happen, well …
Now Abraham, a married man, undoubtedly “knew woman,” i.e., his wife, Sarai. Yet they had no children. So, if the how question remains, perhaps the path forward is a child through Sarai’s slave woman, Hagar? Perhaps she could be the olden day surrogate mother. It’s even Sarai’s idea, and a successful one at that.
Good plan? Well, they are trying to expedite or speed up God’s plan, and they are using sexual intercourse to achieve this. What could possibly go wrong?
Hagar’s pregnancy, particularly given the value both Abraham and Sarai attach to it, changes the relationship between servant Hagar and mistress Sarai. It has to.
Now, Hagar holds her maternity over Sarai. Look at me. I have conceived, and you haven’t. I carry Abraham's child, and you don’t. Aren’t I the privileged and the clever one?
Sarai blames Abraham for what has happened. ‘This was all your fault. If you hadn’t been so jolly complicit in this plan, none of this would have happened, and Hagar wouldn’t be giving me such a hard time.’
Fortunately, Sarai does conceive, and a son Issac is born. Now Sarai begins to mistreat Hagar, and this is where today’s first lesson comes in. It all becomes too much for Sarai. She now has a son and heir; there’s no further use for her slave woman and her squawking brat Ishmael. She gets her husband to send Hagar and her son into the desert with only a morning’s rations.
Have you noticed, … there are no winners in this…
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she goes off and sits down about a bowshot away, for she thinks, “I cannot watch the boy die.”
Her sobbing is heard, an angel shows her a well, and they live. Ishmael grows up, and Mum finds him an Egyptian wife. Hooray!
Back at the ranch, Abraham continues to flourish and go on to be one of the forefathers of the faith.
What can we learn from this episode? Well, the whole situation is the result of humanity taking into his own hands the terms by which God will fulfil his promises through a child. That’s neither the first nor last time that God’s plans have been subjected to human-planned parenthood — with the usual problematic outcomes. The episode reveals certain constant truths about human experience:
We learn that trying to speed up God’s timeline is not a good idea.
We learn that God can take our messiest family mistakes and use them to his glory.
We learn that when we are rock bottom, in the desert, when all seems lost, and we are a long way from home, then that is when God intervenes and sets us on a completely different path, to a different place, with different people doing wildly unexpected things.
We learn that the people that we think are the outsiders, the lowly, the marginalised, the ones shunned and kicked out socially and physically, are actually very important to God. God is not confined to the ‘In crowd’. He very much enjoys the mucky company of those on the fringes and the outer.
We learn that The Master is deeply aware of our pain, confusion and bewilderment when we feel invisible to the world. It is in these times that we are gazed upon and listened to.
We learn that the desert places are often the places where we drink from the deepest well and that, like Hagar and Ishmael, these places are the places of new beginnings and adventures.
We learn that we are called to "let go" of what we cling to—pride, security, or our own plans—to follow God's plan. The story highlights that divine providence often acts in the midst of messy human situations.
We learn that sexual intercourse in its appropriate use is a marvellous and wonderful gift, but it’s not to be used to try to fix messy family situations. It will only make things worse. Just ask Abraham, Sarai and Hagar.
Or if all that is too much, just try to remember this.
When your heart breaks, listen to the one who hears….