For the Un-Chosen

For the Un-Chosen--February 14, 2019

"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 [Ishmael], and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba.  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 rink.  God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness..." [Genesis 21:14-20a]

Sometimes the people you looked up to--even heroes of the faith--really let us down.

This is one of those stories that I don't remember ever being taught on the flannel board in Sunday School, but I am glad that eventually the Scriptures themselves smacked me over the head to pay attention to this scene. And even though it is one of Abraham's worst moments, it turns out to show a depth and a surprising breadth to God's love for "the Other," the outsider, the un-chosen, as it were.  And because of that, this story messes with my neatly ordered faith... in a good and necessary way.

Maybe a bit of backstory is necessary here, just to make sense of what's going on, and what a cowardly louse the great father of faith, Abraham is being.  Abraham, of course, is remembered for being the one who trusted God when, out of nowhere, God called him to leave behind his old land and family ties and life and go to a new land without so much as a piece of identification on his person.  And you have to give Abraham credit for that much--at nearly one hundred years old, he and his wife Sarah left the land in which they were ostensibly citizens to become squatters and migrants on land that was not their own for the rest of their lives, and Abraham never in his lifetime owned a piece of land that he lived on ever again.  It takes a great deal of courage and faith to be a resident alien in a foreign land without legal permission to be there, and that was Abraham.  So, okay, the old patriarch gets ten out of ten points for taking a leap of faith.

But then, after God had promised him a child but no children seemed forthcoming, Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands.  Abraham used (and there is no better word than "used" in this context) Sarah's slave Hagar as a surrogate, to have a child through her that Sarah would claim with Abraham as their own.  (This will be remembered later as Bad Idea #1.)  And what do you know, but Hagar has a son, Abraham's firstborn, whose name is Ishmael.  Well, in due time, Sarah also has a son, whom you might know was named Isaac (his birth story was one of the flannel board stories from Sunday School), and Isaac is the child through whom God's promises will be kept.  

Ah, but now what to do with Hagar and her boy, Ishmael? Especially as the two boys get older and Ishmael starts doing what older brothers do and picks on little Isaac?  Well, now, Ishmael and his mother Hagar are expendable.  Abraham and Sarah can't use them any longer, and so the decision is made to kick them out.  (This should be known as Bad Idea #2.) The single mother and her young son are sent off with a few meager provisions, no legitimate rights, no status, and no hope for survival.  They are outsiders, anyway, so they are disposable, right?  Hagar is Egyptian, so her darker skin and different culture make her and her son stand out anyhow.  And so it is not long before Hagar has run out of her meager supplies where Abraham left her in the middle of nowhere, and she has no way of providing anything more for her son, whose only crime was having been born... by Abraham and Sarah's scheming insistence in the first place.

Hagar feels utterly hopeless.  She cannot provide for her son to live. She cannot bring herself to take her son's life as some kind of mercy killing.  And she cannot bear to watch him die the long and painful death of starvation and exposure.  So she leaves him under a bush and watches from a distance.  Abraham has abandoned her, and so, she believes, must the God of Abraham also.

But God reserves the right to love the people kicked out of the house.  God reserves the right to love not only the "chosen" child of the promise, but also the non-chosen son of the enslaved woman.  God is just getting started with the family line of Abraham and Isaac, and indeed that family line becomes the people of Israel and the redemption of all the world eventually through the son of a young woman named Mary who is descended from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob... but God is also still at work with the story of Hagar and Ishmael. And even though they are "outsiders"--no, strike that, precisely because they are the overlooked, unwanted outsiders, the living God provides for Hagar and Ishmael and chooses to be "with" the child as he grows.

This is a dangerous (in a good way) story for our tidy religious piles.  We tend to see the world, both our world today and the world of the Bible, in terms of acceptable insiders and despicable outsiders.  We tend to assume that God will keep on coming through for insiders--for Abraham, for Isaac, for Jacob, and for that family line... but that God will have nothing to do with those who are not dues-paying in-group members.  Blessing, we assume, is for "insiders," and there is nothing for those no-good dirty heathen outsiders.  

But God insists on being bigger than that.  Without denying that God will yet work through Isaac and his family line, God also reserves the right to be compassionate for a starving boy left alone and separated from his parents in the empty desert.  God provides a way, not only for the boy to quench his thirst and live another day, but to get to stay with his mother and grow to adulthood with God's own presence.   God takes our neat and tidy piles of insiders and outsiders, of "chosen" and "not chosen," and God says, "I choose to love them both."  Isaac, yes, but also Ishmael.  The son of the ninety-year-old Sarah, and the son of the dismissed, formerly enslaved foreigner.  Both are blessed.  Both receive love.  Both are given the grace and honor and dignity of having God go "with" them into adulthood.

Sometimes we Christians do a poor job of reading our own Scriptures.  We say, more often than I would like to admit, things like, "God is only interested in taking care of us Christians," or "We have to look out for the interests of Christians first in the world--you know, people who are like us, and the rest will have to fend for themselves." We say things like, "Any outsiders should have to wait for us to take care of our own before we get around to leaving scraps and crumbs for them."  And we presume that is because God has chosen us... and has not chosen "those people."  And so, it only "makes sense" to us that in addition to the spiritual blessings of being "chosen" (so we say about ourselves), the material, physical resources at hand should go to us first, too, because, after all, we are the insiders, the chosen, the acceptable ones.  It's like we don't even know that a story like this one from Genesis is there in the Bible, daring us to take it seriously...even just to read it.

See, this is the thing: the Scriptures themselves make the point, from the very first book, mind you, that God is both big enough and gracious enough to love the ones we have cast out.  God is able to love and bless Isaac, the insider, and the son of Hagar as well.  God blesses him, not just for his own lifetime, but blesses his descendants as well into becoming a great nation.  And if that makes us--who trace our spiritual heritage through Isaac and Jacob and David and Jesus--uncomfortable, well, tough.  God reserves the right to love in a way that is bigger and wider and deeper than our shallow, shrunken comfort zones.  That is exactly what the story of Hagar and Ishmael is all about--a love bigger than our ability to contain or control, and a grace that is stronger than the boundaries or barriers we try to erect.

Abraham just didn't have the courage to see that God had loved and cared for him, even though Abraham himself was just a migrant squatting on someone else's land, and that.  And that meant Abraham was unable to see that God's love was just as strong and true and good for the son of the enslaved Egyptian woman as it was for the long-awaited son of Sarah.  But good news: Abraham is not God.  And the salvation of the world does not hang on Abraham's courage or generosity, but on God's. And God did what Abraham either could not or would not do: God provided and included the outcast single mother and son, when the "chosen" one had sheepishly turned them out.

Today, before we dare to allow phrases like, "But we have to look out for our own first!" to cross our lips... before we baptize our cowardice and selfishness and assume that God only cares about "our kind of people" (whether we mean that spiritually, nationally, ethnically, or whatever), and before we permit ourselves to imagine that "insiders" have all the rights and privileges, while "outsiders" should get none, we should remember this story that has been shouting to us like the voice of an angel calling out from heaven in the wilderness.  At the very root of our story of faith is a resident alien named Abraham living as a foreigner in a country that was not his own without any legal permission to be there... and a God who steps up to protect and provide for Abraham's outcast son when Old Abe himself doesn't have the guts or compassion to raise both of his own kids.  Our Bible begins with God's insistence on being "with" the outcast and the un-chosen as well as the privileged  and chosen "insiders." 

And God appears to be committed to that presence still today, whether we like it or not.

So... will we scowl at the idea of unworthy outsiders getting help, or will we rejoice at a God who opens eyes and provides springs of water in the wilderness for the single mother and son who have been left to fend for themselves?

I recommend rejoicing.

Lord God, where we attempt to box you in and contain your care and compassion, smack us upside the head as you reach out to outcasts and people who have been thrown away, especially by respectable religious people.  Let us learn to rejoice at the way you love far and wide.