"For the Un-Chosen"--January 14, 2020

For the Un-Chosen--January 14, 2020

"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 deaprted, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. 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 oppose 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 the boy up 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...." [Genesis 21:14-20a]

God, it must be said, loves the un-chosen, too.  God loves and stands with the cast-out, the un-loved, the not-accepted, and the disregarded.  God lifts them up out of the grip of death and raises them up to be held fast in their mothers' arms.

Whatever else we may want to say about God, we cannot ignore that the true and living God overturns the callousness of "father Abraham" to raise up the son of an enslaved African woman named Hagar from the verge of death, and blesses them both with life and God's own presence.

This, I must confess, is one of those Bible stories I was embarrassingly old to read for the first time--or at least, to read and understand its implications.  This is a story that messes up tidy categories and blurs the boundaries of belonging we so desperately want to set up.  Some part of us, I admit, wants a world where there are clear lines, solid borders, between "insiders" who are acceptable... and "outsiders" who are not.  And we especially want our picture of God to back up that view of the world--we want God to give us clear marks to identify who is "in" and who is "out," who is "blessed" and who is "cursed." But the story of Hagar and her boy Ishmael brings us face to face, even kicking and screaming, with a God who reserves the right to show up for the ones deemed "unacceptable" and "outcast."

This story comes shortly after the great patriarch and matriarch of our faith, Abraham and Sarah, decide they are done waiting for God to give them a child and instead that Abraham will father a child with the woman enslaved to Sarah his wife, an enslaved Egyptian woman named Hagar.  When Hagar becomes pregnant and has a baby boy (whom Abraham names Ishmael), Sarah is jealous and eventually wants Abraham to kick them out of the household.  Even after Sarah has a baby of her own--Isaac, the child of promise--she can't stand the sight of Hagar and Ishmael in their household.  And rather than defending his son and the woman he has taken advantage of to father the child Ishamel, Abraham does what Sarah says and sends off his own son, Ishmael, and his mother, Hagar, with only a canteen of water and a loaf of bread.  (Abraham was not really Father-of-the-Year material, I'll say.)

So now you have Isaac the insider getting to stay with his mom and dad, Sarah and Abraham, and they have been told that God's promise and blessing will continue through Isaac's family line.  But now, outside of that neat and lovely little family tree, there are Ishmael and Hagar: a single mom trying to take care of her boy as well as she can, but clearly they are the cast-out, not-good-enough, not-loved, not-chosen ones.  The part of us that likes clear boundaries between "insiders" (who we assume are "good") and "outcasts" (whom we assume are "bad") is ready for God to declare a divine "Good riddance" to those outsiders and to pour out the blessings for the child of the promise, Isaac.

But that's not how the story goes.  Not at all.  Because even though we may like rigid boundaries between the "acceptable people" that we think God is allowed to love and the "unacceptable people" whom God is not allowed to stand with, the real and living God doesn't operate like that.  And so, even though, yes, God will continue to do something special with Isaac's family line, eventually leading his descendants through slavery of their own and out into their own wilderness journey to become the people of Israel, God also chooses to hear the cries of this rejected one, Ishmael.  God has mercy on Hagar, too, and spares her from having to lose her baby to a death in the wilderness.  Even though Abraham has cast them out, God does not stop loving or caring for this family. And even further than that, God chooses to be "with" the boy Ishmael, yes, even while also being "with" Isaac as well.  God reserves the right to love and care for them both.  God reserves the right to work through Isaac's family line and also to bless Ishmael's, not because of any particular achievements or worthiness of Ishmael's, but simply because he was rejected and in need.  God hears the cries of mother and son and acts for them, not because they promise to go to church if God helps, or that they'll give money or sacrifices or prayers to God as payment, but simply because God loves the ones the world rejects--even when the ones doing the rejecting are the likes of dear ol' Father Abraham.

And so in this story, something of a resurrection happens.  Just as the child is at the brink of being lost to the deadly dangers of the wilderness, God speaks to his mother, "Lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand."  God raises him up and loves Ishmael, even though he was the unwanted son.  God provides for Hagar and opens her eyes to be able to provide a living for herself and her boy, even though she had been dismissed as "just a slave girl" by Respectable-Matriarch-of-the-Faith Sarah. God lifts them up from the clutches of death, even though that messes with our wish for clear boundaries between the insiders-whom-we-assume-God-loves and the outsiders-whom-we-assume-God-rejects.

This is utterly radical.  Instead staying inside the boundaries of some Club-of-Already-Acceptable-Chosen-Ones, God operates within and outside of the lines, blurring them and breaking them by caring for Ishmael just as surely as God also provides for Isaac.  And that means, too, that God reserves the right to love and bless and stand with the people we Respectable Religious Folks have cast out.  The rejected ones, like Ishmael under the shade of a bush, are still beloved.  The disregarded ones, like Hagar ready to give up on the cruel unfairness of life, are still cared for.  The ones left to die in the middle of nowhere are lifted up to new life and saved from the power of the grave.

And the moment you and I want to start drawing lines to separate "acceptable insiders" (you know, like US) from "rejected outsiders," God comes along and says, "I think I'll stand over there, too, with the ones you think are rejected and outcast.  That is going to mess with our theology and all of our perfect little labels. But God doesn't really care about how messed up our categories get or how blurred our lines become.  God simply keeps on with God's peculiar work of finding the ones left for dead and raising them up to life.

Realizing that makes me fall in love with God all over again.  Taking it seriously means I will join in God's work of raising up the ones deemed unacceptable and not-good-enough.

Lord God, you who love the ones we write off and ignore, let us see the wide embrace of your love and be caught up in your work of lifting up the rejected ones as you have lifted us up into life in you.