A Sermon by Canon Maggie Guite
Proper 7 A Track 1
23/6/14
Genesis 21.8-21
Matt. 10.24-39
Reading Hagar and Ishmael’s Story
This year in the Sundays after Trinity we’re embarking
on a long trawl through the early parts of the Old
Testament. I want to speak today about how we may
best read and understand these early ‘histories’ - and I
put the world ‘history’ in inverted commas, because
they’re not at all like the kind of history we read today.
In the earliest part of the Old Testament we’re dealing
with stories from very long ago – stories which were
originally passed down by word of mouth – which, if
you like, became familiar to people more around the
camp fire than in the study. As they were told,
generation on generation, they gained a life of their
own: they were embroidered, or presented in different
ways, to suit the emphasis the story-teller wanted to
give. And the process of their use for particular
purposes didn’t end when they were originally written
down, or even when they came to win a place in what
was recognised as ‘Scripture’. Still people pick them up
and use them for differing purposes, and to make
different points.
Out of these stories peep faces with names, such as
Abraham and Sarah – but names about whom we can
say remarkably little in a strictly historical sense. It’s
interesting when someone finds a name similar to one
of the ones in the Biblical narrative in some ancient
inscription from a different source; but none of us has
to go to the stake for the claim that Abraham has a
recognisable historical identity, or can be dated to such
and such a particular century. What people have
chosen to say about Abraham is much more important
than being sure when, or even whether, he existed.
Now, I hope this isn’t too shocking a thing to hear from
the pulpit! I want to give you an analogy from nearer
home to illustrate what I’m saying.
Malcolm and I once heard the radical American political
theologian, Jim Wallis, say that when he was in
England, he made sure to go to Nottingham, to pay his
respects to the memory of England’s greatest practical
theologian – Robin Hood. I’m sure Jim Wallis wasn’t
making any big claim to know who Robin Hood was, or
when or even whether he existed. People have their
theories, of course, and you can read all about them in
the Visitor Centre in Sherwood Forest. But the idea of
Robin Hood, and the stories about him, are what’s
really interesting. What they tell us is that some time
around the beginning of the 13th Century – not far off
the time when the Barons were asserting their liberties
over against the king in Magna Carta – the idea was
gaining ground that the common people, too, deserved
justice and fairness, over against rich and oppressive
overlords. People are still inspired by that idea today,
as well as interested enough in the stories themselves,
to retell and adapt them with all sorts of emphases in
books and films and TV version which keep on rolling
out.
Well, Abraham is located in an era much longer ago
than Robin Hood, and we can tell that the stories about
him were told and re-told many times before they were
written down, because if you read the Book of Genesis
and its account of him, you’ll find inconsistencies and
repetitions of the same events with different details –
and so forth. But the important thing about Abraham is
not to hammer out an absolute date and chronology
for him, but to think about the idea, or ideas, that the
stories convey: the idea of worshipping one God,
instead of many; the idea of travelling in radical trust;
the developing sense of identity, promise and calling for
a particular Middle Eastern nation coming into being
some time in the Bronze Age – the nation which would
later be called the Israelites.
Within the story of Abraham –and indeed, the saga of
his family – are many particular stories; and, as people
told and re-told them – and eventually wrote them
down, and then interpreted them further - they were
answering questions which were important to those
people. I want to look today briefly at the story we
heard in our first reading, the story of Hagar and
Ishmael, and some of the things it has meant to people
in the past, and what it might mean to us today.
One of the questions this story addresses is to do with
the Israelites’ identity, and relationship with other
nations around them. Clearly, the Israelites were and
are) a Semitic race – distinct in their faith and identity;
but equally clearly they were (and are) related to some
of the people of other races around them. The story of
Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham’s first son born of her,
gives an account of how the later Israelites can trace
back their relationship to the travelling people of the
wilderness – the ancestors of the Bedouin of the Negev
and Sinai. Hagar, the slave girl, who had originally been
given to Abraham by his wife Sarah so that he might
beget children, because she, his legal wife, was infertile
(which was an ancient tradition), lost her position in the
family, and with her, her son, when Sarah miraculously
had her own son (and also, we may say, when Sarah’s
ambivalent feelings about the past welled up into
antagonism and fierce rejection). It’s a vivid story,
deftly told, with strong emotional resonances; but the
important way in which it answers the Israelites’
questions about identity and relationship is found in
verse 18, God’s promise to make Ishmael the father of a
nation – though not from within the security of
Abraham’s tent, nor under the promise that Abraham’s
descendants would be a particular kind of blessing to
others. Isaac and his descendants were to be the nation
of the big promise – yet the Ishmaelites were
established as a closely related people, for whom God
had their own purpose.
Other stories within the family saga in Genesis tell of
ways in which other surrounding nations were related
to the Israelites, through focussing on particular
individuals – Esau as the progenitor of the Edomites, for
example.
But, to return to the story of Hagar and Ishmael – there
it is in Genesis, enshrined as Scripture, but still available
for re-telling to bring out different emphases and
points. And one of the people who did that was St Paul,
who used the story in Galatians chapter 4 in a really
startling way; he focussed in on the aspect that Isaac
was the son of promise, whereas Hagar was the mother
of a son who was not the inheritor of the big promise to
Abraham; and Paul goes so far as to say that Hagar
‘stands for’ Mount Sinai, and that her ‘children’ (in
symbolic terms) are in fact the Jewish nation – or that
part of it which remained under the Old Testament
Law; whereas Christians, as inheritors of God’s big
promise of salvation through Christ, are the true
inheritors in Isaac’s line. And, if you think about it, this
is a breathtaking reversal for Paul to have made, and no
doubt deeply offensive to Jews, both then and now:
Hagar is effectively their mother (symbolically
speaking), and Sarah, the true wife, ours.
Most of us probably don’t spend much time wrestling
with Galatians Chapter 4: the symbolism seems more
remote than shocking to us, and there are other New
Testament passages which speak to us more clearly of
our salvation through Christ and not by keeping the
Law. But one thing Galatians 4 illustrates, very clearly,
is that Paul, pre-eminent among New Testament
writers, saw no difficulty in taking a story from
Scripture and interpreting it in a very radical way, to
make a point relevant to his readers
And this gives us some encouragement to look for
significance which is relevant to us today in these old
stories – not twisting their content, but bringing out of
them emphases which are certainly there, but of
particular relevance to our needs and concerns.
And it seems to me that today, the story of Hagar and
Ishmael speaks in a very important way about the
relationship – indeed kinship –of all the people there,
and of God’s care and concern for each group and its
history. And the message can be extended, surely, to all
other parts of the world where brother is tearing
nearly related brother to pieces, often on the basis of a
religious narrative which gives overemphasis to
difference and privileged revelation. Sunnis and Shiites
have hated each other over the centuries because of
the stories about what happened after the prophet
Mohammed’s death – and they have told these stories
in different ways. The running sore of the
Israel/Palestine situation is again sustained and
exacerbated by the stories people tell about
themselves, and the emphases they choose to put on
certain aspects of those stories.
The poignant story of Hagar and Ishmael certainly tells
of a terrible rift between the descendants of Sarah, and
those of Hagar; you can tell it in such a way that
emphasises the rift, and separates people. But behind
the rift, it tells us that fundamentally their children are
closely related, and God has a concern for them all.
We, too, as a nation and culture tell stories about
ourselves; at different times in history we place the
emphasis differently in how we do this. We should all
try to be discerning about this process, and above all- if
we’re Christians – seek to tell to our children the story
of our identity in ways which resonate with Christ’s
teachings, and his priorities: that is, he love of God who
is creator and lover of all, and the love of our
neighbour, who may sometimes be cast as an enemy
during history’s tragic course , but is certainly no
further beyond God’s care and plan than we are.