Sermon for June 19th 2005. The Revd. J. Michael Povey at St. James's, Cambridge, MA

Genesis 21:8-21 + Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17 + Romans 6:1b-11 + Matthew 10:24-39

A wee while ago I preached a sermon in which I lamented the substitution of "slogans" in modern American life as a substitute for thoughtful discourse. Slogans do not say it all, and they are dangerous when we think that they do. And here are two religious slogans of which to be wary. One is "family values", and the other is "Biblical world view". When we hear those words, we should be careful to ask the person who has spoken them "please tell me more of what you mean by those words?" We, for instance might want to know how the words "family values" with their implication that the nuclear family is the be all and end all of God’s plan for humans fit in with the words of Jesus about relationships between sons and fathers, daughters and mothers. Do remember if you will, that these words of Jesus were just as shocking to those who first heard them, as they are to us. They are meant to shock. And they are a healthy challenge to the "Jesus is my best buddy" theology which is all the rage these days. Read again the teachings of Jesus as expressed in the Gospels. Do you really want this Jesus to be your "best buddy"?

And just what are the "family values"which are being expressed in the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac?

I am reading, with difficulty, a novel written by Khaled Hosseini, it is called "The Kite Runner" It is a tale of modern Afghanistan, with multiple betrayals on the part of a father and his son Amir, towards the servant boy Hassan. Amir and Hassan had grown up as best friends until a moment, (when as I read it, I had to close the book and weep) Amir betrays Hassan the servant boy. There is a twist in the story which emerges much later than the betrayal. It turns out that the servant boy Hassan was in fact the half brother of Amir. His father had two sons, one by his wife, and the other by his servant woman. Oh, here are Isaac and Ishmael again in a modern novel. Here are Cain and Abel. Here are Jacob and Esau. Here are the prodigal son and his older brother. Here, in a strange way are David and Jonathan. Here are you and I. Capable it seems of betraying our nearest and dearest.

We entered the Abraham/Sarah/Hagar/Ishmael/Isaac story at an odd spot this morning.

"The child grew, and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast"we read. The boy is Isaac, son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. He is doing what all boys do, he is playing. He is playing with his half brother, Ishmael, son of Hagar. Sarah sees this, and tells Abraham to dis-inherit Ishmael, and to cast him out. Before we get to the "rest of the story"we must go back to the beginning.

Abraham believed that God had promised him a son in whom all the families of the earth would be blessed. That’s all very nice, but there is a problem. Sarah, his wife, is unable to conceive. And it is Sarah who sees a solution. She tells Abraham to take her slave girl, Hagar, and to try to father a son with this Egyptian slave. Sarah does more, she brings Hagar to Abraham, and hands her over to him. The inevitable happens, and Hagar conceives. And when she conceives, she looks, it says, "with contempt upon Sarah". Sarah treats her harshly, and Hagar runs away. Like Jacob, running away two generations on, Hagar encounters God. (Odd, isn’t it, that we always remember Jacob’s encounter with God, and always forget that Hagar had previously encountered the Holy One.)

So Hagar returns home, gives birth to Ishmael, and in today’s portion she is cast out once more, again at the behest of Sarah.

Now, in the biblical story, God always trumps human beings. And in the desert, Hagar encounters God yet again, and a promise was made to her about her son, the same promise that God had made to Abraham about his son - "he will be the father of many nations". Perhaps we should count Hagar among the Matriarchs, for we surely name Abraham as a Patriarch!

But back to Sarah. Is she the villain of the story? After all, it’s Sarah who orders that Hagar and Ishmael be banished. But slow down a bit will you? For it is Abraham who has set the precedent. For twice he treats Sarah as a piece of property to save his own skin. Sarah has learned from her husband to treat people as property. She had owned Hagar as a slave, and she had handed Hagar over to Abraham as breeding stock. Perhaps that is why Hagar had looked with contempt upon Sarah. That contempt was perhaps rooted in her own dignity "you Sarah, treated me simply as a piece of property, to do with as you wish". If there is a villain in the story, it is Abraham.

And so it is that next week we shall read the horrifying story of how Abraham later tries to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. I got an insight on this story from "The Kite Runner". In the book, Rahim Khan writes to Amir about Amir’s father and his half brother Hassan. "Amir" he writes "I know how hard your father was on you when you were growing up. I saw how you suffered and yearned for his affections, and my heart bled for you. But your father was a man torn between two halves. You and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love Hassan the way he longed to, openly, and as a father. So he took it out on you instead - Amir the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited, and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them"

Perhaps Abraham, in trying to offer Isaac was really trying to punish himself for the shameful way in which he had treated Hagar, Ishmael and Sarah. Perhaps the nixing of his plan to offer Isaac as a sacrifice was God’s way of saying: "Abraham, stop using people as property".

What are biblical "family values"? I want you to begin to figure that out. But I venture to say that we are in big trouble when we begin to treat people as "property", to use them for our own ends, whether as parents, employers, rectors or congregations.

Do remember that the family life which Jesus questions, was a family life in which sons, daughters and wives were, in effect, owned by the father and husband. When we love a "family value" of "owning people", more than we love the Christ, we become unworthy of a new way of life to which we are called, a way of life in which no person owns or possesses another, a way of life in which, as St. Paul puts it: "there is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile"

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