Seeing Things the Way God Sees Them Genesis 21:1-20

Seeing Things the Way God Sees Them Genesis 21:1-20 November 19, 2017 Laurel Neal 1

Genesis 21:1-20 (NIV) The Birth of Isaac Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him. When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Sarah said, God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. And she added, Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age. Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac. The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to him, Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring. Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, I cannot watch the boy die. And as she sat there, she began to sob. God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. 2

Seeing Things the Way God Sees Them Genesis 21:1-20 November 19, 2017 Laurel Neal Their wedding was impossible to miss. So was the birth of their first child in 2013. And their second child in 2015. The same will be true regarding the birth of their third baby or possibly twins! sometime next April. I m referring, of course, to Prince William and Kate Middleton the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Think back, if you will, to 2013 and to something known as royal baby fever. It swept through the United Kingdom that year, culminating in the birth of George Alexander Louis on July 22. His title, at birth, was Prince George of Cambridge, and he s a future King of England. Given all the buzz and hoopla, you d think we d been waiting for-ever for William and Kate to have their first child instead of just two years. And you d be tempted to think that Prince George just might change the world. But we ve been reading Genesis together. So we know what it means to wait forever for a baby to be born. And we recognize a birth of worldwide significance when we see one. Which we do in Genesis 21. Way back in Genesis 12 25 years ago in the story we ve been reading God approached Abraham with a command and some promises. God said to Abraham, I Go. Go from your country and your kindred and your father s house to the land that I will show you. I ll make of you a great nation, and I ll bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I ll bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Abraham and Sarah s persistent childlessness has seemed like the biggest obstacle to the fulfillment of these promises. But we ve spent a few months in Genesis with Abraham and Sarah, so we know there have been other impediments as well. We ve watched the two of them especially Abraham live in fear. They ve taken matters into their own hands. They ve used other people to save their own skins. In the process, they ve created additional obstacles and problems for themselves and others, for God and the covenant. But God hasn t wasted a single situation or misstep. And over these last 25 years, Abraham and Sarah s relationship with God has expanded. A lot. We ve seen it happen. We ve also seen God reinforce those Genesis 12 promises over and over again. We ve seen God deal with every obstacle and problem culminating today in the birth of Isaac. Today s passage is emphatic in reminding us of God s faithfulness: Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. So Isaac is the child of God s faithfulness not Abraham and Sarah s. And once again Sarah laughs the laughter of incredulity. The laughter that delights in what God can do against all odds. The laughter that means, This is too good to be true. Except that it is true. Isaac s the baby Abraham and Sarah have longed for, hoped for, prayed for for something like 80 years of their lives. 3

II It seems like all should be well, doesn t it? And yet, rather quickly, storm clouds develop.there s trouble again between Sarah and Hagar: basically on account of Hagar s son Ishmael, who s 14 or 15 years old when Isaac is born. We re in an interesting section of Genesis right now, where earlier events are replaying with interesting new twists. Last week, for example, Genesis 20 was a reprise of Abraham and Sarah s trip to Egypt in Genesis 12 and especially of Abraham s overwhelming interest in his own self-preservation. By the end of that episode, God insisted that Abraham stop using and misusing his own wife. That he stop bringing trouble on other nations and become instead in keeping with the covenant promises of Genesis 12 a channel of blessing to other people. Then today, Genesis 21 reprises the events of Genesis 16. There, Sarah grew impatient with her own barrenness and with the slowness of God. She decided to use Hagar, her servant girl, for a surrogate pregnancy which led to Hagar feeling superior to Sarah. Sarah, in turn, held Hagar in contempt, and made life so miserable for her that the girl finally ran away a pregnant teenager trying to get home to Egypt. Abraham s role in that episode was to ignore the whole situation. Wanting to avoid a confrontation with Sarah, he under-functioned by just letting Sarah to do whatever she wanted. God, if you remember, was the only one in Genesis 16 who saw Hagar as a person the only one who cared about her, who sought her out and helped her. Chapter 21 doesn t give us the details about what happens between Sarah and Hagar after Isaac is born. But it sounds like Ishmael has a tendency to tease Isaac and make fun of him as older siblings sometimes do. Whatever it is, the old bitterness resurfaces quickly and intensely for Sarah. Get rid of this slave woman and her son! Sarah demands of Abraham. No child of hers will share your inheritance with my son Isaac! III But things play out differently this time around and in at least three ways. First of all, Abraham feels distress and anguish about what s happening. This is a big improvement over last time, when he seemed to feel nothing at all about Hagar s predicament. This time, in fact, Sarah s solution to a perceived problem strikes Abraham as all wrong, even evil. Which it is. This time around, Hagar the Egyptian slave girl looks like a real person not just to God, but to Abraham. And Ishmael is, in fact, Abraham s son, whom he loves. Abraham doesn t feel right about getting rid of either one of them even though he knows that Isaac, not Ishmael, 4

is the child of the covenant. After all this time, Abraham s discomfort is a sign. A sign that he s beginning to see things the way God sees them. Second of all, Abraham talks the situation over with God something else he didn t do in chapter 16. He lets God see his distress and respond to it. Interestingly, God encourages Abraham to do what Sarah says: to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Remember, God says, your descendants will come through Isaac. But be assured that I m also going to develop a great nation through Ishmael for he s your son, too. So Abraham responds by letting go of his son Ishmael which I know is unavoidably troubling to us. But as I ve sat with this story myself, I ve been reminded of all the imperfect outcomes to difficult situations and relationships in my own life. Outcomes that are a mixed bag, and involve a lot of loose ends, and are only partially satisfying. Genesis, as you may have noticed, is a story about very imperfect people living in a very imperfect world and about the God who works with what he has. And very often God is working with fallout: with the messes, and complications, and unintended consequences that result from humanity s inability and sometimes our outright refusal to trust him, to walk in the way of the covenant. That s the case here in Genesis, and it s often the case in our own lives. We aren t supposed to like or approve of every aspect of this Genesis story. We re supposed to recognize it as an accurate depiction of what life and human beings are actually like. Of the predicament in which we find ourselves. A predicament in which life and people are constantly failing to measure up to even our own hopes, and dreams, and longings regarding human decency and fair play. Indeed, almost everything about Genesis corroborates the need for someone to do something to set things right. For someone from outside the mess to intervene and at least improve the situation. But as C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity in an important section near the end of that book: mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became [human] to turn creatures into sons [and daughters]: not simply to produce better [men and women] of the old kind but to produce a new kind of [person]. [Redemption] is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. 1 This is why, I think, we often find this Genesis story so troubling. We prefer stories in which all we need, and all the world needs, is a little improvement, here and there. Some tweaking. But that isn t the story Genesis tells us about ourselves, or the world, or Abraham whom God is slowly, painstakingly, not just improving, but turning into a new kind of person. 1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1952, 182. 5

And this brings us to the third difference in how things play out this time around in Genesis 21. This time Abraham doesn t just send Hagar and Ishmael away. Instead of abandoning them as he did before, Abraham hands them over to God, trusting in what God promises to do for them. He also treats them well in the sense that he does what he can for them. He provides them with food, and water, and a personal farewell. This may not sound like much to us, but it s exponentially more than Abraham did in Genesis 16. And now God will take it from here doing just as he did last time. He meets Hagar in the wilderness. He engages her in conversation about her troubles. And he commits himself to provide a future for her and her son. But the big thing to notice here is how far Abraham has come over these last 25 years. How different he is. How much more able and willing he is to trust God to trust in God s capacity to provide 2 for him and his family. How much his own outlook and behavior are beginning to mirror the way God sees things, and the way God treats people, and the way God acts in the world. IV Next Sunday it will get harder. God will present Abraham with his biggest challenge ever. But Abraham, it turns out, is ready. He s ready to trust in God s capacity to provide not just for himself and his own family, but for the whole world. Isaac, you see, is much more than God s response to a deep personal longing in Abraham and Sarah. His birth really does have worldwide significance. For Isaac is the child of God s promise: God s promise to rescue the whole world and set it right. I ll make of you a great nation, God said to Abraham in Genesis 12. I ll bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I ll bless those who bless you...and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. In other words, God blesses Abraham and Sarah with Isaac for a much bigger reason than their own personal happiness and self-preservation. He blesses them for reasons that transcend their own lives but also include and require their own lives. And God blesses us with Jesus Christ for a much bigger reason than our own personal happiness and self-preservation. He blesses us with Jesus for reasons that transcend our own lives but also include and require our own lives. I ve never forgotten something a Young Life leader at a Young Life camp said to us campers years ago now. We were about to wander off into the woods for a time of solitude and contemplation where we just might receive a visit from Almighty God. Here s how becoming a disciple works, he said. We give as much as we know of ourselves to as much as we know of God. 2 Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven t Heard. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001, 53. 6

Hmmm I remember thinking at the time. That does not sound like a one-time transaction with God. Or even a periodic transaction with God. That sounds like a relationship and a way of life. I remember it occurring to me that there would always be more and more of myself and just more and more of my life to hand over to God. And also, always, more and more of God to discover, experience, embrace, and worship. Something very much like that has been taking place in the lives of Abraham and Sarah. Now, in Genesis 21, Abraham turns one beloved son over to God and next week he ll turn over another. Every single bit of this letting go requires learning to see things the way God sees them. Which God has been helping Abraham to do and helps us do, all the time. If we let him. So, a couple of questions. First, what is there about your life, and God, and the gospel that you right now might need to learn to see the way God sees them? And, second, what is there about MPC about your history and identity, about your purpose and priorities, about your internal relationships and your relationships with the outside world that you might need to learn to see the way God sees them? These are questions worth asking and thinking about because things don t stand still for very long. Our own lives are dynamic, and so is the life of the world. Which means we re almost always dealing with something that challenges us to see things the way God sees them. In fact, we need these challenges. They give us the opportunity to keep on giving as much as we know of ourselves to as much as we know of God. Because, as Abraham s life attests, nothing other than this and certainly nothing less than this is what it means to partner with God in blessing the world. Something that also isn't a onetime transaction, or even a periodic one but a relationship and a way of life. For us personally, and also as congregations. 7