In the Secret

In the Secret
I have something to tell you…There are some stories in the Bible that are messy…They don’t have a clear cut moral lesson or if they do, it might be one that we don’t like…Sometimes there are stories that seem to go against what we believe God’s character to be…Sometimes there are stories that make us uncomfortable…Sometimes there are stories that are disturbing…These stories aren’t limited to one book or section, but there are some of them scattered all throughout Scripture…
So, what do we do with these stories? Well, we can ignore them and pretend like they don’t exist and skip over them when we read Scripture…We can explain them away as something that was cultural of the time, but holds no relevance for us today…Both of which are things that people do with these messy stories…But neither of those options are very helpful…That could mean that we avoid quite a few stories in the Bible and it also means that we think that much of the Bible doesn’t apply to our lives or how we understand God…So, what do we do with them? Well, we try and wrestle with them the best we can to better understand God…Sometimes the wrestling is uncomfortable, but in the end it makes our faith stronger.
We have just one such story this morning…The story of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar, & Ishmael…This is a very messy story…Let’s see if we can wrestle with some of it…
Abraham was chosen by God to be the founder of what would become the Jewish people…He and his wife Sarah were called out of their home to go a place where God had chosen and it was promised that a great nation would come from Abraham…His descendants would outnumber the stars. So, he and Sarah picked up their lives and moved and they tried to follow everything that God called and said…And it took them in places and doing things that they had never thought possible! Well, along their journey together, the promise of descendants to Abraham was something that truly stuck and became more troublesome as Abraham and Sarah tried to have children and Sarah was not able to get pregnant…Their struggle to deal with all of the emotions and pain of not being able to conceive a child was not an easy journey and it brought Sarah in particular a lot of pain…She wanted to have children, but she also wanted Abraham to have children…So, she offered Abraham her maidservant Hagar for Abraham & Hagar to have children together…Now clearly this was before our modern technology of surrogacy or in vitro to get pregnant…Instead, Abraham & Hagar had an affair with Sarah’s blessing…Now, there are certainly cultural implications here…In that time polygamy was certainly practiced as men would have numerous wives and then concubines on top of that number…but this was a different situation…Sarah provided Hagar to Abraham for the soul purpose to have children because she could not…
Now one could certainly argue the selflessness of Sarah to do this…That she put aside all of her own emotions to make sure that Abraham had children…Which is true…But as our story continues, Sarah becomes less selfless…
Well, Abraham & Hagar do in fact conceive a child…a son and Ishmael is born. Ishmael is born to be Abraham’s first son…Now this also has a lot of implications because being the first son meant that Ishmael was entitled to the largest portion of inheritance from Abraham…money, land, homes, servants, livestock, you name it—Ishmael would get pretty much all of it! Which didn’t seem to be much of a problem…Until a miracle happened and Sarah conceived a child and Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah…Truly a miracle and a gift from God and Sarah and Abraham celebrated! Our passage for this morning picks up after the celebration of Isaac’s birth…
After the festival, Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac…What was happening between them wasn’t completely clear…were they just playing? In one translation verse 9 is translated that Ishmael was mocking Isaac…Whatever was happening between Ishmael & Isaac made Sarah uncomfortable and angry…She didn’t want Ishmael to inherit anything above her son…She even spoke derogatory of Hagar as she told Abraham to cast out the slave woman because the child of that slave woman would not get anything above her son…Now there are many problems with that, but one of the problems being that Ishmael was also Abraham’s child…And Sarah’s request put Abraham in a very difficult position…He was being asked to throw his first born son out and pretend like he never existed…this son who was a miracle born because he and Sarah couldn’t have children…Sarah was now asking him to pretend like he never existed and send him away…
Maybe we can understand Sarah’s feelings…Ishmael was a reminder to her of Abraham & Hagar’s affair—although Sarah had given them her blessing…Ishmael was the reminder to Sarah that her son Isaac was not the first born son of Abraham…To see Ishmael & Hagar no doubt brought much pain to Sarah…But…Sarah’s selflessness seems to have faded when she asks Abraham to throw out Hagar and her child Ishmael…Ishmael wasn’t grown himself…he was just a child…
So, conflicted Abraham doesn’t know what to do…he loves Sarah and wants to do what she has asked, but it means throwing out his child…So, he goes in prayer to talk with God…And what does God say? God says to do what Sarah has asked…As if it weren’t messy enough…God tells Abraham to through out Hagar & Ishmael…Now, to try and understand why God would do that might be impossible…Clearly we are not God and can’t see things in the same way that God does…and that might be what makes us uncomfortable…because we can’t see the whole picture…God does assure Abraham that nothing will happen to this child—in fact God promises that God will make a great nation out of Ishmael…Maybe with that promise and assurance from God is what gives Abraham the strength to do what he does…Well, Abraham follows what God has said and he prepares water & food for Hagar and Ishmael and then sends them out in the wilderness…
Hagar & Ishmael wander for quite some time…long enough that the water and food run out…When the water runs out, Hagar knows what that means…they’re in the middle of the wilderness of the desert…when you run out of water it’s virtually a death sentence…She knows that she and Ishmael are facing their certain death, so she places Ishmael under the bushes so that he can die there…Then she goes far enough away that she can see where he is, but not close enough to care for him…She prays to God that she doesn’t see the death of her child…She would rather die first than watch her child die…I can’t possibly imagine what Hagar must have been thinking and feeling in that moment…The pain that she must have felt at knowing what was going to happen, the betrayal that she felt at the hands of the father of her child…Is the story messy enough yet?
In Hagar’s cries of pain and in Ishmael’s cries for water and for life…God hears them…God hears Ishmael’s cries…and then God repeats to Hagar the same promise that he made to Abraham…God will make a great nation out of Ishmael…He won’t die and to make that even clearer, God leads Ishmael & Hagar to a well with water where they both drink…
God cares for the outcasts, Ishmael & Hagar…the passage tells us that Ishmael did grow up to be very skilled with a bow and that he married an Egyptian woman…In other passages Ishmael & Isaac come back together to bury their father…But we don’t know much about Ishmael after this…
What we do know is that God is with him and that God will keep God’s promise to Ishmael…He will be made a great nation…Even in the messy situations, God is there…The desperate cries of Hagar in the middle of the wilderness were heard and they were given a response…God was with them…The reasons behind them being in the desert seem to be less important than the explanation that God was with and that God kept God’s promises…
The messy stories of Scripture are important because our life is messy too…In our lives there are stories of pain and heartbreak…There are stories of death, divorce, accidents, affairs, abuse, pain…In January 2004, Frank created a phenomenon as he handed out postcards to people and told them to write their secrets…Now, 4 years and 4 books later…hundreds of thousands of people flock to the postsecret website to see the new secrets posted every Sunday morning…There are funny secrets like someone confessing that they sing loud in the car…There are secrets of faith as people both share their affirmations of faith and there doubts…There are sad secrets as sometimes people recount that they wish they would have forgiven someone before they died…There are painful confessions as people confess having been raped or abused…There are real secrets…Now in these postcards—both the website and book, I should be clear to say that they’re not kid friendly…There are some very disturbing secrets shared with the world and in language that is not always acceptable…All of these secrets that are shared are messy…Because life is messy …And I would think that if Scripture was full of people with perfect lives and lives that held no conflict, I would think it would be very hard to relate to them and understand how our stories and our messy lives interact with God…
But God does hear all of our cries and keeps God’s covenant with us…That God will be with us in the middle of the wilderness…That God is with us in our secrets…That God is with us in the middle of the mess…