Isaac and Ishmael

I wonder how old you were when you first heard the story of Isaac and Ishmael.
I can't have been more than 6 or 7 when it was part of my primary school Scripture curriculum.
Of course, as a child you only notice the superficial parts of the story,
and I didn’t really look at it in any great depth until I had to preach about it.
But it's an important story, because it echoes down to this day.

So, then, Ishmael.
The older child.
The one Abraham conceived on his slave girl, Hagar, because he didn't see how else he was going to have a child –
Sarah, he thought, was long past child-bearing.
Hagar and Sarah didn't really get on –
Sarah had been very jealous of Hagar when Hagar was carrying Ishmael,
and Hagar, one gathers, hadn't exactly helped by showing she rather despised Sarah.
Hagar had had to run away from Sarah when she was pregnant, but the Lord had come to her and told her to go back,
and that he would make a huge nation from Ishmael, whose name, incidentally, means “God will hear”.
Any name that ends in “-el” usually means something about God, as “El” was the Hebrew word for The Lord.
Actually, make that male names that end in “-el”; women’s names, like Rachel or Jael, didn’t!
“Rachel” means a sheep, and Jael means an ibex!
But men’s names, by and large, with “El” in them, mean something about God –
Michael, Gabriel, Elijah, Elisha, and so on.
And Ishmael means “God will hear”.

And the years went by,
and they all had loads of adventures which you can read about in Genesis, including fleeing from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and finally Sarah becomes pregnant and Isaac is born.
And now Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac –
some translations say he was playing, others that he was teasing or tormenting or mocking him,
and we have no way of knowing what he actually was doing.
He may even have been doing both –
started off by playing,
but unable to read Isaac's body language to know when he'd had enough,
and ended up with Isaac crying, and Ishmael laughing at him,
the way young people do with very small children.

And Sarah is absolutely furious.
This had been a special party, to celebrate Isaac's weaning –
he would have been somewhere between 2 and 4, I think, rather like Samuel was when he was taken to the Temple.
Anyway, this special party, and now Ishmael has upset the boy and made him cry.
Is it always going to be like this?
And what if Ishmael really meant to harm Isaac?

You can understand Sarah's anger and concern, of course.
She is well old to have a small child to look after,
and this older half-brother is always going to be perceived as a menace.
So for the second time she demands that Abraham send her away, and, heavy-hearted, he does so.

God tells him not to be too upset –
his promise is to go through Isaac, but Ishmael is also Abraham's son,
and so he, too, will father a vast nation.
Ishmael is about 16 at the time.
We know, because we are told he was 13 when they were all circumcised, and that was about a year before Isaac was born,
so if Isaac is around three, Ishmael has to be 16.
But the story makes him sound as though he was younger,
and still very dependent on his mother.

Anyway, Abraham loads up a backpack for Hagar, and sends them both off.
And they appear to have no idea what to do next,
so wander rather aimlessly around until the water runs out.
And then when Hagar is despairing, Ishmael resting under the one and only bush, God intervenes, and miraculously provides a well, or a spring, so they are saved.

According to some Muslim traditions, Paran, where they settled, is identified as Mecca, which is one of the reasons why it is a holy place for Muslims today.
Because, of course, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations.

I am not going to go into details about which tribes he fathered and which he didn't –
the sources are unclear and nobody seems to really know.
However, tradition has it that he had twelve sons, all of whom became tribes, and their descendants are, of course, the modern-day Arab nations.

Actually, you know, that's really depressing!
Because if there has not been peace between them ever since, how many millennia is that, and what hope is there for peace today?
People don't change!
The tribes of Ishmael and the tribes of Isaac have never been able to live in peace.
Just look at the headlines.
Israel and Gaza at war with one another;
Israel and the USA making war on Iran;
Hezbollah getting involved….
“Israel”, incidentally, means “One who struggles with God”, after Jacob wrestled with the angel at Bethel –
but the name seems rather painfully apt today!

And elsewhere, as the news bulletins make horribly, painfully clear,
they are divided among themselves.
Look at the situation in Sudan, or Yemen;
desperate civil wars there causing enormous deprivation and suffering.

So it's all very depressing, and it's a depressing story for a summer morning, isn't it?
I wonder what, if anything, we can learn from it.

One of the things I do like about the story is that it shows the people concerned to be real human beings, with human faults and failings.
Many ancient myths and stories depict the people involved as in some way super-human, all too perfect,
or with amazing super-powers that they can call on in time of need.
Genesis doesn't.
The people here are human, they have human problems and human failings.

We can empathise with Sarah, I think.
At least, I can.
We can't, and shouldn't, excuse her behaviour –
she was wrong to cast them out like that, and I expect she knew it.
But we can understand why she felt the way she did,
and why she reacted the way she did.
She obviously had a huge problem with jealousy,
and if Hagar was youngish and pretty and, above all, fertile, while she, Sarah, wasn't.... well....
And then with Ishmael playing with, or teasing, or mocking –
according to your translation –
the 3-year-old, who may have been over-tired after the party....
you can see where she was coming from.
And she wasn't having “that bastard” inherit any of Abraham's wealth, thank you very much.

And Abraham, too.
He has proved himself far from perfect –
read some of the stories about him in Genesis when you have a moment.
He twice introduces Sarah as his sister –
she was, in fact, his half-sister –
instead of clarifying that she was his wife,
and nearly led important people into sin.
And he didn't believe God that Sarah could have a child,
which is how come Ishmael was conceived in the first place.
But at least here he shows himself unwilling to let the family go.
And he gives Hagar a backpack of food and water, and relies on God's promise to look after them.

And God does look after them, we are told.
They were thrown out for no fault of their own,
they were facing almost certain death in the wilderness,
and then God was there,
in the middle of the mess,
providing water for them and ensuring their survival.

And because God intervened, Ishmael went on to become the father of many nations, just like his brother.
Yet Ishmael wasn't the child God had originally planned for Abraham and Sarah, and his sons were not to be “the chosen people”,
although I daresay our Muslim friends would disagree with us on that one!
But God still looks after him.
God is there, in the middle of the desert.
God is there, in the middle of the injustice and unfairness that caused Ishmael and his mother to be cast out.
God is there in the thirst and the heat and the despair.

And that is true for us, just as it was true for Ishmael.
Ishmael was not a child of the covenant, but God still cared for him.
We ask where God is in the middle of the brutal wars currently raging in the region;
where God is in the war between Russia and Ukraine;
where God is in the middle of our own personal tragedies.

And the answer is the same as it always was.
God is there, redeeming us,
in the middle of unfairness and injustice and tragedy.

Perhaps you are suffering that way today –
in a desert place where it feels as though God has abandoned you,
and certainly everybody else has,
and that you are going to die of thirst any minute.
I don't mean literally, obviously,
but there are times when it does feel like that, doesn't it?
And yet God is always there.
Sometimes God does intervene to improve matters.
Other times, perhaps more often, things don't actually improve, but God gifts us with the skills and grace we need to cope with them.
Hagar and Ishmael went on living in the desert,
but they learnt how to do this on their own.

God never abandons us.
When we call on him, he is there.
Sometimes it doesn't feel like that –
sometimes we really do feel abandoned,
and that our calls are just echoing back from an empty sky.
But that is only what it feels like, not what has happened.
I don't know why it sometimes seems to take God forever to answer our calls –
I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons we'll learn about in Heaven –
but I do know he does answer.
Sometimes “Be patient, be strong!” is the only answer –
but the strength and the patience grows.

The story of Hagar and Ishmael is not a happy story.
But it does have one happy and shining outcome –
God was there with them in the desert.
And God is with us in our personal deserts,
and in the global crises and tragedies of today.
God is with us.
Emmanuel.
Amen.

Put right with God

 The service starts about 15 minutes into the video, although I'm not quite sure when the IT team realised they weren't focussing on me!  

I wonder whether you can remember when you first made a conscious decision to be Jesus’ person?

I know some people can’t remember, they have been Jesus’ person all their lives and it would never have occurred to them to do otherwise.
And some people know that once upon a time they were not Christians,
but their journey to God was such a slow, gradual and yet purposeful one
that they can’t point to a given day when they were a Christian,
yet were not the day before.

And others have a definite date that they can point to and say “Then.
That was the day I became a Christian.”
I sort-of have that.
In many ways the second Sunday in October, well over fifty years ago, was the day for me,
but in fact, there was a lot of stuff that went before it,
and a great deal more that came after it.
It didn’t happen in a vacuum, although it felt a bit like that at the time.

I was just a child then, eighteen years old and on my own in Paris.
I was rather lonely and having trouble making friends,
and my grandmother suggested I went along to the English church
to see whether they had any activities for young people.
They most certainly did, and it didn’t take long for me to hear a sermon on “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.....”.
And this was obviously the thing you did if you wanted to be accepted by this group of people..... so.....
I’m so glad God is gracious and loved me anyway!

But the reason I’m raking up ancient history like this is that when you had become a Christian, as it was called,
you were expected to attend the weekly Bible Study
as well as the more formal teaching sessions which took place on a Wednesday.
The Bible Studies were small discussion groups, people roughly the same age, peer-led.
The minister stayed away, on the grounds that people needed to learn to read the Scriptures for themselves, not just be taught what to think.
And it was noticeable that, very often, if we had got stuck with something,
he would talk about the very thing we’d got stuck on in the Wednesday teaching sessions.

This form of studying the Bible was new to me –
attending Bible Study and prayer meetings –
the two tended to merge, rather –

was not something that was done at the school I attended,
or at my parents’ church.
So I can still remember the very first passage I ever studied with my contemporaries, and do you know,
it was that very passage from Romans that we’ve just heard read.
We used the Good News Bible, only back then it was only the Good News New Testament, which is why I asked Robert to read from this version today.

“Now that we have been put right with God through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
He has brought us by faith into this experience of God's grace,
in which we now live.
And so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory!”

“Now that we have been put right with God through faith”
What does that even mean?
Most translations say “Now that we have been justified by faith”. “Justified” is a technical term, meaning – well, basically meaning “put right with God”!
All the nasty squirmy bits of ourselves that we really don’t want God to look at too closely –
and that, come to that, we don’t actually want to look at too closely ourselves –
they are –
not swept away, sadly, much though we might like that to happen.
Quite the reverse;

they are brought out into the light so that we can look at them and God can look at them and say –
okay, that needs to change.
And then, if we are sensible, we allow God to change us.

That, of course, is a very long process, and will probably never be completely finished this side of heaven.
That’s what we call “sanctification”, being made holy, being made whole, being made more like God, being made more into the person we were created to be.
But the point is, God doesn’t make us wait until we are perfect before he will put up with us.
All the nasty squirmy bits, what the jargon calls “Sin”,
God decrees they no longer exist.
They do, of course, and we deal with them in due course,
but the point is, they no longer come between us and God.

We have, so St Paul tells us, peace with God.
But I really do think the most important thing that I’ve learnt in all the years since that first Bible study, so long ago,
is that I don’t have to do the putting right!
It took me a really long time to learn that particular lesson!
I thought I had to grow my own faith, as though my salvation were down to me.
It’s not.

Our salvation doesn’t depend on what we do.
We all need to be saved, and we all can be saved –
these days, I’m not entirely sure what I mean by “saved”,
and it’s one of those words that I suspect we all interpret slightly differently, but that doesn’t matter.
The point is, we don’t have to –
and, indeed, we can’t –
save ourselves.
God does that.
All we have to do is to reach out, to say “Yes please!”
and accept what is on offer.
“Listen,” says Jesus, according to the book of Revelation,
“Listen! I stand at the door and knock;
if any hear my voice and open the door, I will come into their house and eat with them, and they will eat with me.”

Of course, one shouldn’t really take a verse out of context like that,
but it is a helpful illustration.
All we need do is open the door to Jesus –
and then let go.
Then we are put right with God by faith,
we do have peace with God,
and we can relax and allow God to re-create us into the person we were designed to be.
That bit isn’t always easy –
far from it –
but it’s worth it.

But it’s not just about us, is it?
Of course, our individual relationship with God is essential
it is something that needs to permeate all our lives.
It’s not just about what we do in Church on Sundays, although that too –
it’s about how we live the rest of our lives.
I have often said that these Sundays in Ordinary Time are where what we think we believe comes up against what we really do believe!
And sometimes, I think, we forget that we aren’t in it just as individuals, but as a community.
Paul says “We” all the time in this passage, not just “I”.
We, as a church, have been put right with God;
we, as a church, are being made more Christ-like, more the community that God created us to be.

We don’t have to wait to come to God;
Paul tells us that Jesus died for us end of story.
We could be the foulest person who ever trod this earth, but Jesus died for us.
We could be almost perfect –
and Jesus still died for us!
And that includes everybody –
even those we want to hate.
Even those who want nothing to do with God and treat religion with contempt.
Even those who set themselves up in place of God….
Jesus still died for them, and longs and longs for them to turn to him.

And Paul also points out that when trouble comes –
as it always does, always has, and always will,
God can use it to help us grow and become more what we can be.
Both us as individuals, and us as a community.

God will continue to work on us, if we let him, right up until the day we die, and probably afterwards, too!
Like butterflies, we are in our caterpillar stage right now, and our journey through the valley of the shadow of death is the equivalent of the pupa, and then, we believe, we will be transformed –
perhaps not into a butterfly, but certainly into something wonderful.
To a certain extent, of course, that happens, and is happening right now, here on earth,
which is why God has already started to work in us and to make us into the person we were created to be.
But how much more work will need to be done on us before we are perfect!
I know John Wesley believed that Christians could be perfect,
but I also know I’m very far from!
And God still needs to do a great deal of work on me before I fulfil my potential.

But the thing is, we don’t have to do it.
And we don’t have to wait until it’s done before we can get on with our lives as Christians, as God’s people.
We have been put right with God through faith, and now have peace with him through our Lord Jesus Christ.
So we can get on with our lives.
Amen.

Mercy, not sacrifice

 

“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Jesus is referring his hearers to the passage in Hosea that we heard in our first reading. So firstly, why; secondly, what was Hosea even talking about, and thirdly, is it relevant to us in any way?

Well, the first question is easy enough to answer. Why did Jesus refer his hearers to that passage?

He had just called Matthew from the tax office. Now, as I am sure you know, back in the day, tax collectors were quislings, collaborators with the occupying power. They were expected to hand over so much to the Roman authorities every – I don’t know whether it was every month, or every quarter, but certainly every so often – and also to pay themselves a decent salary out of what they had collected. And human nature being what it is, many, if not most tax collectors were apt to feather their own nests at the expense of the public! They would demand far more than they were owed, and enforce payment. We don’t know that Matthew did that – we do know that Zaccheus did.

So, anyway, Jesus has called Matthew, and then he has dinner with Matthew and, presumably, some of his tax-collector friends. And the virtue-signallers, the Pharisees, start chuntering about this and asking why on earth he would want to eat with such dreadful people. To which Jesus replies that these are the very people who need him, the ones he was sent to help! The ones who think they’re doing fine don’t need him, or don’t admit to needing him. So he sends them away to look up Hosea….. and I don’t suppose they were best pleased, because of course they knew the Scriptures, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

And what, then, of Hosea? Hosea is the prophet who was asked to marry a prostitute who he couldn’t trust to be faithful to him, as a picture of the way the tribes of Israel and Judah couldn’t be trusted to stay faithful to God, but were apt to go off after the local gods of the area who were so much easier to cope with, as they only wanted you to do the various rituals. They didn’t want a relationship with God; that might interfere with their own lives, and make them live in ways they didn’t want to live!

Every so often they would make attempts to come back to God, but what usually ended up happening was that, as we heard in our reading, “their love is like a morning cloud,
    like the dew that goes away early.”

In other words, they start off well, but then get distracted. Like the seed in Jesus’ story that landed in the rocky ground or in the thistles, and didn’t grow much after the first sprout. And God says, through Hosea, that sacrifices and temple rituals are all very well but what is wanted is mercy – steadfast love, says the NRSV – not sacrifice!

I don’t know whether you’ve ever read John Wesley’s sermon on the means of grace? We local preachers have to read certain selected sermons as part of our training, and this is one of them. Wesley tries to navigate between two equal and opposite errors, the first being formalism – ritual without substance, just what Hosea is talking about here, and the second being what was called quietism, where you did nothing but wait for God to give you faith.

Wesley reckoned – and so do we, to this day – that God has ordained three specific means of grace that we all need to use. They are:

Prayer; both private and corporate. After all we all have times when, try as we might, we simply can’t pray, and that’s when we have to rely on corporate prayer, and perhaps prayers that other people have written. It doesn’t matter how you pray, of course – verbal prayer is only one way of praying – it is the contact with God that matters.

Then there is searching the Scripture, by reading, hearing and meditating on it. You probably have your own method of doing this, whether you like to meditate on the week’s readings, or whether you use a daily Bible reading guide, or whatever, but there again, Scripture is there to help us know God.

And finally there is the Sacrament of Holy Communion, which, whatever we may mean when we make our Communion – and of course, our views on it will change as we go on in our journey of faith – is important to our spiritual growth.

So far, so good. But: “I desire mercy, rather than sacrifice”. Wesley goes on to point out that these things, important though they are, have no intrinsic power: Separate from the Spirit of God, a ritual is just what Wesley calls "a dry leaf, a shadow." Spoken words, printed text, or bread and wine aren’t magic!

They possess no merit: Performing these duties does not buy God's favour or atone for sins. Only the blood of Christ saves. And this, of course, is part of what Hosea was talking about. Mercy rather than sacrifice. Steadfast love rather than keeping the rules.

And Wesley also reminds us that God is greater than the means of grace! We should use them, because he told us to, but God is perfectly capable of acting outside them! Again, they are not a magic formula!

But there is more to it than just our personal relationship with God. Of course, that is important, vital, even. But I don’t suppose for one moment that there were no followers of God at the time Hosea was writing. There were probably a minority of people who did want to be God’s people, who did do their best to give mercy, steadfast love, rather than mere form. But the people as a whole were not God’s people. The community was not a God-fearing one. As, of course, ours isn’t.

And you will note what was happening when Jesus told the Pharisees to go away and read Hosea – he was eating with a group of people who were widely hated. Hated. Outcast. Other. And we know all about that in our society, don’t we? Yes, I’m white and privileged, I know that, but I also know that many people are pretty much outcast and hated in much of our society, due to skin colour, sexuality or religion. Or are hated because they are so-called “migrants”, many of whom are so desperate to get here that they take their lives in their hands to do so, only to find they are not only officially unwelcome but are widely mistrusted and hated.

And yes, we know we must and will stand by such people, love them, defend them, help them as best we can. As Jesus did with the tax-collectors. As he did with other outcasts of the day – Samaritans, lepers, and so on.

But then, and this is where it gets really difficult, and why I’ll probably start speaking far too fast – do attract my attention if I do! But then, there are the haters. The Christian nationalists, Reform, Nigel Farage, the MAGA republicans, Donald Trump. What should our attitude to them be? What would Jesus say to them?

It’s so easy, isn’t it, to hate them in our turn. Certainly I hate some of the things that seem to be happening in the US, although I do wonder sometimes if there isn’t a bit of exaggeration. And it makes it very difficult not to hate the perpetrators – but we mustn’t. Jesus doesn’t. He argues with the pharisees, sure. He refers them to Scripture. He tells them frankly that their self-satisfaction means they can’t get close to God. But he doesn’t hate them.

Look at the healings in the second half of the Gospel. Matthew’s account is very bald compared to those in Mark and Luke, but he still tells the story. How the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus in despair as his daughter is deathly ill – in this account, he says she has already died. But Jairus, as the other accounts tell us he is called, is probably a Pharisee. He may have been one of the haters; he may have thought that Jesus was blaspheming when he suggested that they should come to him to know righteousness with God. But he was desperate, and he came to Jesus in his despair – and Jesus raised his daughter. He didn’t hate Jairus, any more than he hated any other Pharisee.

And we haven’t to hate, either. Not even Trump. Not even Farage. Not even Boris Johnson for what he did to our country…. We mustn’t hate. But how not to? This is what I find hard – I want to hate them! Yet Jesus says, very firmly, to love our enemies, and he sets us an example of how it is done. He didn’t let them get away with anything – he was, after all, the one who drove the traders out of the Temple – but he didn’t hate them, and when they were in need, he responded to that need.

So how not to hate? I think there’s only one way, and that is to ask God to love them through us. We are given the potential through the Holy Spirit indwelling us; we can, I think, be guided as to whether we should speak out, or not. Probably we should – we need to call out wrongdoing and hatred when we find it. Not always easy to do – much easier to leave it to other people! But we are promised that we’ll be given the words when we need them.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note – let’s think about love, not hatred! Matthew doesn’t really show it, but look how lovely Jesus is with the woman who couldn’t stop bleeding, and, indeed, with Jairus’ daughter. And, indeed, with the tax-gatherers, with whom he enjoyed a convivial lunch! Which reminds me of the passage in Revelation that so many of us have used, over the years, to commit and to recommit ourselves to being Jesus’ person: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”
“I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Amen.