God's Kindness

God's Kindness

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

June 25, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 21:8-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

It's one of those unpleasant stories in the Bible that we don't pay much attention to. There's a worse one in the lectionary for next week, but this one is bad enough. Here's the background to this story. God has promised Abraham that he, Abraham, would be the father of offspring more numerous than the stars. Yet Abraham and his wife Sarah have grown old, well past childbearing age, without having any children of their own. With Sarah's consent Abraham has fathered a son with the slave woman Hagar. That child's name is Ishmael. I won't go into the morality of what Abraham did to and with Hagar, but trust me, it's not good. Moving on. After Hagar bore Ishmael, Sarah conceived and bore her and Abraham's son Isaac. She then became jealous of Ishmael because as Abraham's firstborn he, the child of a slave girl and not of Sarah, would be the one to inherit most of Abraham's estate. So Sarah decides to get Abraham to send Hagar and her son Ishmael out into the desert to die. Make no mistake about it. Sending someone out into the desert in that part of the world with only a little water is a death sentence. Sarah is perfectly willing to kill off Ishmael, and his mother along with him, so that no one could challenge Isaac as Abraham's son and inheritor.

Abraham isn't quite so sanguine about it. Our text says “The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son.” I guess he didn’t care about Hagar any more than Sarah did, since the text doesn’t say it distressed Abraham because of her. She’s just a slave, so she didn’t really matter. We of course find that attitude to be grossly immoral, but never mind. Abraham is distressed about sending his son off to die of thirst in the desert. I guess that’s decent of him, although it seems pretty elemental to us. The story tells us that God allayed Abraham’s concerns by saying to him “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your maid-servant. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your off spring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maid-servant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”

Notice a couple of things about what God says here. First of all, God tells Abraham not to be distressed on account of both the boy and his mother though Abraham has expressed no concern about the boy’s mother. We see already that God’s concern and kindness are greater than Abraham’s. Abraham doesn’t care about some insignificant slave woman, as Abraham apparently thought Hagar was, but God does. Note also that God speaks to Abraham, but God says nothing to Sarah. Abraham may have reason to be confident that God will take care of Ishmael and Hagar, but Sarah doesn’t. The story says nothing about either Abraham or God giving Sarah any assurances about their wellbeing. So as far as Sarah knows she’s sending her slave and her husband’s son off to die. Sarah, as far as we know, has no qualms about doing so. Abraham has received some divine assurances, but Sarah hasn’t. She’s the one being really cruel here. She is, that is, the one being really human here.

Sarah planned to get Hagar and Ishmael killed by sending them off into a place where they could not survive. We don’t know if Abraham would have gone alone with Sarah’s scheme had God not reassured him about the boy’s fate, but he might have. Sarah would do anything to advance her son’s place in the order of succession to Abraham and in the process improve her own standing in the story of her people. We may not at all like Sarah for what she did here, or at least I don’t. We must admit however that Sarah is being perfectly human. We humans are so often perfectly willing to make others suffer and even die to benefit ourselves and our loved ones. In the world of big business people do whatever it takes to advance themselves over their coworkers. Most of us buy products, often from Walmart or other retailers like it, having thought only of saving a little money and having given no thought to what suffering workers around the world endure to get us those low prices. All of us, myself included, drive petroleum burning cars though we know what greenhouse gases are doing to the earth. All too often we resort to violence against other human beings when we think, usually wrongly, that our violence serves some good purpose or at least advances our own interests. We tolerate immense suffering by the poor and ailing among us because we don’t want to pay what it would take in taxes to provide for them. We elect politicians who advocate laws that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor pretty much for the same reason—we don’t want to pay money to benefit someone else.

Even worse examples of cruelty are easy to find if we look to world history. Just take the twentieth century for example. The nations of Europe, and eventually the US too, slaughtered a whole generation of men in World War I, and afterwards no one really knew why. Then came the Bolsheviks in Russia, who established what was probably the cruelest system of government the world has ever seen, a government that killed tens of millions of its own people for it own purposes. Then the Nazis, and I don’t think I have to tell you how cruel they were. Then the Japanese with their atrocities in Korea and China. And all of that is just the first half of the twentieth century. Sarah was cruel when she sent Hagar and Ishmael off to die, but she was in good company. Human cruelty often knows no bounds. Most of the time we prefer to ignore that reality, but we really can’t. In her cruelty Sarah was a model of all too typical human behavior.

And then there’s God. If Sarah is the villain of this piece, God is the hero. Sarah tried to kill Hagar and Ishmael. God saved them. God’s kindness in the peace outweighs Sarah’s cruelty. Hagar and Ishmael are about to die of thirst. God provides a well of water. Sarah and Abraham removed Ishmael as Abraham’s legitimate heir. God made him the patriarch of the Arab people, for today the Arabs trace their lineage back to Abraham through Ishmael. Sarah intended evil, and Abraham went along with it. Sarah intended evil. God intended only good.

Folks, that’s how it is with God. We humans intend and inflict evil all the time. God intends only good. Good for us. Good for everyone. We humans can be incomprehensibly cruel. God is incomprehensibly kind. In our Genesis story this morning God is profoundly kind to Hagar and Ishmael. Sarah wanted them to die. God wanted them to live. God wants all of God’s people to live. Of course God knows that we’re mortal. That’s how God created us for God’s own purposes. But God wants life—abundant life—for all people. We humans can be incomprehensibly cruel. God isn’t. God never is.

That doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen to us. Human cruelty hurts and kills God’s people all the time. We live in a created world that includes various kinds of natural phenomena that hurt and kill people. My point about God’s kindness is that God never wills harm for anyone. When bad things happen, and they do, they’re not God’s doing.

And here’s one more thing. God calls us always to kindness. God calls us always to compassion. God calls us always to peace. God calls us always to justice. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Perfection may be beyond us, but transformation isn’t. God is always there to help us be more like God, more kind, more loving, more compassionate. God’s call to transformation can be hard to hear over the clamor of the world that tries always to make us more worldly, not more divine, but if we’ll listen we can hear it. When we hear it we can respond. May it be so. Amen.