God of The Invisible
The God of Abraham - Part 3
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Genesis 16:1-16, 21:8-21, 17:20-22
So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”
Genesis 16:13
God heard the boy’s cries, and God’s messenger called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “Hagar! What’s wrong? Don’t be afraid. God has heard the boy’s cries over there. Get up, pick up the boy, and take him by the hand because I will make of him a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. She went over, filled the water flask, and gave the boy a drink. God remained with the boy; he grew up, lived in the desert, and became an expert archer.
Genesis 21:17-20
Listen to this Week’s Sermon here:
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As we journey with Abraham and the story of Israel’s beginnings, it is very easy to cast Hagar and Ishmael aside just as Sarah did. After all, we are worship the God of Abraham, Issac & Jacob, not the God of Ismael. Hagar and Ismael are not part of our story, or so we think.
But what if the God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob is the God of Ishmael too? What if the God we worship also cares for those we cast aside because they are different than us? For centuries Muslims and Christians have been at war, and yet we are all children of Abraham, one nation descended through Isaac and Israel and another through the line of Ishmael.
Isaac may have been chosen by God as the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham, to birth a nation through whom all the world would be blessed and would come to know the love of their creator, but that choice does not imply any condemnation of Hagar or Ishmael. They did not do anything wrong. They and their descendants are not our enemies, nor are they enemies of God. In fact, Hagar is the first person in our scriptures to “name” God, and the name she uses is “the God who sees.”
By our modern sensibilities we may want to condemn her as immoral for having a child with a married man, but in her culture, she only did what was demanded of her for the greater good of making sure Abraham had an heir. She was cast out not because of wrongdoing on her part, but because of Sarah’s jealousy, particularly after the birth of her own miracle baby, Isaac.
So what does this ancient story of an abandoned single mother and child in the wilderness have to do with us? Perhaps a lot more than we think, especially considering this abandoned child is our brother. The fact that God did not abandon Hagar and Ishmael means that we cannot abandon them either.
Who are the Hagars and Ishmaels cast out in the deserts of our world today? From a genealogical perspective, that would at least include the Muslim people who descended from Abraham and Ishmael and yet are continually demonized by Christians all over the world.
More than that, however, we see the face of Hagar & Ishmael in every person who is cast out, who is on the margins, who has lost everything and everyone in their lives. We see the face of Hagar in those we have overlooked, ignored or even turned our backs on. We see the face of Ismael in those we do not even know, in the poor and abused and abandoned in our own community who we do not even notice.
God sees them all. Do we?