People behaving Badly - and a God who never gives up on Them

This Sunday’s Old Testament reading is the story of Hagar and Ishmael. And it is a tragic, awful, embarrassing story to own as my faith history:
Sarah, the wife of Abraham, chases Abraham’s first-born son out of the house so that he does not inherit anything from his father.
This is more than just jealousy – it is an effective death penalty: They live in a desert, and without a family to protect them, they will die of exposure. And the worst of it all is that Abraham gives in to his wife’s jealousy. (Go read it in Genesis 21)

And it is quite possible that if this family had placed more trust in the promise of God, then both Abraham’s sons could have grown up together. And together become the leaders of the people of God.... and the rift between Jew and Muslim might never have happened.

But it was not to be.
Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar, and her desire for her son to be the only son of Abraham, caused her to drive the two into the desert.
And so Hagar and Ishmael became outcasts.

It shouldn’t have happened,
it didn’t need to happen,
but it did.
And we have it in the Bible, staring us in the face, bearing witness to the failure of our ancestors to treat each other with the most basic level of human decency.

But I wonder how many of you have ever heard a sermon on Hagar an Ishmael?
I wouldn’t expect many of us, because this is not just a dark story, it is not just a story of our Abraham and our Sarah behaving so badly, it is also the story of the beginnings of Islam. And we have evidence right here before us as Christians and as Jews that Ishmael and his descendants were under God’s care from the very beginning and part of God’s plan.

I think we haven’t really known what we should do with that information and so we’ve just not talked about it very much. Because so much of the prevailing wisdom of Western society makes Muslim people out to be evil. The way stories and Movies are told have shifted ground: The bad guys used to be the Germans; then they were the Russian Communists; now – they are Muslim fundamentalists. But the children of Ishmael are the people of God.

As are every other kind of people who have been chased out into the wilderness. The aliens, and the orphans, and the gays, and the street people, and the refugees from Zimbabwe/Congo/Somalia are all loved by God: The story of Hagar and Ishmael is a story that warns us against our jealous rejection of other people.

In fact, the more I read the Bible the more I think that the Bible should come with a longer title, something like, “The Holy Bible: the story of people behaving badly and the God who never gives up on them.”

I am indebted the Rev. Sara Buteux, First Congregational Church of Hadley, for her rendition of the story of Hagar. She got me going.