“The Hard Work of Departing” based on Genesis 16:7-15 and…

November 6, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We are told that in order for life to exist three things are necessary: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals. To expand on the last of these, “Life as we know it contains specific combinations of elements including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that combine to form proteins and nucleic acids which can replicate genetic code.”¹ It could be that life could exist with a different combination of chemicals, but the theory remains: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals are necessary to life.

Those three things exist on this planet, and given that reality, life seems irrepressible. Tiny cracks in pavement or cement sidewalks sprout grass and weeds. Puddles that stand too long grow algae, wet wood grows mold and moss. I’ve been considering this unstoppable quality of life ever since I visited Bryce Cannon National Park and was motivated to take this picture. At one and the same time there is a huge evergreen growing at the base of “hoodoos” easily 5 times its size AND there are tiny little evergreens popping up at the top of hoodoos with remarkably little soil available to them. Yet, life won’t stop. The trees grow.

The Bible is a remarkably interesting document, and within its complexity and contradictions it sometimes feels like there are unquenchable truths gleaming through it. These truths are like the force of life on our planet – no matter what is done to try to stop them and no matter the strength of the circumstances that would prevent them – they prevail. Our two stories today tell profoundly of a God who cares about ALL people, while existing within a narrative about God choosing to focus on just one people.

The story going on here is supposed to be about God choosing Abraham. There is supposed to be a special bond with Abraham, and less so with Sarah, and yet the story keeps diverging to include and bless others. It is as if the universal love of God cannot be contained, even in the stories trying to tell the back-story of the people who long claimed God’s love was particularly for them.

Our two readings today are most likely two versions of the same story that were adapted differently with time. The one in Genesis 16, which we read first, is the version from the Southern Kingdom and much older. The one in Genesis 21 is the version from the Northern Kingdom. The Bible got edited A LOT. Most of the stories in the Torah (first 5 books) were passed on in oral tradition for centuries before they first got written down, and oral tradition naturally changes stories as it goes. Likely each version had changed over time in different ways to suit different time-relevant needs. Then, after being written down, the stories continued to get adapted, including by editors so that they would make a more coherent story. The people responsible for translating the Bible into English also made difficult decisions that functioned as further editing. The stories we have now are the complicated compilations of milenia, with many fingerprints on them.

That is, the two stories we read today are likely the same story with different fingerprints on them. Yet, they are edited into the current version of Genesis whereby they fill two different roles. They are, at one and the same time ONE story and TWO stories that happen sequentially. The editors aren’t perfect, in the second version Ishmael is a 17 year old that his mother carried away into the wilderness in her arms like a baby. (Oops.) But the work of the editors to make a coherent story makes both stories important, and not just the older one.

Throughout both stories, extraordinary things happen to Hagar. Explains of this are coming from the work of the amazing Biblical Scholar Phyllis Trible. In Genesis 16 Hagar has run away from Sarai/Sarah because of Sarai/Sarah’s harsh treatment of her. Hagar is a subversive woman choosing to run away, likely to die, and taking with her the heir that her slave-master husband wants most desperately. She reaches a point where she claims her life as her own, and she acts on it. In Genesis 16, Hagar is pregnant, and when she runs away she is near the border with Egypt, and finds a spring to sustain herself.

“The Hebrew word ‘spring’ (’ayn) also means ‘eye.’ The association resonates with Hagar’s having acquired a new vision of Sarai, and it anticipates the new vision of God that she will soon acquire. She, an Egyptian and a slave, is the first person in the Bible to whom such a messenger visits. Moreover, for the first time in the narrative a character speaks to Hagar (rather than about her) and uses her name. … The messenger promise Hagar innumerable descendants, thereby according her the special status of being the only woman in the Bible to receive such a promise. … The messenger affirms Hagar’s conceiving. She will bear a son and will name him Ishmael. Hagar becomes the first woman in the Bible to receive such an annunciation. … The messenger specifies the meaning of the name Ishamel (God hears): ‘For God heard your affliction.’”²

Now, unfortunately, in the form of this story that we have now, the messenger of God tells Hagar that God hears and knows her affliction, AND sends Hagar back to it anyway. The first act of subversiveness doesn’t get her free, although she is different afterward. Perhaps the only reason it doesn’t work is so that we can get to the second story though. After the words of the messenger, Hagar speaks for the second time, and from the way the story explains it, what happens is astounding. Trible puts it this way:

“Hagar’s next words bypass the messenger’s words. She does not comment on her continued affliction, the promise of descendants, the naming of her son, the meaning of his name, or his future. Nor does she comment on the God who hears. Instead she names the Lord who sees. The narrator introduces her words with a striking expression that accords her a power attributed to no one else in the Bible. Hagar ‘calls the name of the Lord who spoke to her’ (Gen 16:13*). She does not invoke the Lord; she names the Lord. She calls the name; she does not call up on the name. ‘You are El-roi [God of seeing],’ she says.”³

And then, after all of that astounding-ness, the text seems to revert to the mundane. “Hagar bore Abram a son.” (Genesis 15a). It isn’t as mundane as it seems. Trible says, “Hagar becomes the first woman in the ancestor stories to bear a child.”⁴ Mostly sons are attributed as coming to their fathers (as if that’s how it works.) But, that isn’t all. Hagar gets a lot of “firsts” in the Bible. Moving onto the Genesis 21 version, according to Trible “She is the first slave in Scripture to be freed. At the same time, she becomes the first divorced wife – banished by her husband at the command of his first wife and God.”⁵

In the Genesis 21 version of the story, Hagar prepares a deathbed for her son, and sits to wait for his death. The story is clearly about a very young child. Within this story, Hagar “becomes the first character in the Bible to weep.”⁶ According to Trible, “The God who she saw (r’h) long ago in Shur opens her eyes enabling her to see (r’h) a well of water at the site of the ‘well of seven’ (Beersheba).”⁷

Whether the stories are taken sequentially or as two versions of the same narrative, some themes emerge. First and foremost, God takes care of Hagar and cares about Hagar. She is given extraordinary access to the Divine, paralleling Abraham’s. Unlike any other person in the Bible, she gets to NAME God. Her survival, which is inherently threatened by being sent out alone into the barren wilderness of the desert, is assured by God who SHE renames “The God who sees.” It feels like she names God, “The God who sees ME” because that seems to more completely articulate the wonder spoken by Hagar. She knows she’s a woman, a foreigner, a slave, and in both stories she is profoundly alone and utterly powerless.

Yet, God sees her.

Isn’t it weird? Throughout the rest of the Bible, God is referred to as the “God of Abraham”, but “The God of Abraham” goes with Hagar to care for her. God refuses to be contained by the stories boundaries. God’s love and grace are too expansive to be held within the walls of the narrative. Hagar is meant to be placeholder for Sarah, simply the womb to the woman who matters – and THAT woman only matters enough to be the one to provide descendants. That’s how this is supposed to go, according to the story itself! Instead we get Hagar naming God in the desert.

God disrespects human separations, especially about who matters in the world, even within a story trying to articulate how the ancestors of Israel came to be in the world! Even in that story, the sparkle of God’s love for outsiders shines through. Hagar is one of the least empowered characters in the Bible, by any set of human standards, and she is one of the people given the most access to God in the Bible. Her experiences of God are more expressive and profound than Abraham’s.

That is, Hagar matters. Those like Hagar matter. The Native Americans whose tribal lands were taken by the United States matter, even when the USA disregards its treaties, even with energy companies want protests squelched, even when protesters get arrested. Those seeking to protect the land from the Dakotas Access Pipeline matter like Hagar matters. Women and girls who are used in sexual trafficking matter, even when they are being used to make profits for others, even when they are using drugs to try to escape, even when they are being raped for other people’s pleasures. Women and girls living in modern sexual slavery matter like Hagar matters. Refugees around the world fleeing violence and horrors matter, even when no country wants to welcome them in, even when they use all that they have to get onto ships that may sink, even when getting to a new country means they’ll be labeled ‘illegal.” Refugees and immigrants matter like Hagar matters.

If a refugee, a slave girl of an ancient nomadic herder was important enough to name God, then the world’s standards are COMPLETELY irrelevant. Everyone matters because Hagar matters. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Life Needs” found at http://phillips.seti.org/kids/what-life-needs.html on 11/3/2016

2Phyllis Trible, “Ominous Beginnings for a Promise of Blessing” in Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian PerspectivesTrible, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2006) p. 40-41.

3Trible, 41.

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 46.

6Trible, 49

7Trible, 49.

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 6, 2016

Sermons

“Jesus Wept” based on Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44

November 1, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It has been a while since I’ve stood in the pulpit to preach. Over the past three weeks, this space has been filled by profound and interesting men, whose willingness to share of themselves gave me space to focus myself elsewhere. I went on vacation. I soaked up the goodness of people I love, who make me whole, and it was grand.

Over the course of my adulthood I’ve used my vacation time to do two things: to see people I love, and to ski. The skiing has always happened with people I love, which makes winter vacation trips all the sweeter. I’m told that there are people who go vacations to do other things – like sit on a beach, or meet a new city, or hike an amazing part of the world that they’ve never hiked before. Those options have always seemed wonderful to me, but they have never become a priority because I have too many people I love and want to see, and they are always a bigger draw than anything else could be. There are a lot of people I love that I wish I had more time with – and they’re all over!

This week I came across an article that substantiated my vacationing choices. It is entitled, “How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult”¹ and it was a response piece to an article in the Atlantic entitled, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.”² Both pieces were both interesting, discussing the importance of friendship to happiness and the challenges of making and maintaining friendships during adulthood. The Atlantic article discussed the challenges related to work and family – the demands of life that take away the time for friendship.

The housing article added some important perspective on American society, and what we think is normal. It points out that making close friends comes down to “ proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.”³ Or to put it more succinctly, “The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact.”⁴ For many of us, the way we life doesn’t make a lot of space for that. Cars don’t help. Walkable neighborhoods do help, but not everyone lives in them. Houses don’t necessarily help! People are more likely to run into each other in apartments or in intentional co-housing. (The articles points out that this explains why so many people make such important friendships in college.) That is, we don’t just run into all that many people!

Interestingly, whenever I am walking around in Schenectady, I do run into people I know. Because of poverty levels in Schenectady, many people are not isolated by cars (they don’t have them) or housing (it is intermingled). It strikes me as strange that as people move up the socio-economic ladder in our society, they end up being more isolated from others. This seems to support the article’s argument that what we think of as normal in the USA isn’t normal and likely isn’t good! Why can’t we build a society where people interact AND have food security? The truth is we can, but we have to dream it.

The article, which was really advocating for thinking about housing life differently, much like my college friends and I always dreamed, with extended community in co-housing, running into each other in shared spaces, had one passing line that I couldn’t let go of. It was arguing about how isolated people are and said, “Say you’re a family with children and you don’t regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.” (The two ways are “walkshed” neighborhoods and intentional co-housing.)

But did you hear it? If you don’t regularly attend church, then you don’t have the opportunity to meet people, run into them spontaneously, get to to know them slowly over time, and become friends. But, if you do attend church, that’s one of the benefits. I sort of love it when the value of church IS seen in society, and that is in fact one of the greatest values.

Today is All Saints Day. While we use it as a ritual of remembrance for all of our loved ones, and that is beautiful and important, there is a nuance to it that we often ignore. All Saints started as a way to remember the martyrs of church, and is formally a way to remember all Christians both past and present. Most specifically, today is the day to remember the members of our church family who have passed away in the past year and add them to the collective cloud of witnesses who came before us. The great cloud of witnesses dreamed and shaped our community and entrusted it to us, hoping that we will one day pass it on again. In a celebration of life, we thank God for the life of an individual person. On All Saints day we thank God for all the saints, and the collective gifts they’ve given us.

And THAT is why I’m waxing poetic about friendship today. We are formed by each other, in community, and sometimes the lines of connection and intersection are invisible to us. In my time here I’ve heard stories of people I’ve never met, and yet their lives have shaped mine. Friendships are most important to our happiness and our wholeness, they shape our lives. Most church relationships are friendships.

The honored dead whose names we will read today are people who shaped our lives, whether they were part of this church or not. And by shaping us, they’ve guided us not only into who we are but also in how we understand God and Love. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus weeps. Trivia fans be aware, in the KJV, this was the shortest verse in the Bible. Theologians have argued since this story stated getting told about why he wept, but I think most of them have been wrong. They have messed up theories about him weeping is just a ploy, or annoyance at the crowd.

I think Jesus wept because his friend was dead.

This is not a particularly difficult interpretation for me to come to. Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was sad that he was dead, and he was also sad that Mary and Martha were hurting, and being present to his own grief and theirs led to tears. Over the centuries this interpretation has been avoided like the plague because it implies that Jesus may not have been: all-knowing, stoic, or immune to emotion. I’m cool with all those issues. I’d rather understand Jesus to be a man who cried when terribly sad things happened.

In our Revelation passage, the acts of creation which start the Bible and continue thematically through it, come to their narrative conclusion. God acts in creation again, this time a creation that exists without chaos, without death, without grief, and WITH the fullness of the Divine presence in all places and at all times. It is a vision of comfort and consolation that has held up to the passing of the ages. As one scholar put it, “It is a vision of the church at the end of time, and, because it partakes of the eternal, it is present and available to us now.”⁵

That is, in our relationships of love – in our families, in our friendships, in our church family- we get a glimpse of what it is to have the fullness of God among us. The vision of Revelation is one where we’d not only be intimately connected to God, but we also wouldn’t lose each other anymore.

Somehow, and we all understand the how differently, God keeps us connected to each other, even beyond the seemingly firm lines of death. God is the connector, we are connected, and connection is what makes life so wonderful. So thanks be to God – for those we love and have lost, for those we love and have not lost, and for God’s own self. Thanks be to God for friendships – past, present and future. May we continue to learn to give them energy so they can give us life. Amen

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1 http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/
3 David Roberts “How Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult” published in Vox Policy and Politics accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/ on Oct. 31, 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Ginger Grab, “Homiletical Perspective of Revelation 22:1-6a” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 233.
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Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 1, 2015 – All Saints