Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's May 9, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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Prior to chapter 21 of Genesis, we read that Abraham and Sarah have been unable to give birth to a son. So Sarah tells Abraham to conceive a child through her handmaid, Hagar, an Egyptian, a foreigner, a family servant. Later, of course, the three messengers from God visit Abraham and Sarah in their tent beneath the oak trees of Mamre, and in their old age, they are promised their own son, but only after the birth of a first son Ishmael, to Abraham and Hagar, does the birth of Isaac, the one whose name means laughter, occur.

Chapter 21, then, celebrates the birth of Isaac. But, for Sarah, there remains the problem of what should be done with Ishmael. Is he a child of God’s promise, too? And instead of the mother who laughed, we see a jealous and angry Sarah.

Hear now this passage from Genesis 21: 8-21.

Of course, we can’t be sure exactly what it was that put Sarah over the edge, but it probably had something to do with the simple act of watching this son of her own flesh playing with his older half-brother Ishmael. Their playing games in the sand or whatever it was that these two boys did together must have been too much for her. Perhaps, in Sarah’s mind, an imagined rivalry was already taking shape. And, along with this imagined rivalry, the fear that this son of Abraham and her handmaid Hagar would eventually use his age and strength to crush this miracle child of her own old age. Jealousy can wreak havoc on the imagination.

It is ironic that the simple act of observing children at play seems to have been the catalyst for Sarah’s mounting desire to expel Ishmael and his mother from her tribe.

I don’t know how many other times in the Old Testament the Hebrew verb appears which the New Revised Standard Version translates “to play,” but here it is used in the context of a feast marking the weaning of Isaac, this one whose name in Hebrew means “laughter.” Play. Laughter. Two words we don’t often encounter in scripture. But it is in this context of play and laughter that Sarah’s anger boils and she acts on her reservations about the continuing status of Ishmael and Hagar in her household.

Oblivious as children will be to the complex histories and agendas of their parents, however, these two boys are simply exploring the delights of interaction in a world whose boundaries are as yet open horizons rather than borders guarded and controlled by settled adult opinion, proven adult knowledge, and narrowly proposed adult goals. Amid their playful discovery and acceptance of one another, adult world and adult rules must have seemed like they were light years away.

Sarah, of course, does not see it that way. With an adult perspective defined by clan experience, tradition, and observation, she sees Hagar’s son as an alien threat standing inside the circle of her family’s laughter and love.

But, the good news is that God’s circle of children and God’s circle of laughter is larger than Sarah is either able or willing to realize. Not only is Isaac a child of promise but so is Ishmael. Despite Abraham’s agreement with Sarah to banish Hagar and her son, providing them only with a little bread and a skin of water, the God of the covenant does not forsake Ishmael who is a child of promise just as surely as is Isaac, for God says, “I will make a great nation of Ishmael.”

But first, the promise to Hagar and her descendents must come to a severe test. In her wanderings through the wilderness of Beersheba, the water Abraham gave her is quickly used up. And in an act of desperation and resignation, she puts Ishmael in the shelter of a bush and goes about a bowshot’s distance away and weeps, presumably so that she doesn’t have to witness her child’s death.

But the writer of Genesis tells us that God hears the cry of the boy and God opens the mother’s eyes so that she sees a well of water. And Ishmael, this child of promise, survives, later becomes an expert bowman, lives to manhood, and receives an Egyptian wife through the mediation of his mother.

Thus, this story about Hagar and Ishmael ends at a well and a wife and within the horizon of God’s providence and care. These two children who played together, Ishamael and Isaac, will meet once again, in an act that speaks of continuing ties between them, when in chapter 25, they together will bury Abraham alongside Sarah in the cave of Machpelah in the field of Ephron.

And what are we to make of this story about our Father Abraham, the two women through whom he bore children, both of whom were children of promise?

One thing this Genesis story illustrates is how adults simultaneously can love and fear their children – love their own flesh and blood and the future promise they represent, yet at the same time, fear what they might do or might become.

Some adults watch children like Sarah watched Ishmael, and fear becomes their watchword. Sarah fears that she won’t be able to control Ishmael, that he will grow up to rival Isaac’s favored status with Abraham, or perhaps, challenge her own cozy world view and values. Perhaps she is most afraid that Ishmael will learn to think for himself and assert the truth of his own paternity, that he is just as much a child of the covenant as is Isaac. What do adults fear about children?

This week, I was reminded of how a mixture of love and fear often continues to be the way in which adults view children. I found it disconcerting to learn this week that a decision had been made by the host church to censor tonight’s high school baccalaureate service at First Baptist, the only space large enough to house this annual community event. I spoke with the high school senior in charge of putting together what is supposed to be a student organized and student run event. She seemed upset that after 1000 programs had been printed, a program that serves for both tonight’s baccaleaurate and Friday’s commencement, that the plug had been pulled on the printing process because the church found objectionable a quote she had chosen and had printed on this student organized and student led program. The entire program had to be redone without the quote. I talked to her about the quote she had selected. She h ad thought about an appropriate quote for some time. It was one, she said, that had been a favorite of hers for years, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Let me read you the quote and see if you can identify why it has been deemed so offensive.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

Let me read that again in case we missed something that is going to harm the mind of our children. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

What, I wonder, is heretical, blasphemous, or otherwise objectionable about that? Emerson is the most quotable American of Americans, a key figure in our nation’s religious history. Certainly, he does not fit into the Christian mainstream, but that quote is about as innocuous as it gets, a hallmark card kind of sentiment as students pass through the rite of passage called graduation. There is much good in that quote. Where’s the harm?

So what’s up with our friends at First Baptist? Why censor the efforts of our high school seniors? I am told that now the clergyperson there has demanded to look at all lyrics to songs and all words to be spoken tonight – apparently in fear that something worse than Ralph Waldo might be lurking in a song or speech. What are we afraid of? I have interacted with many of these seniors – here in church, through the band, soccer, tennis, when there have been some terrible tragedies in this community – I can assure you that they are hardly a group of young people whom I worry about doing something disrespectful or irreverent in church.

What is so fearful about giving a little freedom to young people to make some decisions for themselves, to want to quote a great American thinker like Emerson, or to want to leave behind their own mark as they cross from adolescence into adulthood? If the host church wasn’t willing to follow the rules and let this be a student organized and student led service, then in my opinion they should not have agreed to be host in the first place. Or, at least there should have been an opportunity for dialogue and mutual discernment instead of this figurative slap in the face.

Like biblical Sarah, perhaps there are some adults who look at children playing and feel only fear, fear that the children won’t grow up to be and look exactly like the adults, fear that their adult world might be shaken a bit, fear that they will no longer be able to control and dictate every movement as the children grow up and carve out a niche for themselves. And that, to me, is a very sad commentary on the state of this community and our ability to model the kind of values that the world most needs right now: values like tolerance, open-mindedness, the ability to listen to differing opinions, but also, the courage of convictions and a willingness to give thanks for life’s new opportunities to talk about things that really matter instead of summarily dismissing the aspirations and dreams of those whose moral and spiritual development should matter most of all to us.

Sarah looked upon Ishmael and Isaac playing together, and all she could think about was protecting her own self-interests, not doing what was best for Ishmael or for his mother. So, she banished both of them to what she anticipated was a certain death in the wilderness, even though God had already allayed Abraham’s distress since God refused to abandon this other child of the covenant, of whom God would also make a great nation.

This story of God’s deliverance of Hagar and Ishmael is a story that speaks of God’s expansive purposes, that those like Sarah who try to restrict the inclusive purposes of God do not and will not have the final word. For there is hope, even in the wilderness. Even when mother and son are close to death from lack of water, God provides a well, and there is life, and the seed continues. God does not forsake his children – whoever they are, whatever be their situation.

This inclusive, expansive love of God for all of God’s children is an important message for this community to hear right now. God’s perfect love casts out – not only our fear – but our foolishness as well. The exclusion of Ralph Waldo Emerson from a high school baccalaureate may seem like a small, rather insignificant thing, hardly worth fighting over. But what’s next? Will classics of literature in the public library become a target for anything adults deem might endanger the minds of our children? Will we see a repeat of the foolishness that has gone on in Rhea County, either this year or back in Deyton in 1925? What’s next?

I, for one, could defend the right of any congregation or any other religious group to worship as they please, even though I might disagree quite profoundly with some of the choices they would make regarding content or style. Freedom of worship is an inalienable right that I treasure as a citizen of this nation. And when it comes to a public occasion for the practice of American civil religion, like a baccalaureate service, that freedom to worship has to be zealously guarded. The civil rights signified by the American flag, which I might add, does adorn the church in question, should be honored and not censored or made a mockery.

I am a reluctant prophet. The biblical tradition says that the prophets didn’t speak to those outside the religious community but rather the prophets spoke God’s word of judgment and accountability to those inside the religious community, that is, in this case, to the wide body of Christ in this community. For better or worse, someone has to have the moral courage to speak up.

Like Isaac, God promises to make a new nation out of Ishmael’s blood. For all intents and purposes, Hagar and Ishmael are outsiders, aliens in their own land. They didn’t ask for that status. It was simply given to them. Sometimes, we may feel like aliens, too, strangers in our own land, because we look at the inclusive, loving purposes of God in ways different than others in this community.

But love, not fear, always has the final word when it comes to our understanding of what God is doing in the world. We, like Sarah, might try to make the circle of God’s children small or more in keeping with our own preconceived ideas about family or church, but the story of Hagar and Ishmael reminds us that God is constantly stretching those boundaries beyond what we had ever thought or dreamed possible.

The good news is that God’s circle of children and God’s circle of laughter is larger than Sarah or any of us first thought . . . good news for us, for this community and for our world. Thanks be to God! Amen!