Costly Discipleship

I don't think this sermon needs a whole lot of introduction. Just look at the news in the United States and you will understand instantly all that you need to know for why I have said what I have said. 

It's time for the church...the whole church...to decide what we are willing to give up (security, popularity, complacency, timidity) and decide to follow the one who stood on the side of the marginalized. 

I simply don't know how to read Luke's Gospel any other way. But maybe I'm wrong.

See what you think.

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 Text: Luke 14:25-33

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?

Our Gospel passage today had me thinking about some of the ways we quickly proclaim that we’re on Team Jesus.

We wear necklaces with Christian symbols.

Put on a T-shirt proclaiming the goodness of God.

There’s a billboard that I would see every time I drove into Wakulla County…south of Tallahassee…on Crawfordville Highway.

I’m not sure if it’s still there…since I haven’t driven that way in a long time.

But it was this big blue billboard with white lettering that announced proudly, “Wakulla Loves Jesus.”

That’s nice but what does that really mean?

If we say we love Jesus…how do we actually show that?

Paying close attention to our Gospel text…it seems to show that we love Jesus is to say that we’re willing to follow him.

And following Jesus clearly has a cost.

What are we willing to give up to follow Jesus?

I think that’s an interesting…and a difficult question to consider.

Imagine what it was for the original hearers of this Gospel.

Although we’re hearing this some two thousand plus years later…Luke’s Gospel was written and shared with followers who had already lost a lot.

The Roman Empire had already destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem…the center of their worship and social gathering space…for a second time.

The Jewish attempt at rebellion against this oppressive regime had failed.

In many ways…the Lukan audience was likely feeling  broken and defeated.

The cross…which we now hold as a symbol of Christ’s ultimate victory…was anything but a symbol of triumph.

It was an instrument of torture and death.

So imagine what it must have been like to have Jesus saying to those who were in the crowd following him:

You must hate your family members and carry a cross.

I don’t know about you…but such a demand would probably leave me feeling as if all the blood was draining out of my body.

Again…what is that we are willing to give up to follow Jesus?

To help us figure that out…Jesus gives a couple of examples….images that are a little more concrete…to help us understand the demands of discipleship.

He talks about the person who decides to build a tower.

For our own sake…let’s think of this in a more generic way.

“Tower building” could be a stand-in phrase for “any major construction undertaking”…as if we’re doing a big renovation on our house.

Nobody…or at least I hope nobody here…just decides to take on such a project without first doing some number crunching…and finding the most reputable contractor.

We’d want to understand the costs involved with labor and supplies…what it will take to pull a permit…what is the time frame for finishing the remodel et cetera et cetera…

In other words…there’s more to this than simply saying, “I’m gonna remodel my home…or in this case…build a tower.”

The same thing with the king who wants to go to war against another king.

Anyone with any sense…whether they have a military background or not…can figure out that it’s not a good idea to wage war against a more powerful nation…without first considering the cost…both financial and human.

The point that Jesus seems to be making is that discipleship is a two-step process.

There’s the weighing of consequences…and the consideration that one must be willing to risk giving up some things…maybe even precious things like the security of family or being part of some “in crowd” in our friend group…to become a disciple.

Because discipleship…following Jesus into a mission of love…compassion…and mercy…is not about being liked or being popular.

Taking a position that goes against what society has accepted as “normal” is the risky turn that Jesus is taking in this march toward Jerusalem.

He knew that he was going to meet with tremendous resistance and that the threat to his life was real.

But he also knew the Empire was causing hardship and terror for the people.

The ways of the Empire…with its commitment to power over others… was not in keeping with the dream God had for the world.

A vision such as what the prophets describe…where mountains are lowered and valleys are lifted up (Is.40:4)…and all are treated with equity and “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24).

The commitment of Jesus was to stand against the tyrants and the bullies of the world and build up the people who have felt lost and left behind.

And he was not looking for cheerleaders.

Jesus was seeking those who were ready to let go of those things that got in the way of dedicating themselves to this mission of mercy…compassion…and justice for all.

That mission remains the call to us today.

If we say that we are followers of Jesus…if we profess a belief in God…if we have a sense of the Holy Spirit as a burning flame…or the dove of peace hovering over us in our lives…then it follows that we should be doing all that we can to work toward a world where people are treated with respect and dignity.

We are a far cry from that right now.

At some point…we need to address the sins happening in our name.

The epidemic of gun violence that allows for the killing of school children should have stopped with Columbine.

It should have ended at Sandy Hook.

Why did we have to have Parkland?

And now kids are shot during their mass in Minneapolis?

The building of prison camps…when we interred Japanese citizens during World War II…should have taught us something about not stigmatizing people based on their heritage.

But here we are today…with masked men grabbing Latino and Latina people off the streets…at their workplaces…even showing up at the court hearings to arrest those attempting to comply with the law…and sending them to prisons hundreds of miles from their families with no way to find them.

We even had 450 people taken away from the new Hyundai plant in Chatham County a few days ago.

We know that we are a diverse country…reflecting the beautiful mosaic of God’s human creatures.

And yet…there are state and federal authorities actively attempting to erase the existence of the LGBTQ+ community.

There are those in positions of power who are ignoring our medical scientists and their expertise…an insult to their God-given talents…shunning them for work that has saved the lives of millions of people for decades.

The horrible abuse of girls and women…not just by the likes of a Jeffrey Epstein…but what has happened to young children out of the spotlight for decades which leads to hurt and traumatized adults.

These are all sins against that very basic tenet of our Baptismal covenant: to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

To address all of this can feel insurmountable and numbing.

But it doesn’t have to be…if we are willing to acknowledge the sins…and then commit to the hard work of repairing the damage that has been done.

It’s our refusal to face what is wrong with honesty…integrity…and truth that only further compounds the sins.

This is the cost of discipleship.

To be willing to offend those who would want to maintain silence…and just go along with what is happening.

It requires us to break from attachments…our need to be accepted…to let go of our prejudices and hatreds that keep us separated from each other…and to join our lives more deeply to God…accepting the consequences that come with that.

Those consequences will mean some losses…but they also will mean gaining solidarity with those committed to making this a world where all can enjoy the life-giving and liberating love of God.

And that soil of God’s love is more fertile…and more sustaining than the acrid bitter soil of fear and hatred.

Our society needs the church…you and me…to live into the discipleship that Jesus has called us to…come what it may…cost what it will.  

A discipleship that stands with those who are speaking up and even joining the chorus of voices insisting that we must get back to a way of Love...respecting each other and recognizing that our differences are not the definition of our whole being.

It’s time to follow Jesus…and make our own march toward Jerusalem.

In the name of our One Holy and Undivided Trinity.

 

 

Inequality Spurs Righteous Anger

This is Year B, the Year of Mark's Gospel. But the original evangelist doesn't always give us enough meat on the bones of the Jesus story. And so, this week (and next) we will have stories from the Gospel of John. And John's Gospel puts Jesus in Jerusalem right away...in Chapter Two...and he's already geared up and ready to challenge the system of Empire that has permeated everything...including religion. 

And--oh my--what a difficult text to have on the same weekend that an important commemoration was happening on the Georgia coast to remember the largest slave auction in the 19th century!

This was a moment of "Come Holy Spirit" as I wrestled with how to say things that need saying in a way that they might be heard...understood...and taken in with the hope it might make at least a few people do some self-evaluation and make a turn toward a way of striving for equality and equity.

That is my prayer.

See what you think.

Text: John 2: 13-22

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Most of the Episcopal Churches I’ve been to in my lifetime have something we don’t have here:

a plethora of stained-glass windows.

The sunlight streams through them creating beautiful and mesmerizing patterns of golds…blues and reds on the floors and the walls.

Often times…the scenes depicted in the stained-glass feature one of the Gospel stories about Jesus.

Sometimes….he’s the surprisingly Northern European white Jesus with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Other artists have captured him with darker hair and a darker complexion more reminiscent of people from the Middle East.

Frequently…Jesus is shown lovingly cradling a lamb in his arms.

Or he’s washing Peter’s feet.

Or talking with the Samaritan woman at the well.

In more majestic imagery…he’s either ascending into heaven…or we see him in his dazzling brightness of the Transfiguration through his bleached white robe.

Those are all great.

But once…just once… I would love to see a Jesus in a stained-glass window…his nostrils flaring…his muscles flexing as he’s flipping tables…sending money flying everywhere and chasing people and animals with a whip of cords!

I want to see the human Jesus…the one who knows what it means to get angry and be fed up.

I think a lot of people would be able to maybe see themselves in such an image of Jesus.

I think it’s important for us to understand why Jesus has this massive hissy fit in the Temple that seems so un-Jesus-like.

One of the shortcomings of the church…at least in this priest’s opinion…is that we’ve allowed our Sunday schools…especially for children…to cast this scene as “Jesus cleanses the Temple.” We’ve stopped the lesson at a simple, “Jesus was angry about the House of Prayer being a marketplace.”

That’s really only half right.

And that half-truth has fed into some of the anti-Semitism that we see raise its ugly head… especially in this time of year…and is becoming prevalent in this country and around the world.

It’s that whole ugly idea that Jews only care about money and controlling commerce.

So what’s “the more” going on here in the Gospel?

To understand Jesus’ anger…we need to look at both the where and when that this happens.

This Second Temple…built by Herod the Great over the course of 46 years…was an enormous structure….the size of five football fields…. a massive stone building taking up several city blocks…with many entry gates.

It was the center of everything in Jerusalem.

There was an area for prayer happening in the Jewish section of the Temple…and there was also something like a shopping mall.

Along the Temple’s outer courtyard was the place reserved for Gentiles.

This is where the money changers would have worked…taking in Roman coins with the image of Caesar…in exchange for the Jewish currency which had no graven image.

Think about those Ten Commandments we recited in the Decalogue and heard in our first reading.

The Roman Empire treated Caesar as a God.

Jews would never attempt to make an image of God…so the money used to pay the Temple tax had no face on it.

The time that this scene takes place is just before Passover.

Lots of Jews would have come from all over the countryside into Jerusalem to commemorate the festival of their deliverance from Egyptian slavery…and liberation from oppression.

They would be needing to come into the temple to get their lambs for sacrifice…or doves if they didn’t have money.

Doves were reserved for the poor.

Even Mary and Joseph had to buy a pair of doves for their sacrificial offering.

Doves were also used by lepers and menstruating women.

So all the activities going on in this part of the Temple were normal.

Sacrifices and getting the right coinage were part of the religious practice. 

That’s not what was sticking in Jesus’ craw.

What infuriated him…and it was the thing that sent John the Baptizer out to the Jordan River in protest… was that the Roman Empire…and its religious cronies…had so profaned the religion within this structure that the poor were especially exploited and oppressed by the system.  

This is why in the Gospel accounts…we hear that Jesus particularly targeted the tables of money changers and dove sellers.

And…since this is the Gospel of John…Jesus is making it explicit that his body…his own flesh and blood… is replacing this temple of massive stones.

That the religion of justice is in him and not the ginormous edifice with demands of taxes and sacrifices by the poor.

What Jesus could not abide by was this conflation of religion with the privilege and wealth…and how it oppressed the poor.

His protest was against an unjust system.

Such systems still exist.

In fact…it’s something that has haunted the Episcopal Church.

At the founding of our United States…a number of the most powerful men who crafted and signed the Declaration of Independence and created our U.S. Constitution were affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

One of those men was General Pierce Butler…a South Carolina Senator and veteran of the Revolutionary War.

General Butler was farmer and landowner.

He held property in several states…including much of St. Simon’s Island.

His Butler Plantation in Darien, Georgia, was left to his grandson Pierce Mease Butler.

The Butlers owned the land in Darien are where St. Andrew’s and St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Churches stand today.

Owning so much land had made the Butler family quite wealthy…. growing sea island cotton and rice.

But with that generational wealth comes the truth about how they were able to become one of the richest families in the country during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The Butlers owned slaves.

Hundreds of them.

When Pierce Mease Butler’s English wife…the actress Fanny Kemble…came to the States and stayed on one of the Butler plantations…she was horrified by the treatment of the slaves.

She couldn’t accept the arguments her husband and others made to justify the institution.

She became an abolitionist.

As you might imagine…the marriage fell apart and she went back to England.

Maybe she threw over a table or two.

One of the saddest moments in the history of Georgia and the young country…happened on this date in 18-59.

Pierce Butler…having squandered 700-thousand dollars of his wealth…sold 436 African men…women and children at a racetrack outside of Savannah. 

It was the single largest slave auction in the nation’s history.

It took two days…and it poured down rain from the start to the finish.

They call it The Weeping Time.

The thought was that the heavens wept… watching families being sold like cattle.

There are commemorations and vigils of this travesty happening on the Georgia coast in Darien this weekend.

Pierce Butler regained some of his wealth…about 300-thousand dollars’ worth.

But at what cost and pain inflicted on others?

To benefit from a system that dehumanizes people?

And at what further cost to us?

Because sadly…we’ve been handed this legacy…wealth gained on the backs and bodies of other people.

This is the heritage we have…all of us…as a people.

Fortunately…the Episcopal Church is doing the work this weekend by participating in the vigil in Darien to own its part of that heritage.

This is how we begin the work of repairing the breach of history.

We can’t change what has happened in the past.

But we can acknowledge that it happened.

And then we can metaphorically work toward flipping over the tables of systems that have benefitted some… at the great expense of others.

One small but helpful step is to pay attention to where and how we spend our money.

Maybe instead of eating at a chain restaurant…perhaps we go to a local one owned and operated by a black or brown family.

That’s one simple and yet conscious way to make a difference.

Our Gospel is giving us permission to see inequality…and to get angry about it.

Our God calls us to not just get angry…but to flip the script and to take actions to address injustices in the system.

Perhaps one day…I’ll finally see a stained-glass window in an Episcopal Church of a blonde blue-eyed Jesus turning over tables in the temple.

That’ll be a church ready to live into our Baptismal Covenant: resisting evil, striving for peace and justice, and respecting the dignity of every human being.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

Christ the King: A Sermon for the Last Sunday After Pentecost Year A

 

At long last, we've reached the end of this very long season of "After Pentecost." Ready or not, Advent is coming...and that means new projects to run alongside that idea that we're supporsed to be "waiting with anticipation" the coming of Christ. Seems the way of the church is to get as busy as possible before Jesus shows up!! 

I'm taking on a fun, and ambitious, project of doing a staged reading of the Gospel of Mark. The script is almost 90 pages, meaning that this will probably take anywhere from 90-100 minutes to do this reading. I'm hoping we'll get an audience for it. It's slated to go up on Saturday, February 10th. So we'll see what happens.

OK...back to today. I found myself this year bothered by the idea of "Christ the KING." It isn't the Christ part that was troubling; I'm really cool with the idea of Jesus being the head of things. 

It's this "King" business which was troubling. There are a lot of political leaders these days who think that they are the King of the country, or the city, or the state. The Matthew Gospel has the king deciding who are sheep and who are goats...something that...again...our political leaders have engaged in this behavior way too much lately. 

So most of this sermon was really me wrestling with these questions...and taking the congregation on a ride with me. See what you think.

Texts: Ephesians 1: 15-23; Matthew 25: 31-46

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Good morning! And welcome to the Last Sunday After Pentecost…also known as Christ the King Sunday.

It’s odd to call this Christ the King Sunday.

One could argue that in any Christian Church…Christ ought to be King every Sunday.

And it was relatively recent history that this last Sunday following Pentecost became Christ the King Sunday.

This whole idea started in 1925 with Pope Pius XI.

At the end of World War I…there was growing secularism in Europe and fascism was beginning to take root.

The Pope decided the best way to combat these dual pressures on the church was to declare…emphatically…that Christ is King and to mark a particular Sunday…the last one in October right before All Saints’ Day… as Christ the King Sunday.

In 19-69…Pope Paul VI thought the Last Sunday After Pentecost…and right before Advent… was the better placement for the celebration of Jesus as Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

And so that’s where we are today.

This celebration of Christ the King does raise some interesting questions for us in our time...particularly when we think about that whole history of how this day came to be a special day on the church calendar.

Just as in the era of the 1920s…we here in the 2020s are living at a time when more and more people are identifying as “Nones.”

That’s N-O-N-E-S.

They’re not interested in Christianity or any religious group.

In this country and around the world…our politics are skewing in the direction of authoritarianism…a system which centralizes power to a few and demands loyalty to an ethic that runs counter to that of a God of Love and Prince of Peace.

Perhaps we need to make a renewal of our commitment to this idea of Christ as King.

But then that poses another problem.

We live in a pluralistic society…one where we must contend with the idea that not all people who profess a faith in God also understand Jesus as the Son of God…let alone believe in a God who comes to us as the Holy Spirit, too.

We have a very particular understanding of who Jesus is.

And our thoughts on Jesus are not the same as our fellow descendants from our Biblical ancestor Abraham.

And then there are Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans: oh, my! They too live in our society…and they worship in a faith that calls them to a higher good for all creation.

It might then seem a bit arrogant for us to assert Christ as King.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to diminish Jesus or shy away from our belief in Jesus as Christ the King.

We can have our beliefs about Christ as King and love and accept our siblings of other traditions or no-traditions at all.

Because they’re not excluded from the kingdom of God in Christ…even if they don’t profess Jesus as the Son of God.

One of the early church fathers…Irenaeus… found this hope for inclusion of all in the Letter to the Ephesians that we heard this morning.

For Irenaeus… this passage reiterates the idea that Jesus’ life, ministry, and death was in fact for all of humanity…and not just an exclusive few believers.

Jesus came into the world to be a Second Adam… restoring all people to the right relationship with God that was lost in the Garden of Eden.

The twentieth century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer also emphasized that point. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” Bonhoeffer says that Christ wasn’t just a person; he was the person who represents all of humanity…no divisions between people. He is all people…and came as a savior for all of the world.

Karl Rahner…another twentieth century Jesuit priest and theologian…put forward an even more radical and controversial theory.

Rahner suggested that people who never heard the Gospel are “anonymous Christians”…having benefitted from Christ without even knowing it. His theory was highly influential on the Roman Catholic Church’s Vatican II statement. The Roman Church had to struggle with its antisemitism following World War II and the Holocaust. Rahner’s theory helped them find their way toward issuing an apology.

All this sounds fantastic, right?

It keeps asserting that Christ is King.

But then what about this passage from Matthew’s Gospel?

Aren’t some people sheep and others goats?

Doesn’t this sound like a more exclusive…only Christians get eternal life…talk?

I suppose one could read it that way…. if we believe that only Christians do the clothing of people, feeding them, offering them water when they’re thirsty, being kind to strangers, visiting the sick and those in prison.

But we know that’s not true.

In fact, we know plenty of people who call themselves “Christian” who not only don’t do these things; they have invested more time and energy in attacking fellow followers of Christ.

We can see that playing out right now with our siblings in the Methodist church.

And even the Southern Baptist Convention has turned on some of its own.  

The English hymnwriter and minister Samuel John Stone captured this well with these words in the old standard “The Church’s One Foundation”:

“Though with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed

By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.”

Thank goodness Stone completes that stanza with “soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!”

When we sit in judgment of each other…deciding who is a sheep and who is a goat…we’re putting ourselves in that seat at the right hand of God…and making ourselves King or Queen of the universe.

I think if we are honest with ourselves…we’re all bouncing back and forth between being a sheep and being a goat.

There are days when we get it all right… and others where we fall short of this expectation that we will care for the least and lowest among us…either out of ignorance or exhaustion or both.

What I think is so telling about this vision of the kingdom is that those who Jesus declares as “righteous” and even those who are “unrighteous” are totally taken off-guard.

Both groups are like, “Huh? When did I do all that?” or “We never saw you in need? When did we miss that?”

The message seems to be that we can’t know which group we’re in.

Nor should we be so quick to assume which camp we belong to.

What we can do is take in the lessons Jesus teaches through the Gospels…trust in the power of God’s love…and then do our best to emulate Christ…both in our giving and receiving.

By making that our priority…and our ethic of living…we establish Christ as the King of our hearts and minds.

In that way we can only hope for a world where God’s kingdom will not only come on earth as it is in heaven…but will be seen and experienced through us.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

God's Faithfulness: The Story of Hagar

 After two straight Sundays of Matthew 10, I decided I wanted to put my attention on another reading. And then I opened the First Reading text and saw it was the troubling story of Hagar. This is one that I imagine other priests using the Episcopal Church's Track One probably thought, "Ummm...let me talk about Paul's Letter to the Romans...or I'll stick with Matthew."

But not this preacher! I couldn't help it. I read the exile of Hagar and Ishmael, and I felt I couldn't ignore her, the Egyptian woman, who was used and then rejected. 

There is simply too much happening in the United States these days with the way women...and most especially black women...have had their bodies ruled by others. 

And the assault on the teaching of history...with concerted efforts to erase the experiences of different groups in the United States...made this story, which we share with our Islamic cousins, an important text to be lifted up on a Sunday morning. 

I wish I could say that I got rave reviews for this one. I did hear a few positive comments. But most said nothing. Oh, well. Perhaps reading the text on your own will make it better. 

Text: Genesis 21:8-21

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Humans love to tell the stories of our lives.

We like to tell the ones where we are the heroes of our stories.

And we try to forget the ones where we aren’t so heroic.

When it comes to the stories in the Scriptures…we get the proverbial good…the bad…and the “oh no, we didn’t do that, did we?”

That last category applies to our first reading from this morning…the account from Genesis of what happened to Hagar and her son…Ishmael.

Those of us who have been raised up in our Judeo-Christian culture and churches know the couple Abraham and Sarah as our biblical ancestors.

We probably remember that from this elderly couple comes Isaac….and then Jacob and Joseph…all the way down to King David.

The promise God made to Abraham that he would father many nations and kings all comes to pass.

We may know that there is a lot of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis…specifically struggles between brothers for who has the birth right?

Who is favored one of the family?

Who has God chosen?

Often, we learn there are binaries in these sibling relationships.

One brother is more plodding and pedestrian.

The other brother is the one who is “the gift” or the favored.

And it’s the gifted one whose story gets told and we learn about him.

But the Scriptures aren’t some carefully curated history book.

And they don’t let us get away without acknowledging that there’s more to our biblical story than what gets lifted up in Sunday School.

This morning’s reading…where we hear about Abraham’s older son Ishmael and his mother Hagar….is a prime example of the Bible pulling back the veil and showing us a darker side of Abraham and Sarah….and how they treated in the foreigner in their family.

In fact….how Abraham and Sarah used and abused Hagar was pretty rotten.

Our lectionary does a lot of skipping over large sections of the Genesis narrative. So in order to understand Hagar’s plight, we need to know more of the back story.

So here we go.

Hagar is an Egyptian…given as a slave-girl to Sarah.

We don’t know why…we just know that it is what it is.

Sarah and Abraham were both so old that they didn’t believe they could have children.

We heard last week that Sarah laughed at God’s suggestion she would have a child.

Because Sarah didn’t believe she would have a child….she told Abraham to go sleep with Hagar. From that surrogate relationship…Hagar had a son by Abraham and the child was named Ishmael.

After that…Sarah resented Hagar….treated her cruelly…to the point where Hagar ran away.

An angel of the Lord found Hagar hiding and told her to go back to Sarah….with a promise that there would be a way forward for Hagar.

And that brings us to this moment in today’s reading where Sarah spies Ishmael and Isaac playing.

Our matriarch gets enraged.

She demands that Abraham get rid of Hagar and her son.

Abraham complies.

He casts them out.

Sends them into the wilderness with just a skin of water and some bread.

Good luck!!

Hagar and Ishmael were two characters that stood in the way of the story we have come to follow…the one of Abraham…Sarah…and their son Isaac.

This is OUR story because God pledged to Abraham that it would be Sarah’s child who would carry forward the covenant God was making with God’s people (Gen. 17:19-21).

And it’s through Abraham and Sarah…and their creation of Isaac…that we trace the lineage that leads to a young girl named Mary and her carpenter husband Joseph who raided a child they called Emmanuel…..and we know the rest of that story.

Now the Genesis story could have stopped with sending Hagar and Ishmael away.

But that wasn’t the end….at least not for God.

In fact…Hagar gets to do something no other woman at this point in Genesis has been able to do: she converses with God’s messenger…and thus with the God who has kept watch over her and her son through this whole ordeal.

And just when all seems lost…God provides water in the desert for Hagar and Ishmael.

Hagar’s story isn’t limited to our Scriptures.

She and Ishmael are part of the creation story of Islam.

In Islam…she is Hajar.

The way the story is told in the Qur’an centers more on Abraham…or Ibrahim… and his relationship to Ishmael. Instead of wordlessly sending them off…Ibrahim offers a prayer of protection…seeking kindness for them. And instead of a well appearing in the wilderness…it’s Hajar who runs between two mountains in search of water for her son.

In THEIR telling of the story….God sees her desperation and meets her action with one of God’s own: a spring of water comes up when Ishmael strikes his foot on the ground.

Ishmael becomes an Islamic prophet…and the Hajj…the journey to Mecca with this run between two mountains…is one of the five pillars of Islam.

The same story of deliverance told by Muslims is the story told by Jews and Christians.

And in both…we hear that even though Abraham and Sarah are cruel and dismissive….God has not abandoned Hagar and Ishmael.

God sees and hears the cries of the disinherited.

God’s response to their pleas may seem delayed…but ultimately… God will come to the aid of the one who cries out for help.

God is faithful that way…even when God’s people are not.

God watches over all the nations.

God’s love for Israel…extends to the Egyptian.

Because God’s love is unconditional and all-encompassing.

I think it says something that this story of Hagar didn’t land on the cutting room floor.

It shows us that in our biblical ancestry…not all the stories are heroic.

And…especially in the Old Testament…the scribes didn’t feel the need to edit out the less-flattering tales of even the most highly favored.

That this story is part of the cultural heritage of our Abrahamic cousin…Islam…also shows that there are other stories.

We can have different views of the same event…all descending from that singular truth that God is the faithful one.

And in sharing a common story….we are interconnected…and bound together as part of the larger human family.

I think that can serve as a great reminder to us as we live in a time when there is such debate over who gets to tell the story of who we are as Americans and as people.

There’s been so much noise about how and what stories we get to tell about the way this nation came to be that we forget there are many stories…many understandings.

And we have nothing to fear in hearing those parts that are not as flattering.

On Monday…we marked Juneteenth…a new federal holiday which celebrates the delayed news delivered to slaves in Texas in 1865 that they ere now free. Texas hadn’t bothered to let the slaves know about the Emancipation Proclamation signed two years earlier.

Tuesday…we recognized World Refugee Day.

We have 110-million people displaced from their homelands…many of them due to wars in places like in Syria and Ukraine. We still wrestle with the best way to help resettle people who find themselves in peril.

And, of course, this is also LGBTQ+ Pride month… a time that celebrates the three days in 1969 when the gay community…led by Marsha P. Johnson and drag queens and kings…stood up to police violence in New York City and asserted their rights to live free from state harassment and intimidation. The intimidation is on-going…only now happening with school boards and state legislatures.

These stories are all part of the larger narrative about our country and the world.

They aren’t pretty…but they’re still part of the story…the larger story we tell about ourselves.

The biblical account of Hagar has been particularly important to African-American women as her experience speaks to the abuses and tensions between races and genders.

The author and theologian Wilda Gafney notes that Hagar’s story holds up a mirror to the dominate culture to consider how black women’s bodies have been used as commodities.

And ultimately…Hagar becomes the biblical ancestor for the likes of Harriet Tubman…who led men and women to freedom from the bondage of slavery.

The Hagar story…painful as it is…is still a story of hope.

Amidst the pain and division happening between the people of God…God keeps covenant with both…and ultimately from both Isaac and Ishmael comes many nations.

The task for us now and always is to trust in God’s faithfulness…and trust enough that we are willing to listen to each other’s pain…each other’s stories.

And in that listening…may we see that in the holiness of the Divine…we are truly one.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.