THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE—NOT!

Genesis 18: 1-15; 21: 1-7

Our world is filled with some necessary—and sometimes maddening—places and instances when we simply have to wait.  With gas prices as high as they have become, I’ve taken to turning my car off at long stop lights, and have found some of them shorter than I imagined. If they are longer than I have imagined then I have saved that much more fossil fuel. I have found it worth it to get fast passes to avoid the longest lines at Central Florida theme parks. I have sat in my share of doctor and physical therapist office just in the last thirty days- one so crowded that I took the last seat, and one with magazines so old they were from 2005.  The waiting can be long and frustrating. Going to Halifax Hospital regularly, I once told Chaplain Jim Smith How long I thought it took to catch an elevator there. I apparently caught him on the wrong day, because he said, “I hear that from everybody! How much time out of your day do you really have to wait- 2 minutes, 3 minutes tops?”  (Over the years I still think they take too long!) One person, Melissa Tidwell, once wrote that she was in charge of connecting customers in a large corporation with those who actually developed their products. At the business meeting as she attempted to teach employees how to do that, her biggest complaints were from the customer service representatives themselves! The people who were supposed to specialize in people were the ones who had no patience in getting acquainted with others! They saw the exercises in socialization as “pointless,” and asked repeatedly, just give us “the bottom line.” I have had a couple of requests like that regarding our year long Confirmation Class. Some have wanted to just take the exams and miss the classes because of their child’s busy schedule. They did not see the point of weekly meetings. I told the families that part of what we do in a year is build relationships and watch young people grow in faith and knowledge. Some families then signed on and some didn’t, saying their child didn’t have time to devote a school year to the class.

Certainly there are plenty of examples, cooking for instance, where one simply can’t cook a pot roast in the time it takes to cook a minute steak.  But sometimes our best laid plans get thwarted. Sometimes time is the ingredient of miracle! The story of Abraham and Sarah is one where waiting a long time led to them taking things into their own hands—a natural response after long suffering waiting with no results.  On this Father’s Day we look at a particular father and the world in which he lived, a story that still speaks to our world and the desperate decisions of couples- where some have children out of wedlock, some adopt, some have pregnancies too easily, and for some pregnancy is deemed “highly unlikely” after countless tests. Some go to expensive and drastic measures like in vitro fertilization, while others go through the heartbreak of childlessness. Some who have had several children quite easily and are exhausted from the huge responsibility of truly parenting their children may not have an idea of the inward aching a woman or a man feel when they cannot have a son or daughter. In our world, most often, it is a desire. In Abraham’s world, no children meant God was not pleased with him or with his wife.  So today, let’s not be too hasty to label Abraham’s desire to have a child without waiting for what we know would happen. God was about to do what was thought to be impossible. Sarah was trying to please a husband who was silently tormented, wondering how else he could change his life so that God would bless them with a child. When God says to Abraham “I will make of you a great nation,” he clearly interprets God’s words as blessing them with a son. What he doesn’t assume is that it has to come from Sarah his wife, demonstrably barren, and that a surrogate mother of sorts would have the child for Sarah. One rabbi puts it this way: “For many years (not months) after God’s revelation to Abraham, Sarah remains barren; that was the great tragedy of both her and her husband’s life.” [BIBLICAL ILLITERACY, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin 1997, p. 29]  So they, like perhaps some of us, begin to wonder if they need to help carry out God’s promise by an action of their own.  I used to know a business woman who was married and had a daughter. She loved her daughter but found her identity and personality in her work. Unfortunately her husband, as described by the “Peter Pan Syndrome,” was really a boy who never grew up, always wanting the fun in life but never the responsibility. She became a single mother and poured herself into motherhood. But her cash reserves were getting lower every month.  She told me she would get a job if God told her to do so. She lost her husband, and then went on food stamps, and eventually lost her beautiful home, all waiting for God to say “Get a job!” Others said it, but to her, it hadn’t been from God! So sometimes, like Sarah and Abraham, after much time passes, taking prayerful action can bring blessings from above. This story is most often read as if Abraham and Sarah should be ashamed for going ahead and having a child through the accepted means of their culture. Some say, “What wife would ask, even urge, her husband to have a child with his Isha, most often translated “concubine,” or “maidservant,” but also has the meaning of “wife,” in this case, “second wife?”  Without suggesting Biblical polygamy, the Bible does suggest that being “fruitful and multiplying” is one of God’s commands, not one of God’s hopes. Asking a woman such as Hagar to assist in the process was a way to fulfill God’s command. So some have, through their own heartfelt desires or through a desire to honor God, gone to extreme measures to have offspring. Sarah not only agrees to letting Abraham have a child with Hagar, she encourages it, perhaps thinking she can quell her rising feelings of inadequacy. She says she will raise the child as her own, but lets her own desire for a child cloud her judgment about how much Hagar would be unwilling to part with the son she bore with Abraham. We then get an old picture of things that are still around: dysfunctional families and love triangles.

What are we to make of this story?  The easy answer that Abraham, and we, should wait for God to talk with us or act in our lives, could leave some childless like the weeping Rachel of the Bible, and leave others unemployed and homeless like the woman I just described, or worse.  Surely there is another way of taking this story instead of labeling Abraham, (the “Father of many nations,” and the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,) as lacking faith. Remember, he waited not many weeks or months, but many years after God spoke with him, yet still he and Sarah had no child- an eternity to a childless couple. Could it be that, on top of their own means for figuring out a way to have a child, that God not only blessed their first child, born of their own means (Genesis 21:20), but that, because of God’s own plans for them, God added a double blessing to them, not only giving the first son, Ishmael, a nation; but also having many nations be born through Isaac as well?  To an impossible situation- a man advanced in years and a woman well beyond the time of childbearing- God said “from your faithfulness and your longsuffering, I will do for you one thing that shall happen to few if any others just to show you that with me, nothing shall be impossible: I will give you a son.”  Of course, with God’s sense of humor it also made them the oldest parents in the little league stands and ones who defined “generation gap,” with an eighty to ninety year spread between themselves and their boy!

What are we to make of this story- that God curses human resourcefulness and only blesses those who hold out faith for a child born “naturally,” whether or not it actually happens? With a closer reading of the story, we see that the plans to have a child that Sarah would claim as her own got thwarted by motherly instincts and jealousy. Instead Abraham and Hagar had a child born to a desiring couple, a child also blessed by God. Every child born into the world, not just the longed for boy, or the longed for girl, or the natural born, or the adopted, or the surrogate born child needs parents who want him or her. And oh, how much it helps to be grounded in faith, and believing in a God for whom nothing is impossible. Hold your child; but don’t spoil your child- that’s the job of grandparents! And since we are all a child of somebody, think of how your parents, as imperfect as they were, fall in a line with Sarah and Hagar and Abraham, imperfect  people trying to figure out a way to follow God’s instructions and to fulfill their own hopes as well. Today, let us give thanks to our fathers and for our forefathers, holding on to their morsels, or bushels, of guidance that have brought us to this day.

Amen.

Jeffrey A. Sumner                                                  June 14, 2008