Uncomfortable Stories

Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39

These are uncomfortable stories, today.

Stories about God dividing families – Abraham’s family and our own.

Jesus offering us rejection and mockery, danger and division.

So much for church as a refuge from the world, or a comfort in the storm!

The storm is right there in the stories, today.

Hagar’s story is always hard for me. It’s unjust and unfair. And black women theologians and friends have helped me see how her story – abused, used, and cast away – sheds light on the stories of women of color today and through the centuries.

It’s hard to read and hear both the fear and the cruelty in Sarah’s instructions to cast away her slave with her husband’s first born son and recognize that temptation to treat people as problems. It’s hard to hear the anguish of Abraham, worried for the son he’s losing – and recognize in myself and in friends the self-absorbed protectiveness that has him hustling Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness with ridiculously inadequate provisions before anyone else is awake. 

It’s hard to read and hear the anguish of Hagar, feel her abandonment and grief that makes her step away from her child in the wilderness, unable to watch him die, and recognize the anguish of mothers today watching their children die of injustice, cruelty, and division.

It’s hard, too, to hear God tell Abraham and Hagar (separately) that things will be okay in the end because God is going to make a great nation out of Ishmael. You see, I hear that and feel the way I often feel when I hear someone tell me or a friend that “this suffering is all part of God’s plan.” 

I feel angry.

Because while I believe that God sometimes accepts the suffering of God’s people, I am convinced that suffering itself is never what God intends for us.

And I am convinced that an injustice from which God ultimately makes good happen is still an injustice.

God’s eyes are always on the goal, yes. Dividing Abraham’s family creates two great nations instead of one; and it begins two different stories about how God chooses the unlikely leaders – both the younger child and the child of the slave, the ones supposed to be written off – as instruments of God’s work.

But Sarah could have served God’s purpose of creating a separate people with generosity rather than fear. Abraham could have established Hagar and Ishmael in their own home, or at least given them real wilderness supplies. Abraham and Sarah, God’s chosen and faithful, are just as capable as you or I of creating injustice – often because we’re trying to protect ourselves from whatever we fear. You and I, too, can choose justice, love, and healing even when we’re faced with danger to ourselves, family division, and any other loss we fear.

That’s what Jesus is telling his disciples today.

“They’re going to call you agitators. even evil. The world isn’t going to treat you any better than me, and you know what happens to me.”
 There’s real physical danger, sometimes, in healing and curing, real risk that comes with bringing God’s power to confront the evils of this world – to healing not just the injuries and illnesses of individuals, but healing the systems that break and sicken and kill God’s people. The transformation we are involved in is so powerful – so much is going to change – that

there’s a lot out there to fear. But you don’t have to be ruled by that fear, even when it strains relationships with those who are closest to you.

You and I have seen this happening ourselves. People you love, right now, are saying someone else’s lives matter. And it hurts.

We’re calling one another agitators and oppressors; police are saviors and enemies at the same time. So are protestors.

Transforming our world so that we’re even a little closer to the kingdom of God, to the gospel that Jesus preached, is an expensive and chaotic process, dangerous to a lot of people’s comfort, and to what we’ve gotten used to as safety.

Jesus wants to be very sure we know this today, because he’s talking to the people who are in this for love – who have seen God’s healing at work, and want to spread it more widely.

Because he’s talking to people who have shared at least some of God’s vision for the world, who yearn for the God’s kingdom from the depths of our being, who long to share God’s dream, Jesus wants to be sure we know the risks.

Know that choosing to work against the evil embedded in the world, choosing healing of deep and powerful injury, choosing God’s priorities over our own, means telling uncomfortable stories. It's going to be expensive, uncomfortable, and at least a little dangerous.

And that the stakes are pretty high. Jesus tells the disciples – tells us – that the way we claim or deny Jesus – and Jesus’ priorities – is how Jesus will claim or deny us.

That sounds like the opposite of unconditional love, but really, it’s about how we respond to that love. 

Jesus comes to love and save all God’s people - unconditionally.

And if that transforms us so that we actively join Jesus in the risky work of transforming the world, then we are seen and known to God and to the world, as part of Jesus, the Body of Christ.
If not, we’re not.

God is bringing the kingdom whether we help or not. We choose whether we belong to that kingdom of heaven with our actions here and now, or whether we instead watch and wonder at the sides.

In our time and place, joining the healing Jesus brings, raising hope from the dead, restoring the outcast, and proclaiming God’s dream, means working intentionally and specifically to seek and serve Christ in black and brown women and men and transgendered people of every race. To seek justice for people living in poverty or on the wide and slippery edges of poverty, for anyone who can’t get access to immediate, affordable health care. To lift up the human dignity of anyone who is stereotyped and dismissed because of religion, national origin, rural or urban residence, or who you voted for last time.

The world needs that from God and from us because the pressures of systemic evil – racism, fear, the commercialization of greed, the public shaming of faithfulness, the fiction that we are in this alone – work to bury the image of Christ, the love of God, in everyone alike, whether victim, oppressor, or bystander.

That work is expensive to our self-image, our comfort, and sometimes our safety. So it’s important to remember that this isn’t about arbitrary rules, or even simply doing what is right. That we’re not suffering, struggling, or risking ourselves because God’s planned it that way, but because we’ve been invited to share God’s vision, God’s deep, all-powerful hope for the world, God’s unconditional love for us all.

Division, ridicule, danger and suffering aren’t the road itself. They are the hazards of the road, the side effects of living in the unbreakable love of God for us and for one another when the world around us is still broken by greed and fear.

I read these hard stories of division and discomfort today, and I am convinced by this that suffering is never God’s plan.  I’m convinced that you and I are called to choose justice, love, and healing – to relieve suffering – even when we’re faced with danger, division, and any other loss we fear.

That we are invited to throw our hearts and selves into God’s plan, God’s risky dream, because of God’s own great and unbreakable love for us, and for the world.