Seeing Through

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

Some days, you read the Bible and find it full of inspiring miracles, joyful abundance, fulfilled promises. Other days it’s full of dire warnings, division, and distress.

Today, for instance, Jesus is warning his disciples that the gospel, taken seriously, has the power to divide even families; that the radical new life that comes from a wholehearted relationship with Jesus can disrupt even the closest bonds that could exist between parent and child.

And division like that is playing out in another story we heard today, where the fulfillment of God’s promises triggers a round of family disruption.

Sarah and Abraham have their miracle child Isaac, the fulfillment of God’s promises. He’s healthy and growing and wonderful, and they have been filled with joy. And then… well, then Sarah can’t stand that other kid any more. That son of Abraham’s, that Ishmael: the son she plotted to create so that they could know that God’s promise of descendants would be fulfilled. Suddenly, Sarah can’t stand the legacy of her earlier experience of God’s promises, and demands that Ishmael and his mother be exiled. “Get them out of my house!” she says to Abraham.

That’s hard for Abraham. He loves Ishmael. And no one wants to lose a good son. But he hears God say to him, “Do not worry. I will fulfill all my promises to you; Ishmael will survive and his descendants will thrive.” So he packs up some food for the journey, and sends Hagar and Ishmael away.

And God does, ultimately, protect Ishmael. He thrives and becomes the ancestor of many tribes.

But still.

Still, the family is divided. At God’s command, or at least with God’s endorsement. And the process is awful. Nobody comes out looking good. Just the way it is when our families divide, when we, for one reason or another, cast one another aside  – emotionally, spiritually, physically – today.

The tragedy of division – the division Jesus talks about, the division we experience – is played out vividly in Ishmael and Hagar’s story.

Because the travel rations Abraham packs up for Ishmael and Hagar run out. They run out long before there’s any chance for them to establish themselves sustainably outside Abraham’s household.

They are about to die of starvation and thirst, and Hagar – unable to watch her child die – goes off to give vent to her anguish by herself, where the child cannot see, and she cries out to God, or to an uncaring universe.

If that doesn’t break your heart, it should.

Even if you know the end of the story.

Even if you know how the angel of God appears, tells Hagar not to fear, repeats God’s promise that Ishmael will ultimately thrive, that God has a great destiny for this child,

and reveals a hidden spring of water to Hagar, water that lets her save her child’s life.  Even if you know that God was with Ishmael, and he does indeed thrive, and grow, and father a great nation, it should break your heart.

That division Jesus talks about – son against father and daughter divided from mother all in the process of proclaiming the gospel – that should break your heart too. It breaks mine.

Because when we hear these stories, when we read these texts, I think we are supposed to know that even when everything works out in the end, God hears the tragedy that history forgets. God knows the pain that triumphant endings gloss over. God bleeds for us and with us when we hurt one another in the process of responding to God’s promises, in the midst of God transforming life itself.

And seeing that tragedy with God’s eyes, God’s heart, should inspire us to work to prevent it.

God tells Abraham to accept this division of his family, to trust that God will still fulfill God’s promises in the face of his loss. But God doesn’t tell Abraham to wash his hands of the results.

Abraham might have sent Ishmael and his mother out to start a new household, a separate life, with enough of his own wealth of goats and gold to be secure and confident in that new and separate start.

If Abraham could see with God’s eyes, he might have worked with God to avoid the tragedy, the near starvation and despair Hagar and Ishmael experienced in the wilderness, instead of packing up only a day or two of travel rations, and leaving all the rest up to God.

I think you and I also have that opportunity to see with God’s eyes, to work with God to avoid the tragedies that so often accompany division, even division for God’s sake.

It’s probably a coincidence that as I read this story this week, a friend posted on Facebook that she’s fasting on the 21^st of every month, because that’s about the time when a monthly ration of food stamps run out for families; and probably a coincidence that on the 20^th and 21^st of this month, as I read commentaries on this story, we saw a lot of people come into the office looking for food from our pantry.

But those coincidences made me wonder about how Ishmael and Hagar’s story might be playing out today. It makes me wonder about how often I may be leaving up to God the life and health of people I could do something to help. If there are divisions in my human family that I have accepted as God’s plan, I wonder if knowing that God can do better for others than I can imagine has blocked me from seeing more that I could do myself.

Some of us, seeing the tragedy of hunger in the scripture or at the food pantry with God’s eyes, might be fired up with hospitality and friendship, wanting to heal the divisions in our human family and prevent tragedy by gathering as many strangers as we can around our own table; to build new relationships that feed both soul and body.

Others, seeing that tragedy with God’s eyes, may be fired up to “change the system”, to find ways to create laws and culture that make it impossible for people to starve or be malnourished in our country; to have to balance the costs of food against the costs of shelter, treatment for illness, laundry and clothing, or other necessities of life.

Some of us will see still other ways to act that I haven’t imagined. Any of us could make a point of shopping for the food pantry right before the 20^th of any month.

Perhaps a different division, or a different tragedy, crossed your path this past week, or may in the next. Some separations are subtle, some are clear, but God sees the need in all of them.

Sometimes, the divisions among our families, our friends, our human family, come from a good or godly cause: a life-giving new relationship with a partner, a vocation, with God, that demand the release of old bonds so the new life can grow and flourish.

And even - perhaps especially - in those divisions that work out for good, God hears and responds to the hearts that are broken, the tragedy and need that arise.

So we ourselves are called to see with God’s eyes: to imagine what more we can do, even as we let go; to trust God not just enough to leave the results to God, but to enough to extend our own hearts, and resources, and imagination: to do with God much more than we alone could ask or imagine.

Messengers

Genesis 18:1-15; Matthew 9:35-10:23

What do you do when someone comes to your door to announce that your religion isn’t right? that you’ve gotten God wrong?

If you’re like me, you probably don’t even answer the door. And the Jehovah’s Witness or young Mormon missionary moves on to the next opportunity, just like the disciples of Jesus were instructed to do.

But if you’re like Abraham, things go a little differently.

Abraham, sitting on his porch, spots strangers in the neighborhood. He runs to meet them, begs them to come in to the shade, to rest, to have a bite to eat. When he gets them settled, he rushes in to the kitchen: “Sarah! Quick! The best bread, hand made, fresh from the oven!” He nips down to Whole Foods for the finest, tenderest organic free-range veal. Nothing is too good for his visitors.

And once he’s put a feast in front of them, he sits down, deliberately, to listen.

Now, he didn’t know that his visitors had come to change his mind about God, about what God’s promises mean, and what God has in store for him and Sarah. But I think we’re supposed to understand that he’d hardly have done less to welcome anyone to his home, no matter who they might be or what they might intend.

Hospitality is different in South Jersey in 2017 than five or six millennia ago in Palestine, back when the world had no hotels, no internet and cell service, no Wawa for refreshments and refueling. Sharing shelter and meals is no longer a matter of life and death, most of the time. But deep in our current understanding of politeness and generosity is still, I believe, the understanding that true hospitality runs both ways, and requires openness and attentiveness even more than simple food or shelter, because it is, still, about giving life.

And Abraham does hospitality without hesitation or holding back:

He runs to welcome them,

sets the very best he has in front of them,

and then settles in to listen.

And the strangers tell Abraham that Sarah is about to have a son.

It’s a literally laughable assertion, that a 90ish year old post-menopausal woman is going to give birth in the next twelve months. Sarah, out of sight behind the door, laughs out loud (just the way Abraham himself laughed – fell on the floor laughing – in fact, when God made this promise to him some time earlier!)

It really is funny. And the visitors use that laughter to open up the possibilities; to show Abraham and Sarah that they’ve been interpreting God’s promises wrong all along.

God promised them offspring years ago, when they picked up and moved from their home because God said so. And then they didn’t start having kids. So they solved the problem in their own way. They made Sarah’s servant into a concubine, and adopted her son as their own. Abraham’s proud of Ishmael.  He has a son; God’s promise is carried out; that’s how these things work, right?

And then these strangers tell him he hasn’t understood God’s promise after all. Abraham wasn’t exactly wrong about God giving them Ishmael. But perhaps he’s stopped looking for the extraordinary thing God is actually doing. He doesn’t know how to believe that he and Sarah will create a son, against all the obstacles of nature (and, judging from Sarah’s comments, probably a habit of inaction).

These strangers have come to tell him that God is going to fulfill that long-held promise, now, in an absolutely ridiculous, dramatic, bizarrely practical way that requires both of them to recommit themselves and their bodies to their trust in God.

That’s the same kind of news that Jesus’ disciples are sent out to carry, in the instructions we heard in the gospel today: Proclaim the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Announce that the thing we’ve been promised all our lives, since before our grandparents’ parents remember, is about to be astonishingly true, and not in the way we’ve accommodated to. Not in the way that’s good enough to call it a promise fulfilled, but in a way that may seem ridiculous, certainly dramatic, and is definitely going to require some re-assessment and a new surge of effort on our part.

You and I, now, have gotten used to the bizarre and miraculous way that God fulfilled the promise those early disciples carried. We’ve gotten used to the resurrection of Jesus, and the spread of the gospel.

And I’ll bet I’m not the only one who has, over a lifetime, come to the conclusion that God has already fulfilled the renewed redemption promised to us after the Resurrection, or close enough:

a healing of some dangerous illness; release from a demon of guilt, or addiction, or depression; finding a comfortable relationship with God with a confidence that things work out in the end; living in an era that’s managed to defeat some world-threatening horrors and evils… There’s good reason to believe that God has fulfilled many promises to us.

But even now, people show up on our doorstep or in our neighborhood to tell us we are wrong about that. People still knock on your door to tell you how much more true it would be to have their kind of personal relationship with Jesus.

People appear on the thresholds of our television and internet to tell you that your understanding of how God’s commandments to love your neighbor, feed the hungry, make peace, care for the earth, and heal the sick are wrong – or a misunderstanding – and that there’s a better way to do it.

They don’t all consider themselves disciples or evangelists. They go by titles of commentator, economic policy expert, lifestyle coach, friend (or stranger on airplane!); occasionally civil rights activist, lobbyist or politician. Whoever they are, they appear from time to time in all our lives, with something to say that challenges our assumptions about what God wants, and what God is going to do.

That’s the same experience people had, some two thousand years ago, when the first apostles of Jesus showed up in their neighborhoods with a new and different take on the promises of God, an insistence that God had something new for us to know. It’s the experience Abraham and Sarah had, much longer ago, when three strangers showed up in their neighborhood.

And it’s going to keep happening to us, here and now, because God isn’t done with us yet.

God is going to keep sending us out as apostles. And God is going to keep sending unexpected messengers to us. So we have to keep thinking about how we keep our hearts and lives open to the unexpected or unlikely people that God is sending to shake up our expectations about God, and ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we have to convert every time we encounter someone with a new story about God. It does mean we have to practice hospitality: practice being open-hearted and open-minded toward all kinds of people who cross our paths or show up on our doorsteps – or whose doorsteps and paths we cross; practice being generous with our resources – not only of material goods, but our time and attention.

Because sooner or later, in all of our lives, we’re going to encounter someone sent – whether they know it or not – to blow open our expectations of how God will fulfill the promises of grace and salvation we inherit – perhaps even with news as laughably ridiculous as a 90 year old giving birth, or an executed criminal destroying death itself. News that we’ve actually been setting our expectations too low, and God is ready for us to recommit our hopes and actions to a radical trust in God.

Sooner or later, God’s messengers will cross your doorstep.

So how will we greet them, when they come?

And what will we do when it’s our turn to bear the news?

God in Relationship

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20

In the beginning, there was God.

And God was creative.

That's how our story starts. It’s the first thing we learn about God. At least, if we start learning about God by reading the Bible.

But if you don’t start with the Bible, the very beginning of the Bible, as we did this morning, (and many of us don’t start there) you probably learn something else about God first.

In most cases, the first thing we learn about God is relationship. That's because, much of the time, God initiates a relationship with us before we even read the Bible.

It happened in the story we just heard, where God defines humanity “in the image of God,” in relationship with God, before humanity even exists.

It happens generation after generation: when our infants grow into relationship with God from long before they have words because of God’s relationship to them, and their families’ relationship to God.

It happens when God initiates a relationship with us later in life, usually through the human relationships we have. Someone tells you about God. Or God draws you in by the life of someone you know – something about their life that would fit a deep yearning or curiosity inside you.

Often, of course, God does all of those things: creates us in relationships, uses our families to teach us about God, from before we can remember, and uses the lives of others to draw us into newer, deeper, relationship again and again.

So for many of us the first thing – the very first thing – we know about God is relationship: God is with us, before – often long before – we are with God.

That’s the story of creation, the story we heard this morning.

It’s the story of the Trinity, of that odd but essential doctrine we officially celebrate today: God as Father, Son, and Spirit is above all, God in relationship.

Did you hear in the story of creation, that unexpected little plural: Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…’

Us. Our.

God in relationship – within Godself – is the model and source of our own relationships.

That relationship is the story of our lives.

The story we heard this morning again in the story of Jesus.

At the very end of the gospel of Matthew the risen Jesus takes the disciples up a mountain, and says to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples among the nations, among the peoples of the world, baptizing them – immersing them – in the being of God, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them what you know. Because you know, I am with you always.”

I am with you always.

God is with us long before, and long after we are with God.

And Jesus is sending out his disciples – sending us – to take that relationship to others; to take this relationship with God to all the peoples of the world.

There’s just one little problem with this instruction, this commandment to “Go, and make disciples among all peoples…”

We can’t do it.

Are you ready to go out and convert all the people of the world, starting now? No?

There was no way the eleven people with Jesus on the top of that hill – some with hearts full of doubt, even in the middle of worship – no way those few people were going to make disciples among ALL the peoples of the earth. Among dozens of city-states with distinct identities in the Roman Empire, among tribes and tribes and nations known beyond those borders…. And beyond the boundaries of that known world, among still more hundreds and thousands of peoples in the Americas, across Africa, Asia, and island after island through the seas.

With eleven people? who are you kidding, Jesus?

Jesus knew the job was too big for them. It’s too big for those of us gathering here this morning, for all of our congregation put together. Converting the world, bringing everyone into relationship with Christ, is a job probably too big even for all of the faithful disciples left in an increasingly secular Christendom.

No one group of people listening to Jesus can do this.

But Jesus can. God can.

And because God can do it, we can act on it.

Because, as Jesus tells us, all authority, all power, in heaven and earth is invested in Jesus, Jesus will accomplish this.

So we are sent out as carriers of that action. We are sent out to be the visible, tangible presence of God’s action, among all the peoples of the earth.

Among every nation, every culture, language, race, tribe or faction, God draws people into relationship, like God did with you and me. And God uses people like you and me to help. God uses the things we say, and the ways that our lives, in faith, hold what someone else may be yearning for.

What Jesus commands you and me to do is to go out, making ourselves available, among every kind of people, for God to act.

What Jesus commands us to do is to go forth and listen. Go forth and look, pay attention to how God is drawing the people around you into relationship. Pay attention to family, friends, colleagues, neighbors (the ones in your physical neighborhood and your internet neighborhood and your global neighborhood). Pay attention, and see how God is drawing people around you into relationship.

And when you see it, hold out a welcoming hand.

Let your light – your own relationship with God, God’s enthusiastic relationship with you – let that light shine freely. Don’t be embarrassed by it, don’t ignore it, even when it’s awkward. Feed that light inside you by paying attention to how God keeps drawing you into deeper, livelier, more loving, more joyous relationship, right now, and always.

God does so much of the work in these relationships that sometimes it's easy to take our relationship with God for granted.  But we can't. We can't ever neglect the relationship that God has created with you, because it is, above all, what you were created to be. Because that light within you is God’s power at work to create new and abundant life for others, and for you.

Every time you do something as simple as hold out a welcoming hand to new relationship,

God’s power is at work in the world.

Every time you open yourself to go deeper in a relationship, difficult or joyful, you make visible the image of God within you, and nurture that gift which is our relationship with God, the image of God created in us.

Although this relationship is often easy for us, Jesus’ command to us to go forth means we can’t take it for granted. We must invest in it, rejoice in it. And when we are filled with that gift; when we know all power in heaven and earth is invested in Jesus, in God who is relationship above all, then we must go forth, into all our world, to carry that gift.

Jesus’ command to us to go, to baptize and teach, is to recognize and help deepen relationships that God is making. We go forth to let God position us to help, as God keeps drawing people into relationship, among all peoples, at all times, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.