The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
June 22, 2008

Proper 7 -- Year A
Genesis 21:1-21
Romans 5:12b-19
Matthew 10:24-33

How did the world get in the mess it’s in, and what hope is there for us? Well, the mess was made by one man, and then made worse by all the others, St. Paul tells us. “It was through one man that sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death pervaded the whole human race, inasmuch as all have sinned.” The mess originated with Adam’s sin, and we participate in the mess through our own.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, explains it this way: “When we open our eyes as babies, we see the world stretching out around us. We are in the middle of it. All proportions and perspectives in what we see are determined by the relation – distance, height, and so forth – of the various visible objects to ourselves. This will remain true of our bodily vision as long as we live. I am the centre of the world I see. Where the horizon is depends on where I stand.

“Now just the same thing is true at first of our mental and spiritual vision. Some things hurt us; we hope they will not happen again; we call them bad. Some things please us; we hope they will happen again; we call them good. Our standard of value is the way things affect ourselves. So each of us takes his place in the centre of his own world.”

In the beginning of our lives, in other words, we are spiritual infants. Like Adam and Eve, we eat whatever fruit we like, judging our actions by no external measure, but only by whatever pleases us as we stand in what appears to us to be the center of the world.

“But I am not the centre of the world, or the standard of reference as between good and bad,” Bishop Temple reminds us. “I am not, and God is. In other words, from the beginning I put myself in God’s place. This is my original sin. [Just as it was Adam’s original sin.] I was doing it before I could speak, and everyone else has been doing it from early infancy. I am not ‘guilty’ on this account because I could not help it. But I am in a state, from birth, in which I shall bring disaster on myself and everyone affected by my conduct unless I can escape from it." (Christianity and Social Order, p. 60)

When we speak of a “fallen” world, when we speak of our participating in Adam’s sin and the death it brings, this is what we are talking about. We are talking about the human habit of measuring the good and bad of everything according to how we see it affecting us, as if we were the center of the world.

Abraham and Sarah show us how this works out in practice.

Despite the fact that Abraham and Sarah were both old and childless, God promised that he would bless them with a child and that their grandchildren would become a great nation. The child was to be God’s gift.

But years passed without Sarah’s bearing the promised son, and one day she said to Abraham, ”The Lord has not let me have a child. Take my slave girl Hagar, and sleep with her. Perhaps through her I shall have a son.” So Sarah gave her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to her husband to be his wife. And Hagar conceived and gave birth to Abraham’s first-born son, and they named him Ishmael.

Later, however, God also made good on his promise to Sarah, and she too conceived and bore a son. And Abraham and Sarah named him Isaac. Isaac was a gift from God, an improbable gift that caused Sarah to laugh in her old age.

But Sarah does not simply accept the gift and enjoy the blessing of her old age, because Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son, now stands to gain his father’s inheritance. And Sarah is not about to let that happen. After all, to Sarah, it is Sarah, not Hagar, who is the center of the world. So Sarah demands that Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out of the house and into the desert, where they are certain to die. Sarah goes for the gold. Whatever it takes! The ends justify the means. And if receiving the gold in the Promised-Blessing-of-God-Department requires it, well then, Hagar and Ishmael are dispensable.

Sarah’s demand grieved Abraham, because Ishmael, too, was his own son, his first-born. But he did as Sarah demanded. “Early the next morning, Abraham took some food and a full water-skin and gave them to Hagar. He set the child on her shoulder and sent them away, and Hagar and the child wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba.

“When the water in the skin was finished, Hagar thrust the child under a bush, and she went and sat down nearby, about a bowshot away. ‘I cannot bear to watch the child die,’ she said. And she sat there and wept bitterly. But God heard the child crying in the wilderness, and the angel of the Lord appeared to Hagar and told her not to be afraid, but to take the child in her arms, because the Lord would make a great nation of him as well.

“Then God opened Hagar’s eyes, and she saw a well, full of water. She went to it and filled the water-skin and gave her son a drink. And God was with the child as he grew up. He lived in the wilderness of Paran and became an archer, and his mother got him a wife from Egypt.”

Why couldn’t Sarah simply accept the gift of her son Isaac and enjoy the blessing that Isaac was, and just let it go at that? Why couldn’t she and Hagar celebrate together? Why couldn’t Ishmael and Isaac share the inheritance? Why did Sarah see Hagar, not as a sister to be embraced, but as a competitor to be driven away? Not only away, but out into the desert to die! And why did Abraham comply with Sarah's demand? Why do blessings we receive – blessings like Sarah’s, which are gifts of grace – so often drive a wedge between ourselves and others?

How did the world get in the mess it’s in? Because of sin. Because our original sin remains our present sin. Because our spiritual sight so often remains as it began in infancy: we see and measure the things and people around us as if we were the center of the world. We are, as Bishop Temple says, in a state, from birth, in which we will bring disaster on ourselves and everyone affected by our conduct unless we can escape from it.

Our story begins, of course, with Adam. It takes a decisive step with Cain, then another with Abraham and Sarah. Then it continues throughout the Scriptures, the story of how one brother supplants the other, often by deceit and violence. Cain, angry with God’s blessing of Abel, murders his brother. Isaac, at the insistence of his mother Sarah and at the expense of his brother Ishmael, becomes the patriarch of Israel. Jacob, encouraged by his conniving mother, steals his older brother’s birthright. The hibiru, the wanderers, the Hebrews, conquer their brothers, the Canaanites and Philistines and others, and displace them from lands they had lived in for centuries. Europeans, in what we called “the New World,” drive aborigines from their lands and establish colonies of the old, and not long afterwards their sons rebel from the old world and establish the United States and drive more aborigines from their lands and plant our flag in the far corners of North America. It was, we say, our “manifest destiny.”

The struggle to supplant reached global proportions with the imperial conquests of the nineteenth century and with the tribal conflicts and world wars of the twentieth. The struggle to supplant continues in the twenty-first. Its roots reach back to Sarah’s sin, and to Abraham’s, back further still to Cain’s and to Adam’s. And today, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Israel and Gaza and in the lingering tribal conflicts of northern Africa, the grandchildren of Abraham, the sons of Isaac and Ishmael, continue, sometimes with our help, to bomb and maim and kill each other, each trying to drive the other out into the wilderness. Often this struggle is the lead story on the evening news, and here in Colorado Springs I think to myself, ”I just can’t watch all this death any more,” and I change the channel to the Rockies. And just so am I spared more strain on my spiritual vision.

Those children in the Middle East – today’s mothers and fathers and sons and daughters in Israel – they are our brothers and sisters and cousins, like us the children of Isaac and the grandchildren of Abraham and Sarah. And those others – the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters in Palestine, in the West Bank and in Gaza, and in Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq – they, too, are our brothers and sisters and cousins, also the grandchildren of Abraham, the children of Hagar and Ishmael. They are the ones Isaac supplanted, the ones grandmother Sarah and grandfather Abraham drove out into the desert to die so that we could be the heirs.

Is this perhaps why the story of Hagar and Ishmael is not a favorite of ours, because, after all, we smell something fishy and can see that there's something all wrong about it?

Truth be told, most of us here this morning are the usurpers, like Isaac. Most of us here – Western, white, Christian, privileged – are, like Isaac and Jacob, the supplanters. Here in the so-called “New World” we forget that from God’s viewpoint there is nothing new about it. Here, like Sarah, we too took our inheritance by force from those who were here before us and declared it good, as if we were the center of the world, as if we were the judges of good and bad, right and wrong.

How did the world get in the mess it’s in? Why do blessings, gifts of grace, so often become a barrier between ourselves and others? It is our original sin, and it’s painful for us to hear of grandmother Sarah’s vicious actions and of grandfather Abraham's cowardly complicity, just as it’s painful to ponder our own dealings with those in this land who were here before us, and with those we brought in chains from Africa to serve us.

Where will it end? So far the story hasn’t told us. We have only the promise we find in the story, the promise that God blessed both Sarah and Hagar, and will bless both their children.

What I do know is this – that most in the world today identify more readily with the anguish of Hagar and Ishmael than with the joy of Sarah and Abraham and Isaac. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa – somewhere in there is the cradle of civilization, the source of the whole human race if the anthropologists are right, and I suppose they are – in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, when our spiritual vision is strong enough, we can find our elder brothers and sisters dying in the wilderness like Ishmael, while we, the supplanters, receive it all “as seen on TV.” Until September 11, that is. Since September 11, we have seen it more immediately.

Who remembers those driven into the wilderness?

God does. Often, we do not. Because, after all, here in the land of promise and prosperity and blessing, it’s hard to keep our spiritual vision focused on wilderness horizons for long. For even as we try to do so, the evening news soon draws us back to things less painful, draws us back closer to home, back to the Rockies, back to the stock market and the price of gasoline here, back to what we perceive as the center of the world, and blocks out the rest. This is our original sin.

But we are not the center of the world any more than Adam and Eve and Sarah and Abraham were. We are not, and God is. And even as the celebration of Isaac’s birth is in full swing at Abraham’s and Sarah’s house, God finds room in his heart to remember our older brother, the one whom Abraham and Sarah drove away, out of their sight, beyond their horizon. But not beyond God’s sight. Not beyond God’s horizon, because God’s nature, as someone said, is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. So hearing the cries of Hagar and Ishmael, God slips away from the party at Abraham’s and Sarah’s house and finds his way out into the desert, and there he blesses Hagar and her son as well.

“Your God is too small,” J. B. Phillips once reminded us. God is not limited to our parochial vision. What is horizon to us is the center of the world to God. There is a place in God’s heart for those who cry in the desert, a place for those like Hagar, who lift up their voices to God in the wilderness.

The mother in Israel still cries out. The mother in Palestine still cries out. The mothers in Rwanda and Sudan still cry out. The mother in Asia still cries out. Is she the daughter of Sarah, or of Hagar? Is she Jewish or Christian? More than likely, she’s either Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, but also our cousin, the grandchild of Adam and Eve. Who will hear her? Who cares? Rwanda and Sudan, like Somalia and Haiti and many other such places, are now back-page stories here. They have no strategic importance to us. They have no oil.

Briefly, we think of them. Briefly, we mourn the plight of Rwanda and Sudan and their children, the plight of Ishmael’s children. And then the evening news moves quickly to what are, for us, more pleasant things. This is our original sin. “I was doing it before I could speak,” says Bishop Temple. “And everyone else has been doing it from early infancy. I am not ‘guilty’ on this account because I could not help it. But I am in a state, from birth, in which I shall bring disaster on myself and everyone affected by my conduct unless I can escape from it.”

How to escape from it? What hope is there for us? That’s the question. Or, as St. Paul asks it, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Education can help, says Bishop Temple, but only to the extent that education can make my self-centeredness less disastrous by widening my horizon, the way climbing a tower “extends the horizon of physical vision while leaving me the centre and standard of reference.”

Complete deliverance requires a spiritual deliverance, Temple insists, a deliverance from my seeing and believing and acting as if I am the center of the world, a deliverance from my believing and acting as if I, rather than God, am the standard of reference for good and bad. It can come, as Bishop Temple puts it, ”only by the winning of my whole heart’s devotion, the total allegiance of my will, and this only the Divine Love disclosed by Christ in his life and death can do.”

Complete deliverance, in other words, is a gift. A gift like Isaac. Her name is Grace. And only Grace can move us in heart and will from our preoccupation with our own inheritance out into the wilderness where we can hear the cries of Hagar and Ishmael as well, where we are joined there by God, because God, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, is, of course, there ahead of us.

Complete deliverance comes only by that grace which moves us in heart and will from our preoccupation with ourselves out to the edge of town, or perhaps these days into the inner city or into some other wilderness, where we can see the Divine Love disclosed by Christ offering a cup of water or dying on a Cross, where we are joined there by God, because that’s where God has gone ahead of us.

It is there, there “outside the camp” – which is how the author of The Letter to the Hebrews describes the place of Jesus’ crucifixion – it is there on the Cross with Jesus, “outside the camp” in the wilderness with Hagar and Ishmael, where Jesus dies in love, not for Isaac alone, but for the whole world, it is there at the center of the world where God is that we can see that we are not the standard of good and bad. It is there, in the wilderness and on the Cross, that we can see that we are not the center of the world, and that God is.

What hope is there for us? “Thanks be to God!” shouts Paul. Thanks be to God, that just as sin and death and condemnation came by the one man Adam, so righteousness and life and salvation come, through the gift of Grace, through the Cross, where the one man Jesus draws our hearts and wills and spiritual vision from our focus on ourselves and sends us out, like sheep among wolves, to the the center of the world where God is, to the place where Grace is born and justice and mercy and love and peace happen.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.