Faith When Things Go Wrong - Genesis 21:8-21

Perhaps, like me, you followed the search for the missing OceanGate submersible this week. People all over the world were riveted by the unfolding story. We waited for news as more and more search and rescue technology was deployed. We received updates about the oxygen on board, with estimates about how long it could support the five passengers. There was that mysterious banging noise that gave us hope. The world was eager for a heroic rescue, and a happy ending. Which sadly didn’t come. We have since learned that there was an implosion on the day of descent. We’ve also heard from deep sea explorers who’ve had serious reservations about the company’s safety protocols for years, which has felt like more bad news on top of a tragedy.

This news cycle brings up an age old question. When there is a rescue in situations like this, it’s easy to give thanks to God. But as people of faith, what do we say when there isn’t a happy ending? In the first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul said we should “give thanks in all circumstances” (5:18). That’s very hard to do with bad news. We always hope God will intervene, whether it’s to prevent disaster or to fix hard situations or to ease our burdens. When God doesn’t fix things, how do we give thanks then? What does our faith have to offer when things go wrong?

You can’t find a better story in the Bible to shed light on those questions than the one we heard today. The Book of Genesis is filled with faithful people doing good and faithful things. But there are plenty of painful events, too, ones in which God doesn’t provide a rescue or a happy ending. Those stories provide a different kind of witness, one that is honest and useful when things go terribly wrong.

Enter Abraham, Sarah and Hagar. God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, and yet he and Sarah struggled with infertility. So Sarah, in her desperation, offered him Hagar, their young Egyptian slave. Abraham and Hagar conceived Ishmael. Sarah got jealous and abused Hagar. Then, when God finally granted Abraham and Sarah their own son, Isaac, Sarah worried that her boy would have to share his inheritance of God’s promise with Hagar’s son. One day, she caught the two boys playing together. The Hebrew word for playing is also the word for laughing, also the root of Isaac’s name. Ishmael was Isaacing, if you will, and this was distressing to Sarah. (bibleworm.com). So she had Abraham cast Hagar and her boy into the wilderness with only some water and bread. The child almost died, until God heard the boy and showed them a well of water.

 What are we to make of this story, in all of its complexity and harm? One thing is clear - you can’t mix slavery, surrogacy, and polygamy without some collateral damage. In his commentary on Genesis, Bill Moyers writes, “Sometimes the details of the stories from Genesis sound like pulp fiction. In this one we come to the first triangle: Two women share the bed of the same man. The squabbling gets mean. Everybody gets hurt. The stuff of a cheap novel and a fast read. But peel back the layers and the Bible is Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. The themes of this story are deep and painful – a woman’s infertility, surrogate motherhood, class differences, and the price human beings pay for God’s will to be done. And something else: This triangle does set off fireworks, and by the dawn’s early light, Judaism and Islam go their separate ways.”

 If you don’t mind, this is a good place for a brief interlude. It matters who is telling this story. In the Bible, Hagar and Ishmael were in supporting roles to the main characters. Thanks to Sarah’s actions, Isaac became the sole carrier of Israel’s covenant, while his half-brother faded into history.

The story is told a differently in the Qur’an, in which Ishmael is a hero. And Hagar is portrayed as a woman of strong faith. She never thought God would abandon her, and she kept her resolve. Hagar and Ishmael are honored in the Islamic pilgrimage in Mecca to this day. You might also be interested to know that Hagar is a central figure in current day womanist, or black feminist theology. She is celebrated for not only surviving the conditions of slavery and surrogacy, but also for finding her voice and lamenting to God in the midst of tragedy. And now, back to the sermon.

We might wish that the story had unfolded differently - that Sarah chose compassion over jealously, that Abraham refused to send his child into the desert, that God swooped in and freed everyone from the powerful forces in their lives that caused so much harm. But the story remains messy, complicated, and harsh. As the scholars on the Bibleworm podcast said, “We wish it were otherwise, but life is not otherwise” (Bibleworm.com). The unvarnished story is relatable precisely because it’s not cleaned up, much like our own lives. Two takeaways become clear.

First: God attends to the most vulnerable throughout the Bible. In this case, attending to Ishmael. The message is that even if God isn’t swooping in with a rescue, God does not abandon people. God is present even in awful situations. And second: this story is as messy as our lives and the world we live in. Like Hagar, there is power in being seen by God and one another in the real struggles we face. There is a good word here about the role we have as a spiritual community to bear witness to one another’s burdens. We need God and one another. Since life is not always about happy endings, as the news this week confirmed once again, this is honest theology that we need.

Into this ancient, if messy, spiritual wisdom, we welcome two new Christians today. [At the 10:30 service/In a moment,] Sofia and Lucia will be baptized into the body of Christ and welcomed into the household of God. This comes with a promise, as old as Abraham, that God will be with them. And this comes with the promise that we will be with them, too. We promise to share what we know about God with them, passing our faith on to them as it has been passed to us. We give thanks as they join us in a spiritual lineage that goes back as far as Genesis, a lineage of faith, messiness, witness, and holiness. May its wisdom give them what they need along the way. And may they come to know that God will always be with them.