What's in a Name: Ishmael

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Genesis 21:1-21

What's in a name?  One's name, particularly the first name, is important.  There are those who say the name a person is given will shape their character throughout life.  So, I thought I'd do a little research on our names and see what turns up.  First, me; Randall is an English variant of Randolf which means wolf shield, a shield against wolves.  How about our Clerks of Session?  Starting with our hosts.  Don is short for Donald.  It has Gaelic origins and roughly means world leader or proud chief.  Linda, if its origin is in Spanish, it means “pretty”.  In the Germanic languages it means “tender woman”.  In Old Norse, Linda means “snake”.  Eric is Scandinavian or Old Norse in origin and it means “always ruler” or “forever king”.  Will is short for William which comes from the Germanic Wilhelm.  Helm is derived from helmet and the whole name means “strong-willed warrior” or “strong-minded”.  Well, so it would seem we are well looked after by strong men bent on world domination and a tender, pretty woman who might be a little crafty if you know what I mean.  Sounds like the makings of successful TV ministry.

In the Bible and particularly in the Book of Genesis, a person’s name is significant.  Let me give you a few examples starting with the first family of Adam and Eve.  Adam in Hebrew is Adam.  Go figure.  Adamcomes from the word Adamah.   Adamah is the word for “ground” and it is a feminine noun.  Adam is its masculine counterpart.   Adam, as we know, is the name of the first human in the Bible and God made him from the dust of the ground.  Thus, Adam comes from Adamah to symbolize that there is a crucial relationship between humans and the earth, the dirt, the ground.  We do not exist apart from our relationship to the ground.  Looking at Eve.  Eve is the Englished-up version of the Hebrew word chavah which means “living” for she is the mother of all who are living.  Adam and Eve named their two children Cain and Abel.  The name Cain is rooted in the Hebrew word qanah which means “to bring forth”, “to produce”, “to be productive”.  When Eve gave birth to Cain in a statement of great surprise she said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.”, meaning, “I have produced”.  Abel, on the other hand, comes from the Hebrew word hebel which means “vapor”, or “worthless”, or “vanity”.  Cain worked the land and produced food.  Abel herded sheep.  Sheep were good for only wool back then as they didn’t eat meat.  When Abel sacrificed a sheep to God, it wasted the sheep’s life.  Then, when Cain murdered Abel, Abel's namesake came to fruition.  Cain wasted Abel’s life and made it amount to nothing.  

That was the first family.  Let’s now look at the first family of faith; Abraham and Sarah.  Abraham, which means “father of nations” was originally named Abram, or “great father”.  Sarah which means “the princess” was originally named Sarai or “my princess”.  God changed both of their names when he made the promise to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  Their son Isaac is the anglicized version of Yitzchak which means “he laughs”.  If you remember Sarah laughed when she overheard the messengers of God telling Abraham that she would bear him a child in her 80's.  Getting closer to our text today, Hagar means “to flee”.  Earlier in Genesis when Sarah learns that Hagar is pregnant by Abraham, Sarah becomes jealous and deals harshly with her, so Hagar flees into the wilderness but then comes back. 

And so, we come to Ishmael, the son of the “other woman”.  Hagar was an Egyptian woman, servant of Sarah, whom Sarah let become a wife to Abraham for the purpose of bearing children in Sarah’s name.  What's in his name?  Ishmael means “God has heard”.  In our passage here, Sarah out of jealousy had Abraham send Hagar away for the crime that Ishmael happened to mock Isaac about something on his birthday as older brothers do; a harsh penalty for kid stuff.  Abraham cast them off providing only a bit of bread and a water bottle, a symbolic gesture of both divorce and freeing a slave.  Wandering off into the wilderness, the water gave out and Hagar, true to fleeing difficult situations, left young Ishmael to die of exposure.   She left him and she went a little way away and began to call out to God but rather self-interestedly.  She didn’t say anything like “God, save my child”, but rather, “Do not let me see the death of the child.”  Then the angel of God came to her and told her that God had heard the crying out of the boy as opposed to her own.  God heard the crying of Ishmael, as I said Ishmael means “God has heard.”  

God’s hearing Ishmael is something very spectacular when you consider how Ishmael has been portrayed in Scripture and throughout history.  He is not the child through whom God's promise to Abraham will be fulfilled.  In fact, he is the child of Abraham and Sarah's lack of faith.  He is the outcome of Abraham and Sarah trying to make God's promise to Abraham come about by their own efforts.  As chapter 16 of Genesis accounts Sarah does not trust the word of God that she will have a child in her old age.  So, she sends her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, to Abraham so that the girl could bear a child for Sarah.  When Abraham divorced and emancipated Hagar, she began to wilderness wander back to Egypt.  But the angel of the LORD stopped her and sent her back telling her to name the child Ishmael because God has heard of her misery.  The angel also described to her a bit of what Ishmael's character would be.  “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers."  He would apparently be the source of much conflict. 

Throughout history, the Israelites have been quite prejudiced against the Ishmaelites.  In the Bible, the Ishmaelites are regarded as just another group of Canaanites who bear the odious burden of being the ones who carried Joseph away to Egypt to sell him into slavery to Pharaoh.  This prejudice is even evident here in chapter 21 where the son of Hagar is never addressed by name.  He is just “the boy.”  This prejudice and hostility continue even to today.  

In the bigger picture of Middle Eastern History, the Arab peoples on the Arabian Peninsula trace their lineage back to Ishmael.  Islam goes as far as to say that God's promise to Abraham was fulfilled through Ishmael rather than Isaac.  There is a lesson to be learned here that even with Ishmael and the Ishmaelites being portrayed so negatively and with such prejudice, his name is still Ishmael, “God hears”.  God does indeed hear his crying, his misery, and harkens to it.  God still blesses Ishmael and makes him to be a great nation.  Yet, that is only half of the promise.  Ishmael did not get the land nor was it through Ishmael that salvation would come.

Ishmael and his name stand as a corrective to all those religious people that snobbishly say, “We are God's people and you are not.  God hears us and not you.  We are the holy and you are the heathen.  God is on our side, not yours.  God will not hear and bless you because you are not one of us.”  God hears the crying of the outcast, period.  He sees the misery of those who have to flee because of injustice and even if they aren't of the “right religion” God still hears them and will and does act to bring them justice.  Ishmael reminds us that God still inclines to hear even those who are “a wild donkey” of a human being and who mock the promise and faithfulness of God to his people.  God still hears even them.  Ishmael reminds us that there is lack of faith and a cruelty even among God's people and that God will indeed look out after the good of those to whom we have wrongfully been wicked in God’s name.  God hears the crying of the outcast no matter who they are.  Amen.  

Promise Does Not Mean Privilege

Genesis 21:1-21

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There are stories in the Bible that are quite troubling, stories in which no one, not even God walks away with clean hands.  This story of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael from the family of Abraham is one of them.  It is a way too true-to-life story of the aftermath of a family gathering that blew over an inheritance.  In the end, the only person who appears remotely innocent is the young boy Ishmael whose only offence was to laugh during the weaning party of his younger half-brother, Isaac, whose name happens to mean “laughter”.  Bear with me a little while and have a look the people and the dynamics at play here.

Let’s start with Father Abraham.  There’s a lot rolled up in him.  As you know, Abraham is the father of the faith so to speak.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share him as their root in history.  

Abraham is pivotal to the story of the Bible.  The Bible can be divided into two parts that are best distinguished not the way we usually do as Old Testament and New Testament.  But rather as Genesis 1-11 and then everything that follows.  Genesis 1-11 describes what’s wrong or gone wrong with God’s good creation: and the second, the rest of the Bible which tells how God is setting and will set things to right in his good creation.  Genesis 1-11 tells how humanity, whom God created in his image to be the caretakers of his good creation instead act like gods in our own right and mess things up badly.  Part two begins at Genesis 12 with God summonsing Abraham to leave the security of his father and family and go to a land God would show him.  God would give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  The Bible then goes on to testify how God keeps this promise to Abraham and his descendants and how through these people God will put things right in his creation.

From time to time God’s promise to Abraham comes into jeopardy like when Sarah and Abraham are 40-50 years beyond a healthy childbearing age and are still childless.  Abraham cannot have the promised descendants if Sarah cannot have children.  Typically, in these moments when the promise seems jeopardized, either Abraham or Sarah took matters out of God’s hands and into their own.  This is where Hagar and Ishmael enter the story.  

Sarah took the issue of her childlessness into her own hands through a strange custom they had back then.  They did this thing where if a woman could not have children, she could send one of her slaves to get pregnant by her husband.  Then while the child was being born, the woman would position herself above the slave in such a way as to make it appear as if the child were coming from her own womb and then the child would be considered her own.  That is what Sarah and Abraham did with Hagar and thus was born Ishmael.  His name incidentally means “God has heard”.  That will factor in later.

Please take a moment here to fathom if you can the complete disregard that Sarah and Abraham showed for the life of Hagar, their slave.  How they considered Hagar and her body and her human dignity to be expendable matters of property to be used however they, the slave-owners, saw fit.

Well, Ishmael enters this odd extended family that was privileged with a promise from God that included the grand inheritance of a land and becoming a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations. Abraham is pleased to have a son.  He loves Ishmael.  But Sarah, the unforeseen consequences of her acting on “privilege” is that Hagar noticeably despises Sarah for taking her child away and Sarah herself becomes insanely jealous of Hagar and her son and she makes a point of mistreating her.  After all, Hagar is now Abraham’s wife too.  Why does Sarah have this “privilege” and not Hagar too?

Well, in the meantime, God gets around to being God and begins to keep his seemingly impossible to fulfill promise.  The Lord visits Abraham and Sarah and tells them that within a year they will have a son.  At this point, Abraham was 99 and Sarah, 86.  Sarah laughed rather dismissively at this “ridiculous” prospect.  But indeed, within a year, God being the God who makes possible the impossible, Sarah bore a son.  They named him Isaac, which means “laughter”.

At this moment in the story, the matter of Hagar and Ishmael becomes gravely complicated.  They, the expendable slave/concubine/wife and her son, become a threat to the people who believe themselves “privileged” with God’s promise.  Ishmael is in fact Abraham’s oldest son and would be for all shapes and purposes by custom and law entitled firstly to the inheritance God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  This entitlement would have been unquestionably Isaac’s had not Sarah played God and tried to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham when it appeared threatened by her own childlessness.  So now, Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar and Ishmael becomes deadly as she perceives that her and Isaac’s “promise-privilege”, I’ll call it, to be in jeopardy due to the very existence of Ishmael and his rights as first born.

Our reading this morning picks up here.  Isaac is old enough to be weaned so Abraham has a celebration for him.  At some point during the festivities she hears Ishmael laugh.  Many translations over the years have tried to excuse Sarah’s ensuing actions by blaming the victim, blaming Ishmael, by saying he was laughing at or mocking Isaac.  But, the Hebrew text simply says he laughed, apparently an expression of joy during the weaning party of his little half-brother whose name happens to mean “laughter”.  

Suddenly, Sarah really perceives that Isaac’s “promise privilege”, his right to the inheritance, was very much in jeopardy.  So she goes to Abraham and tells him to cast out the slave woman and her son, which in essence was a death sentence.  She tells Abraham to send them packing, a young mother and a preteen boy, out into the desert wilderness, where there is no hope for survival.

The Hebrew text says that Abraham was distressed in himself.  Let’s consider that word “distressed”.  In Hebrew, it is what you feel when you know you are being asked to do something evil and your choices are limited.  Abraham does not want to do this evil thing to his firstborn son whom he loves, so he prays.  And God, God tells him to not be distressed and rather do whatever Sarah tells him to do, because “it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named to you”.  Then, God makes lemonade out of lemons by promising to also make a great nation of Ishmael because he too is Abraham’s son.  Even though God makes that promise, we know it’s not going to be as good for Ishmael as it’s going to be for Isaac and for Abraham’s descendants through Isaac.  Ishmael won’t enjoy the same “privilege” that Isaac has.

The next morning old Abe gets up early, so nobody can see, and walks Hagar and Ishmael to the edge of the camp.  He gives her a loaf of bread and a canteen of water to drape of one shoulder.  Then, I imagine him then taking a still sleepy Ishmael and putting him in his mother’s arms to rest his head over her other shoulder and he sends them off.  This was all a symbolic gesture that he had “divorced” her and given them their “freedom”.  Hagar and Ismael are “emancipated” now and Abraham is no longer responsible for the child.  He’s surpassed his obligation to them by providing them with a loaf of bread and canteen of water for their trek in the desert wilderness.  The only thing missing from this story is a few “Jim Crow” laws!

Let’s just step back here for a moment.  If you have ever been the victim of somebody else’s “privilege”; whether it be white privilege, male privilege, the privilege of wealth, the privilege of power, etcetera – then you, like me, are going to have some serious questions about the God of Abraham’s sense of justice.  God just told Abraham to do an evil thing; to treat two human beings whom he, Abraham, and God care about as expendables simply because of this “promise privilege” thing and God promises to make lemonade out of it and that is supposed to make it better.  God does not walk away from this mess looking good.  In hindsight, we know Ishmael winds up living and becoming a great nation and from his descendants comes the Arab peoples and Islam and so many good things throughout history, but it’s just not the same as the promise that plays out through the descendants of Isaac.  If this were a court case, it would be like God settled out of what could have been a pretty nasty lawsuit involving Abraham and Sarah.  The one who should have judged and held Abraham and Sarah accountable for their abuse of privilege instead actually pays the settlement to try to make it all go away.

I need to wind this down, but before doing that I need to say that even Hagar isn’t a brave hero either.  She winds up abandoning Ishmael so that she doesn’t have to watch him die.  She cries and God answers her, but God’s answer isn’t, “Hagar, I hear your cries for justice.” Rather, it is that he has heard the cries of Ishmael and is answering for his sake.  Remember, Ishmael means “God has heard”.  God opens her eyes and shows her a well.  They will live another day.  From then on, the Bible says, God was with Ishmael.  He does indeed go on to become a great nation.  The next we hear of him, is that it is to a tribe of Ishmaelites that Isaac’s grandsons sell their brother Joseph to be taken to Egypt, where Hagar came from, to be sold as a slave there.  Some might call that “poetic justice” but…is it putting things to right when the descendants of the slave woman Hagar and her son became slave traders?

Winding down, as I said this story is troubling and I apologize for troubling you with it.  A mature faith does not Polly-Anna-ize these troubling stories away, but rather wrestles with them.  This story reveals a side of God that truly threatens our Sunday School notions of the love of God.  God lives in a real world, ours, and the fact is: God gets his hands dirty when it comes to dealing with us humans, who, though made in the image of God, try to be God.  Sadly, very sadly, God’s hands don’t always wash clean when he sets about cleaning up our messes.  If there is a take away from this story, it’s that assuming privilege and treating others as expendable is never a good thing.  It is evil, so evil that it even stains the hands of God when he has to step in and clean it up.  Amen.