Loading...Happy Father’s Day!
It seems a little weird to say that after listening to the readings today. At first blush, it feels like the readings are pointing out all the things that can go wrong in a family system—that family disfunction is the norm, and has been for generations.
Abraham and Sarah kick Hagar and Ishmael out of their clan. Paul brings up being enslaved to sin. Jesus talks about how family members will be set against each other.
It doesn’t feel very good to be reminded that living in families can be so very complicated; that many of us carry wounds inflicted by people who raised us or who were raised with us; that we may be estranged for some reason from people we are expected to love unconditionally.
And to have Jesus tell us to expect that estrangement makes it all seem a bit surreal.
Yet, if we focus on these negative messages, the banishment of Abraham’s first son with Hagar, threatening both mother and son’s lives, or the expectation that choices we make might cause disagreements and friction in our first family that can feel unresolvable—we are missing the point.
The point is that God sees and loves us—each and every one of us—so much that God knows intimate, secret, private, details of who we are and why we are important. If God can know the number of hairs on each of our heads and will tell us that we are more valuable than a sparrow, we should believe it.
God made promises to humanity when angels were sent to Abraham and Sarah to announce that she would become pregnant and that Abraham would be the father of nations. And while Sarah manipulated the situation by inviting the Egyptian slave, Hagar to bear the child, named Ishmael, for Abraham, to ensure God’s promise would become reality, God’s promise to Sarah also came true when she gave birth to Isaac.
But Sarah became jealous of Hagar and Ishmael, so jealous that she demanded that Abraham cast them out so that she did not have to face the results of her own manipulation. She hoped that they would die in the wilderness. Quite a drastic measure, don’t you think?
God did what God does, however. God had a plan for Hagar and Ishmael that could not be changed, not even by Sarah. God saw them in the wilderness—near death from starvation and dehydration—and provided for them, sending an angel to tell them “Do not be afraid. God has big plans for Ishmael and will not let anything bad happen to either of you.”
Sarah may have been jealous, and Abraham might have recognized that if momma ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy, but God let us all know that there was a purpose for Ishmael’s life and that he would never be abandoned by God. The hairs on his head had been counted, and he was valued at more than many sparrows.
It always hurts my heart when I hear people who do not recognize their value, their gifts, their talents, or that they are abundantly, wholly, loved by God. That even in our moments when we spend time shaming our emotions or our bodies or our behaviors God is doing everything to help us recognize our unique value to this world.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he talks about sin and death and grace and resurrection with Christ. It might take extra focus to understand that Paul is reminding us of what Jesus was teaching in today’s Gospel. To know that our ultimate priority is to put God first. And when we do that, when we follow the examples of Jesus, we just might create a disconnect with others.
Paul says that when we follow Jesus, when we are baptized into the communion of saints, or, in our church, since many are baptized as children, when we confirm our faith at confirmation, we are making a commitment to live in ways that are often counter-cultural. He isn’t saying it directly, but he is referring to when Jesus tells the people with him in the upper room during his final discourse that we are to love one another like Jesus has loved us.
Loving others as unconditionally as Jesus isn’t like other ways of living. Loving like Jesus means that we recognize that God sees every person so intimately that every hair on their head matters. That loving like Jesus means we see others the way God sees them: valued, important, integral to humanity.
Sarah didn’t see Ishmael that way. But God saved him anyway. What a statement that makes. We might not recognize the belovedness in others, we may be blind to the gifts and talents others bring, we could even downright hate something about someone…but God sees differently. God sees beyond what we can ever see.
Jesus is sending twelve disciples out into the world to heal and teach and welcome lapsed Jews back into community. But before they leave, he lets them know that he and God see all that God created as good, as valued, as important to creation.
Jesus also knows that what he is sending them out to do will be met in some places by some people with frustration, misunderstanding, and even hate. The twelve are to go out anyway, seeking those who are willing to see the belovedness of everyone and to shine a light on that unique belovedness.
It feels harsh to be told that if we don’t follow the way of Jesus, the behaviors and attitudes Jesus taught his followers then and now, that we are not worthy of him. But when I think about it, I wonder if we need to hear the depth of Jesus’s message here.
Following Jesus, striving to live in this world with a deep sense of the belovedness and value of every human being, is hard. We will fail. We will sometimes find ourselves at odds with the expectations placed upon us by family, friends, neighbors, and society. But Jesus calls us to carry on anyway. To shake the dust off our feet in places that cannot understand or accept our commitment to following Jesus. To be willing to break or even sever relationships that do not build up the body of Christ. To become an outlier when standing up for an unpopular cause because standing up is to live more like Jesus lived.
God knows our innermost thoughts, the number of hairs on our heads, the depth of our love for God as we express it through the ways we love others. And even when our innermost thoughts are questionable, ugly, or hurtful; and when the hairs on our heads start to fall out; and when we aren’t very nice to the people who need to feel the love of God most, God will not abandon us.
We are intimately known and we are still loved. We will inevitably make mistakes, and we will still be forgiven. We will struggle, and God will find a way to remind us that we will be okay.
So, while we might hear these lessons as pointing out all the things that can go wrong in our families or in our communities, the lessons are designed to turn our thinking upside down. They are to help us recognize the intimate nature of our relationship with God.
The poet wrote in today’s Psalm: “How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.”
We can find our vows in our Baptismal Covenant, when we make promises that are each designed to express our love and commitment to acting in ways that reflect how we follow Jesus—with loving others as Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit, One God, loves us.
There is a lot of nuance in what that looks like for each of us. But we have the blueprint, and with the blueprint, we are given the warnings and cautions needed to remain faithful to what we are meant to do and be as Christians.
Amen.
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