Sarah’s Sin

Genesis 21:18 – 21,

Matthew 25:31-40

Sarah must have been so happy. Before this, she had spent her entire life childless. For a woman of the Ancient Near East, that was the ultimate in humiliation. She was further humiliated because her husband, Abraham, had to turn to the servant girl Hagar for an heir.

But all that was behind her now. All that changed when those three visitors, who turned out to be angel messengers, stopped by. Their message was that, though Abraham and Sarah were older than dirt, they would become parents! Sarah would conceive and have a son. Sarah’s reaction? Utter disbelief. She laughed out loud. “Yea, right.” “Shall I have the pleasure of a child at this old age!” (She was long past menopause.)

Here it is, however. It happened. God is dependable. God promised a son, an heir for Abraham by Sarah. Indeed they will be founders of a great nation. Here is their son Isaac as proof.

In today’s text, we have a celebration of a milestone. The milestone is the weaning of Isaac, a further sign that God is true to the promise. The child is now passed the point of greatest danger. In that day infant mortality was the greatest threat. It still is today in populations of poverty. So to get a child past those first few years when they were most vulnerable was something to celebrate. This accomplishment would build further confidence in Abraham and Sarah that what God had promised will really come to pass.

It would seem that Sarah had it all. The promise of God is clearly being fulfilled. She has a beautiful, healthy son. She is in the undeniable position that God had promised. She will be the matriarch of a great nation.

You would certainly think that was enough. But it wasn’t. Sarah wanted it all. Specifically, she wanted an exclusive claim on God. In Sarah’s worldview, there was only room for one—one way, one blessed child, hers! “Do away with this other child. Kill him, or allow him to die, this Ishmael, heir of Abraham by Hagar.”

But God would not be caught in an exclusive claim. God would not be limited by the smallness and jealousy of any mortal.

Now you have to give the Jewish storytellers a lot of credit for including this story in the scriptures. Remember that the first five books of the Bible, which include this story, were pulled together into a comprehensive and ordered story during the time of the Babylonian exile. This was a time when the Israelites were fighting for their very existence, and certainly for their identity. It would have been very natural for them to tout an exclusive claim on God. Certainly they had always seen themselves  a chosen people. Indeed, they often acted like they were the only nation, the only people God cared about, even though this always got them in trouble. But here, at the beginning of the story, they make it clear that this is not the case. Sarah is wrong.

 The Muslim Faith is also an Abrahamic Faith. It traces its heritage back to Abraham through Ishmael.

Of course the Old Testament is the Israelite’s story. It is the story of their encounters with God. It is their story of God’s leading, correcting, cajoling, and their response (which was usually wayward). They don’t pretend to tell any one else’s story. Neither do they, however, from the very beginning, pretend to put an exclusive claim on God!

Certainly they forget this along the way sometimes. Often they did act like to be “chosen” meant chosen as the only way, or as the only ones God cared about, rather than chosen for a particular mission of being a light to all the nations.

Unfortunately other of Abraham’s heirs have also forgotten this about their faith. Sometimes and some segments of Islam have forgotten that they do not have an exclusive claim on God. Sometimes and some segments of Christianity have forgotten that they do not have an exclusive claim on God.

Sarah’s sin is all too common. It is common in the personal realm. Sarah was blessed. She had a great deal, a dream come true. She had more than enough but she did not have it exclusively. She could not feel blessed if Hagar also was blessed. She could not feel blessed unless she had more than Hagar did, unless she was the only one blessed.

How much do we replay this sin? How often we cannot see and feel our blessings because we are envious of someone else’s blessings. Though we have enough and more than enough, we want even more. We, then, are left like Sarah, able to celebrate and nurture neither the gifts we have nor the gifts of others. 

Certainly many of us play out Sarah’s sin psychologically and in our religious life. So many of us have the mindset that there is only one right and only one good. We have a “My way or the highway,” mentality. We act as if somehow if another’s way or belief is OK something is taken from mine. Too many people have this incessant need, no doubt born of insecurity, for what they do and believe to be confirmed by everyone else doing, believing, and behaving the same way.

We see this in the great threat some people feel to their “straight” marriage if same-sex committed relationships are blessed. Unfortunately we see this mentality, this sin, played out with a vengeance in the realm of religious beliefs. It is played out to the point of death both across faith lines, but also within.

A huge segment of Christianity, Fundamentalism, is built on the exclusive claim that God only works through Jesus Christ and all others are damned. (For them that means eternal suffering.) But they also claim that within Christianity only their beliefs are legitimate.

You have heard me say before how arrogant it is for us to think that we can limit God. Sarah couldn’t! Neither can we.

When we take our vows of membership, affirming the baptism vows, we make a claim on ourselves. We claim Christ as our Lord and Savior, our lens unto God, the way we most clearly see God’s love acted out and where we see what it means to be fully human, fully faithful. This binds us to God through Christ. It does not bind God!

True confidence of faith accepts that God, far larger than we can begin to imagine, can and does work in any way and through any one God chooses.

This in no way takes away from the legitimacy of our claim. This is not a wishy washy, anything goes, lowest common denominator kind of faith. We give nothing away in the voracity of our beliefs and in our advocacy for the world we believe God intends. We do not, however, build it on limiting God or denying the possibility of other’s truth.

Perhaps our contribution to religious life and civic engagement is this: To show how one can be passionate in one’s beliefs, willing to live and die for them, and still be compassionate of others, still be open to God’s working beyond us.

You wonder, don’t you, how different things might have been. How different things might have been if Ishmael and Isaac would have been allowed to play together as children, to grow up together as brothers. How different things might have been if they had grown to become young men together, knowing and caring about each other’s families, claiming the other’s children as nieces and nephews. How different things might have been had they felt connected by blood down through the centuries. Would the Israelites have had all those wars with their neighbors that we read about ad infinitum in the Old Testament? Would there have been the Inquisition or the “Holy Wars” of the middle ages - Christians and Muslims killing each other? Would Jerusalem be bitterly divided today between Muslims, Christians, and Jews? Would we have today’s “holy wars” and unholy conflicts? 

Maybe it's time to try another way.

Amen