GOD'S OTHER CHOSEN PEOPLE

October 7, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Mark 1:40-2:6, 13-17
Genesis 16:1-16

“The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the
wilderness" -Genesis 16:7 (RSV)

There is, near the beginning of the Biblical narrative, this curious
little story. It's an interesting story, but it's very much a minor
matter involving minor characters. It's a little human story inside the
big, main story.

You could say that about each of us. We are small episodes in some
larger story. I knew a four-year old who on the occasion of a special
family celebration, the fortieth wedding anniversary of his grandparents,
somehow managed to get his face in every photograph taken. You know — the
one of the bride and groom and wedding party, all in their sixties, posed
in the living room and there he is, in the corner grinning. The cake, the
champagne, the toast, the gifts: and there he is - a small story in the
corner of a larger story, refusing to be overlooked, affirming his
presence, reminding us that big stories are just lots of little stories
together, or that you don't know the big story until you hear the little
stories.

That was, of course, the brilliance and uniqueness and the power of
the PBS Civil War documentary that mesmerized us two weeks ago. We know the
big story but heard it, this time, as a composite of little stories, the
suffering, bravery, love, passion and dying of individual human beings.

This story is about a woman called Hagar, a name unfortunately known
because of a comic strip. The board of a shelter for homeless women which
we support was discussing a name for a new transitional living facility.
The committee had come up with Hagar's Place. The logic was unassailable.
Hagar was, after all, our first homeless woman. But the proposal was
defeated because the only Hagar most people know is “Hagar the Horrible."

That's too bad because it's a great story, full of irony, human
passion, love, envy and finally a mysterious and amazing grace. It is also
a story that powerfully reveals a truth about God which religion never
seems to get.

Abraham and Sarah are God's chosen couple. They have the Covenant
and God's promise that they will be parents of a great nation, but they
don't have children. If they're going to be father and mother of God's

people, something better happen guickly. So they agree on a plan, a form
of surrogate motherhood - neither unusual nor illegal at the time. Sarah
gives her Egyptian servant, Hagar, to Abraham for the purpose of bearing a
child. Hagar succeeds. And worse yet, now visibly pregnant, Hagar forgets
the rules. She doesn't fade. She looks at Sarah with contenpt, either
because she has heen violated, or because she has succeeded where Sarah had
failed. In any event, the more Sarah looks at her, the worse she feels.
Sarah complains to Abraham, who is indecisive... unhappily caught between
two strong women, and he consents to whatever Sarah decides to do with Hagar.
At this point Hagar flees to the wilderness and there an angel of the Lord
finds her and persuades her to come home, She agrees: returns home.
Ishmael is born. Scene one.

Scene two happens later in Chapter 21. Now Sarah conceives, is
ecstatic, has a baby -~ Isaac. Everybody is happy. Until one day Sarah
sees her infant son Isaac playing with Hagar's son Ishmael and begins to
think about the fact that while she and Abraham have a wonderful son, Hagar
and Abraham have a wonderful son too, a son actually older than Isaac.
Suddenly Hagar who tried to run away once, is again a threat, again an
unwanted outsider. Sarah wants her and her baby out of there, out of her
life once and for all, out of Abraham's life, out of the story. She's not
necessary. She's irrelevant. The big story of God's real chosen people
can go on nicely without her.

It is, I think a scene of enormous power.

“So Abraham rose early in the morning, and
took bread and a skin of water, and pave it
to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along
with the child, and sent her away. And she
departed and wandered in the wilderness of
Beersheba. When the water in the skin was
gone, she cast the child under one of the
bushes. Then she went, and sat down over
against him a good way off, about the
distance of a bowshot; for she said, ‘Let
me not look upon the death of the child.'
And as she sat over against him, the child
Jifted up his voice and wept. And God heard
the voice of the lad; and the angel of God
called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her,
‘What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not: for God
has heard the voice of the lad where he is.
Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast
with your hand; for I will make hin a great
nation.’ Then God opened her eyes, and she
saw a well of water; and she went, and
filled the skin with water, and pave the
lad a drink. And God was with the lad,
and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness
and became an expert with the bow."

[Genesis 21:14~20]

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Fe in re ne te mn ne enn te a be A OCOD ED,

Hagar and Ishmael are no Jonger important. The birth of Isaac means
the hig story can proceed... the chosen people, the law, the temple, the
Kingdom... It is now just a matter of the main plot playing out in histary.
Except someone raises an objection. Someone sticks a face in the corner of
the family photograph. The someone incredibly is the author of the stary,
the one who thought up the plot in the first place, the one who originated
the chosen people idea. It's almost as if the Bible is arguing with
itself. The tradition wants to get rid of Hagar and her son. Right in
the middle of this scheme to do just that, right at the terrible moment
when the baby is going to die of thirst and exposure, and his mother is so
utterly overcome by her own powerlessness, the senselessness and injustice,
SO overcome that she does the unthinkable, actually walks away because she
cannot hear to watch her baby die, it is just then that God hears that
pathetic, weak infant cry. God knows that woman's agony and rage: God
hears it and knows it and feels it and responds to it and comes and saves
and empowers and promises life. That's some story!

From the beginning God has a special love for the other people, the
little people, the different people, the ones who get pushed aside so the
big story can proceed. From the beginning God's passion for those who are
excluded argues with, judges and confronts the tradition of the chosen
people. It is God, not some outside troublemaker, some liberal do-gooder,
who has to remind even the people of the Bible that the big story cannot
exclude the little stories if it is going to be God's story.

And so at its heart, this Christian religion of ours has always been
radically inclusive and has had always to argue with itself. Think of that
breathtaking sequence of encounters with which St. Mark intreduces the
story of Jesus:

-He touches a leper. It was a radical thing te do. Touching a
leper was a flagrant violation of health and religious moral standards
the practical effect of which was to absolutely shut out a whole class of
desperately sick people.

-He heals a paralytic and forgives the man's sins because the
religious tradition said he must be fuilty of something and so he was not
only paralyzed physically but condemned to live a life of paralyzing self-
loathing.

-He walked by Levi, the tax collector, that despicable traitor who had
sold his soul for a few dollars and who no one would be seen dead with: and
he invited Levi to the intimate circle of his closest friends. "Levi," Mark
says, “rose and followed him." You bet he did.

-"Then he sat down in his own house and broke bread with many tax
collectors and sinners."

Vanderbilt theologian, Sally McFague, writes, “Jesus' table
fellowship with the outcasts of society, his eating with them as a
friend... (is) an enacted parable of God's friendship with humanity...
That simple event is a ritual so basic to Christianity that a case could
be made that it is a, if not the critical motif in Jesus' ministry."
{Models of God, p. 168, 172]

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Suaies

That's what the church is for, the Church of Jesus Christ, the Holy
Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the Fourth
Presbyterian Church of Chicago - a place where God's argument with religious
and racial and economic and social exclusiveness is remembered and revered;
a community where God's blessed friendship with the castoffs is mirrored in
the inclusiveness of the body; a place where God's passionate love for the
whole creation is reflected in the celebration of all the little stories of
all God's other people.

There are plenty of them. Let. Hagar stand for them al):

~for minorities, exploited, sometimes enslaved,
always used and despised by majorities...

-let her stand for the dangerous gap between
the Western world and the Muslim world, a gap
which in the heat and conflict around the
Persian Guif, treads close to racism...

~let her stand for pregnant teen-agers, fresh
out of viable options...

-for the permanent underclass...

-for persons with AIDS, shut out like the
leper Jesus touched, often times by people
who dare to use his name...

-let her baby stand for the children -
the thousands of babies who will die of
thirst and malnutrition and exposure...
the babies of this nation and city who
will die, neediessly, in the midst of
plenty...

-let her stand for homeless men and women who
live on the streets of Chicago and who sleep in
the corners and under the bushes of this
building. .

-for women like the client of Deborah's Place

who broke her leg last winter and refused to
allow the cast to be removed for weeks and
months, who ultimately had to be physically
restrained so the cast could be removed because,
the caseworker explained, because the cast was
hers and she wasn't about to let anything go that
was hers.

God loves them. God loves them when nobody else does. God loves
them when we can't.

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Fp oe ee ee rete OPH MOE tes Loe

The need to be inside, to belong, to be accepted, to be welcome at
the table, is real and powerful and universal. The psychologists tell us.
that our earliest need is for acceptance and our earliest fear is
rejection. That truth about us never changes much. God has created us for
community, for fellowship, for friendship with one another, and with God.
Qur basic need is to be included. Our worst fear is to be excluded. That
need and that fear can drive us.

An article in a recent edition of Fortune asked, "How Much Does Class
Matter?" and explored the unusual phenomenon that a sense of class is
diminishing in our culture while there is an unprecedented search for
social acceptance. A Philadelphia sociologist said, "This is a generation
desperately yearning for class." Unprecedented numbers of Americans gat
rich in the 1980s. The number of registered polo players doubled in the
decade and caused the cost of polo ponies to skyrocket. You can, the
article announced, hire a consultant to help you approach that ultimate
barometer of acceptability, The Social Register. The consultant will teach
you manners, how to dress, style your hair, what briefcase to carry and
scotch to drink, and see to it that you are invited to the requisite and
socially necessary cocktail parties and benefits. "It helps," one of them
said, “if you can look like you just stepped off the Concorde."

It is devastating to be not welcome, not accepted, not included. And
at a level so deep within us that we don't have easy access to it, we buy
insurance and build defenses and invest our treasure and our highest hope
to make certain that we are acceptable and accepted and included by
someone. Let Hagar stand for that in every one of us.

Let her stand for my need to know that in whatever wilderness I find
myself ~

-a self-imposed wilderness of anger and resentment
-a voluntary wilderness of guilt
-or a wilderness to which I have been banished
by the rejection of someone who is important to
Me, or the exclusion from the school or job or
friendship or relationship I want and need

~or the wilderness of ioneliness

~or the ultimate wilderness of the valley of the
Shadow of death

Let her stand for my deepest need to know that the wilderness of
exclusion is where God's angels come to call us home, to invite us inside,
to welcome us to a place that is waiting for us at the table.

Let her stand for the promise that God hears the infant's ery, that

God comes to wipe away our tears, to stand with us when we look into the
valley of the shadow, to lift us up when we fall.

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Lessiie Newbigin, beloved missionary and Bishop for the Church of South
India, wrote recently:

“When we see Jesus eagerly welcoming the signs of faith
among people outside the house of Israel: when we see

him lovingly welcoming those whom others cast out: when

we see him on the cross with arms outstretched to embrace
the whole world... we are seeing the most fundamental of
all realities; namely a grace and mercy and loving kindness
that reaches out to every creature." [Christian Faith in
a Pluralistic World]

Even to Hagar and Ishmael this precious old story promises, and if
that be so, even to God's other people, to you and me.

World Communion, a table set in the middle of the world.

From the beginning of time it is a picture of what God has in mind.
There's a place for everybody.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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