Fathers and Sons

Earlier this month (on February 4) I wrote about the death of Sarah. ("Taking Care of Business"). On February 8, the Daily Office Lectionary reading was from Genesis 25:19-34. What was skipped over between those two readings was Genesis 25:7-18. (When the Daily Office lectionary skips over a text you know it is a neglected part of Scripture!) Almost seven years ago I preached a sermon in the chapel at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where I received my D.Min. degree. Below is an edited version of that sermon: my text was Genesis 25:7-23.

One of the most fascinating things I get to do as a pastor, is to preside at funerals. Whether the deceased is a long time parishioner or a person who hasn’t been to church in decades, I try to follow the same pattern. I sit down with the surviving family members, and I ask them to tell me about the deceased.

It’s a kind of practical exercise in post-modern epistemology, because very rarely do the stories I hear fit neatly together. What we know is so profoundly shaped by where we stand. Two children grow up in the same household, and yet have very different experiences and memories about what that was like. Even if they are now in their forties or fifties, there are glimpses of what it was like for that person to be twelve, or six—just in the telling of the stories. I love it when an oldest child tells a story that the younger ones may never before have heard, or known; or at the other end of that continuum, when a youngest child can speak of those moments in the kitchen, late at night, after all the older ones had all gone off to college or gotten married. I never cease to be struck at what a great mystery we are to one another, even (and maybe most especially) among those you would think would know us best.

On occasion, I have presided at the funeral for a family where one or more members of that family have been estranged from one another, perhaps for years or even decades. It’s such a hard thing to bear witness to, as people choose different corners of the room, or cross their arms, or perhaps speak to one another by directing their comments through me.

It’s with these eyes especially (more than with the eyes of a great Biblical scholar) that I come to the text before us today. I find myself watching Ishmael and Isaac, these two grown men who have come together to bury their father. The last time we saw Ishmael he was a teen-ager—being sent away with his mother. We know only a little more about what has been going on in Isaac’s life—our only real encounter with him—the one we (and surely he!) can never forget was on that horrible day when he and his father climbed Mount Moriah.

And so I catch myself watching these two brothers—wondering what it would be like to be their pastor in this moment. Looking for clues about the kind of men they have become. Wondering whether this shared grief will bring them together or whether it will re-open old and painful wounds. Wondering, even, if they are yet able to grieve, given the terrible memories each has about his relationship to this father, a man larger than life who staked his life on the Voice. (If you think it’s hard to be a “preacher's kid”, just try to imagine what it would have been like to be Abraham’s kid!)

I find myself looking for a gesture: does one or the other put an arm on his brother’s shoulder, or is that simply not possible? Do they gather back at Isaac’s tent afterwards for hummus and olives and pita and wine—or is that invitation not extended to Ishmael?

I have no way to answer these questions, of course. All any of us can say for sure is that as far as the Biblical narrative is concerned, Ishmael disappears after the funeral. The future belongs to Isaac, and to his son, Jacob, and to his twelve sons. He’s the one whom we are told is “blessed by God.” He’s the one we tell our children and our children’s children about in Sunday School.

I do realize that the narrator’s questions aren’t necessarily mine. And yet there’s no getting around the simple point that Ishmael is there. That the narrator makes a point of telling us he is there—even when it would have been easier to just say: “Abraham died, after a good long life, and he was buried in the cave of Machpelah.” But the narrator tells us that both of Abraham’s sons were there. And then, as so often happens at weddings or funerals when we see long-lost relatives we haven’t seen for years, the narrator turns to us, almost in a whisper, to say: "You remember Ishmael…the one whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s slave-girl, bore to Abraham..."

And then, before the story can continue, before the narrative can move forward to those twins in Rebekah’s womb and to the twelve sons of Jacob who will be called Israel…these twelve sons of Ishmael are named:

…named in the order of their birth: Nebaioth, the firstborn of Ishmael; and Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemeh, by their villages and by their encampments, twelve princes according to their tribes. (This is the length of the life of Ishmael, 137 years of age…[his people] settled from Havilah to Shur, opposite Egypt, in the direction of Assyria.)

You could go to Church your whole life, and if like mine the lectionary has virtually succeeded in replacing the Bible, you will never hear this text read aloud—never hear about all those cousins who settled opposite Egypt, in the direction of Assyria. In fact, it took a journalist named Bruce Feiler, in his remarkable book, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths to get me to even take a look at this text.

Before I traveled here for what has been my last required course for a D.Min from this seminary, I sat one morning and did my best Karl Barth imitation: the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other. On the front page of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette that day were two photographs that I’m sure you all have seen, whether these or ones like them. One was of a group of Palestinians grieving the death of a child killed by the Israeli government. And the other was of a group of Israelis grieving the death of a child killed by a suicide bomber. Grief and fear were so apparent in both pictures, and I could only imagine what it be like to sit down in a room with any of them to plan a funeral.

Once upon a time these photos would have felt very foreign to me. But since 9/11, if is very easy for me to imagine a third photo next to the other two—one taken, perhaps, at Ground Zero on that clear September morning in lower Manhattan. So that the looks on the faces in all three pictures are virtually indistinguishable, all these children of Abraham, separated by fear, and by fundamentalisms of various flavors, and by terrible grief and violence.

After centuries of estrangement from one another do you think these children of Abraham—Christians, Jews and Muslims—will ever find the path to reconciliation? Or will an “eye for an eye” make the whole world blind? Surely the covenant God has made with us in Baptism compels us to be peacemakers—to enter into conversations that may yet lead to forgiveness, and healing, and hope. Surely it matters, now more than ever, how we speak in our congregations, and how we who are pastors (or are training to become pastors) help our congregations to speak.

At a bare minimum, we need to find ways of getting re-acquainted with these long lost cousins, these children of Ishmael who settled “from Havilah to Shur, opposite Egypt, in the direction of Assyria.” One of these “distant cousins” of ours whom I am only beginning to get to know is the 13^th century Sufi mystic, Rumi, who was born in what we would call Afghanistan in 1207. I decided earlier this week to “Google” Rumi—looking for a way to conclude this sermon. Among other things, I found myself “surfing” to a twelfth-century “illumination” on one of those sites dedicated to Rumi. It was an image of “Father Abraham,” and he had all of his children—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—sitting on his “large enough for all” lap. It’s that image of hope that I want to define the kind of Christian I am becoming—not those three photographs of Christians, Jews, and Muslims separated by their fear and their grief.

We gather, in just a few moments, at the Table of our Lord. As we share bread and wine we participate in one of the two sacraments that most uniquely defines us—as “separate from” the rest of the world—that makes us different from Muslims and Jews, a people called to be salt, and light, and yeast. We claim through this sacrament that this Jesus is alive, and here—now, in our very midst. We remember who we are, and whose we are.

And yet—and for me this is one of the great mysteries of our faith—our host is the very One who ate and drank with just about anyone who wanted to come—even the “dogs” who wanted only to gather up the crumbs under the table. He reached out his arms of love not just to the Church, but to the world, that all might come within the reach of his saving embrace. The paradox, I think, is that what makes us most unique is also that which makes us most radically aware that the resurrected Christ cannot be contained by us or by our theologies.

If that is so, then perhaps it is not to dishonor Christ but to claim his truest nature by looking for his face and listening for his voice wherever our travels take us in this mysterious and broken world—even beyond those who claim his name. I offer in that spirit the words of one of our long-lost cousins, the Sufi poet, Rumi, in bidding us to gather and to be fed yet again:

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

It doesn’t matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times.

Come, yet again, come, come.