There was a catch, though. BBT said that she got invited to preach at lots and lots of places but almost no one ever invited her to come and preside at the Eucharist. So she said, "you preach, I'll celebrate." Yikes! Oh yeah, and Walter Brueggemann sat in the front row. It was pretty intimidating.
Anyway, it was less than two years after 9/11 and I was thinking a lot (as I still do) about deepening relationships and mutual understanding among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Even though we were Episcopalians leading worship, I broke free from the lectionary that day... These many years later, I offer this sermon without editing it - as a "bonus" post to follow on yesterday's post about Hagar and Ishmael. I do still feel that story-line is worth pursing in interfaith conversations.
Genesis 25:7-23
7 This is the
length of Abraham's life, one hundred seventy-five years. 8Abraham
breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and
was gathered to his people. 9His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried
him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite,
east of Mamre, 10the field that Abraham purchased from the
Hittites. There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah. 11After
the death of Abraham God blessed his son Isaac. And Isaac settled at Beer-lahai-roi.
12 These are the descendants of
Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's slave-girl, bore to
Abraham. 13These are the names of the sons of Ishmael, named in
the order of their birth: Nebaioth, the firstborn of Ishmael; and Kedar,
Adbeel, Mibsam, 14Mishma, Dumah, Massa, 15Hadad,
Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. 16These are the sons of
Ishmael and these are their names, by their villages and by their encampments,
twelve princes according to their tribes. 17(This is the length
of the life of Ishmael, one hundred thirty-seven years; he breathed his last
and died, and was gathered to his people.) 18They settled from
Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria; he
settled down alongside of all his people.
19 These are the descendants of
Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, 20and
Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the
Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. 21Isaac
prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted
his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. 22The children
struggled together within her; and she said, "If it is to be this way, why
do I live?" So she
went to inquire of the LORD. 23And the LORD said to her,
"Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger."
One of the most powerful 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 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 might
know us best. It is an amazing privilege to be present in those moments.
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
to me. I won't say it happens often. But it happens.
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 that we (and certainly 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 and 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 who was larger than
life, this man who staked his life on the Voice. (If you think it’s hard to be
a “PK,” just imagine what it would have been like to be Abraham’s kid!)
I find myself looking for a simple 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 insists on telling 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.
Yes. How could we forget?
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:
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. You will 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 take a closer 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” indeed make this 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 13th
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, an image beyond the terror of those 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. It makes us different from Muslims and Jews, a people
called to be salt, and light, and yeast to the world by Jesus the Christ. We claim through this sacrament that
this same Jesus is alive, and here; now, in our very midst. We remember who we are,
and whose we are when we take and bless and break and share the one bread, and the one cup.
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 whole world, that everyone 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.
Ours is most definitely not
a “caravan of despair.” Thanks be to God!
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