Proper 7 A

Genesis 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39.

This is Refugee Week. Sarah, jealous for Isaac of Abraham’s son by the Egyptian slave Hagar, demands that Hagar and the child be banished. Abraham obeys, even while he is full of regret. In Islamic tradition, all this comes as a command from God, not Sarah, by the way. Hagar and her son Ishmael (Ismael in Arabic) go out into the wilderness of Be’er Sheva to die.

One agenda excludes another. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t come bringing peace, but conflict. His agenda must have priority, and so it is with the promise to Abraham and Sarah. So the story of Hagar’s exile informs not only the stories told by the many displaced people seeking asylum in our world today and their vulnerability. It also informs what is perhaps the primary conflict of our time, the conflict between the sons of Abraham, the Jewish/Christian community and the Moslem East. Ismael is the father of the Arabs.

The story is concrete and contemporary. I thought of Ismael’s exile the other day when I was speaking with an Iraqi man we know, a failed asylum seeker living in destitution, shunned by the people he is living among because his story is not their story. When he came to this country nine years ago asylum seekers were allowed to work, and he had landed a job with Royal Mail working in a local post office. But then the immigration authorities changed the rules. He was no longer allowed to work, and had to live instead on the meagre allowance given to those who were seeking asylum. But even that support has been exhausted, and as he awaits an appeal of his failed petition, he lives off the good will of friends and acquaintances, the Refugee Council and our church. I thought he was beginning to look quite emaciated. We arranged to give him a lift to Birmingham, where someone he knows may have a place for him to live as he awaits the appeal. We gave him a fiver—all we had—and he wept. Here is the living Ismael, exiled to the wilderness because there is no room for his story in the mainstream story the rest of us were living by.

The meaning of the Genesis story is that God’s concerns are always bigger than ours. No matter how you interpret the inheritance of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it’s still a tribal thing, a story that excludes, something by nature partial and incomplete. The author of what we are reading is deeply aware of this, and shows God’s care for the excluded. God brings water to the wilderness for Hagar and her son, and promises that the child will become the father of a great nation. There is a tension between tribalism and universalism here that runs like a bright thread throughout Israel’s troubled history. Israel’s literature is acutely aware of the larger narrative, and acutely aware of its own ambivalent position (even though the same cannot always be said about the Zionist ideology of Israel as a modern state). Today at a conference called "Fear, Democracy and Religion" (the third in a series here in Wales bringing Christian and Muslim leaders together in dialogue), Robin Morrison, Church and Society advisor for the Church in Wales (Anglican), said "My trust in God ends when I think I can erect the boundaries of my faith and police them." My trust needs to be in a God that is bigger than anything I believe. If I erect doctrinal limits to God, I am in sin. And yet I cannot avoid speaking of God in language that is limited and culture specific. The Abraham and Hagar story teaches us the pain of this paradox.

The gospel reading from Matthew 10 provides profound commentary on this Genesis story. This conclusion to the discourse on sending the twelve brings home the central good news in Matthew that the sending of the twelve into the world parallels the sending of Christ into the world, a mission to those in peril by one who himself began life as a refugee, a mission to the lost, the harassed, to those whose spirits have been crushed, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The concern is no longer tribal. It reaches back to Israel’s incipient self-critical universalism to become a mission to “the ends of the earth”, with a God that is the God of both Isaac and Ismael.

We recall last week’s reading, in which Jesus (the Lamb of God) sees his own harassed people as sheep without a shepherd, and sends the twelve to them as sheep among the sheep, as lambs as vulnerable to the menace of the wolves as those they are sent to. Jesus himself has pioneered the way, “numbered among the transgressors”, as Isaiah said. The twelve should not think of themselves as immune from the kind of suffering Jesus endured. Those who read the Gospel of Matthew already know the basic story, of course, and here the cross is mentioned for the first time in this gospel. The path of discipleship is the way of the cross. If Jesus was called the devil incarnate, they will be, too. It’s no easy street, but Jesus says don’t let them get to you. Peacemakers must learn to immerse themselves in the conflict their vision of justice for the dispossessed generates among those wed to the status quo. No truth worth telling is without conflict, and it must be spoken openly and courageously.

The mystery behind the sending of the twelve as unprotected lambs in the midst of such conflict is the mystery of the incarnation itself. What the incarnation attempts to teach through symbolic narrative, “myth”, if you will, is just this sense of being “sent” into a world of conflict, born into a world where Herod’s soldiers are out to get you, or, as Luke would have it, where there is no hospitality at the inn. The incarnation is a metaphor of our own vocation as disciples to put flesh on the Word of God through action and engagement among the excluded. The mission to the “ends of the earth” undertaken at the end of this gospel is not to be understood as expansionist empire building in the way monotheistic religions can too often operate, as if all the values pursued throughout this gospel were suddenly thrown away at the end, but a going out in solidarity with the lost sheep and with those like Ismael who find themselves in exile, or to those who are crushed in spirit, those who mourn, the anawim of the Beatitudes. This is the way of the cross, the new life into which we who have died with Christ are reborn in our baptism.