Hagar

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

 

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

June 25, 2023

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

 

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement:

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

Rejoice! God’s love is poured out for you!

How awesome is God who showers us with love!

This is a day of celebration!

Let’s celebrate God’s mighty healing love.

It’s time to worship!

We are ready! AMEN.

*Hymn               Great Is Thy Faithfulness #140

Prayer of Confession:

Forgiving and gracious Lord, we come here this day with so many things on our hearts. We’ve managed to get through spring and are heading toward the complexities of the summer months. These months for many will be times of transition; children graduating from school and heading out into the world; young people getting married; families planning vacations; some people planning retirement. For others the transitions may be from healthy living to lives filled with illness and pain. We confess that we haven’t always paid attention to these transitions, unaware of the spiritual and emotional adjustments that they require of those in the process. Forgive us when we get so busy with our own lives that we don’t take time to reach out to someone who is ill; someone who is mourning the loss of a loved one; someone who feels lost and alone. Remind us again of how Christ offered his whole life that we might live. He taught us how to be people of compassion and reconciliation. Be with us as we seek to turn our lives around, back toward you, O Lord; for it is in Jesus’ Name that we offer this prayer. AMEN.

Assurance:

Dear friends, listen to the good news! Christ came to give us new life; to redeem and heal our brokenness. We are made whole through his boundless love. AMEN.

Scripture Reading Genesis 21: 8-21

Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away

8 The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac.[a] 10 So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” 11 The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. 12 But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. 13 As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” 14 So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17 And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. 18 Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19 Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

20 God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. 21 He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

Sermon   Hagar

Friends, today we’re picking up shortly after we left off two weeks ago, in Abram’s journey, and God telling him that he will have so many descendants that they will be more numerous than the stars in the sky.

We’re skipping forward a few chapters, and a lot has changed for him since that first conversation with God. His name has been changed from Abram to Abraham. His wife’s name has been changed from Sarai to Sarah. Abraham, Sarah, Abraham’s nephew Lot, and Lot’s wife and two daughters, continued on their travels to Canaan. They passed through the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and far too much happens there to summarize here, but, suffice it to say, Lot left without a wife but with a lifetime supply of salt, and proved to be just about the worst dad ever when he took in two angels as house guests, the men of the town threatened to assault the angels, and Lot begged them to assault his young daughters instead. For the cities’ sins of violence–not something else guys, violence–God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and his two daughters went on, while Lot’s wife couldn’t resist rubber necking, and became a condiment because of it. Remember this lesson about how rubber necking destroys you, because it will be relevant again in a bit.

The rest of this extended family survived Sodom and Gomorroh, but since then have continued to make rather terrible choices, especially toward the women in their midst. Despite God repeating the Divine promise, that Abraham and Sarah will have many children, Sarah in particular becomes inpatient and downright angry, and decides to take matters into her own hands. For her, this means taking advantage of a law at the time that allows her to make her slave, Hagar, sleep with Abraham so that Sarah can claim any resulting children as her own. I can’t overemphasize how much this dehumanizes Hagar, who is nothing but a set of young and healthy organs to Sarah. Have you read The Handmaid’s Tale? That’s what’s going on here. Straight up dystopian. Hagar has a son by Abraham, his first, and his name is Ishmael.

Turns out God was in no way lying when the Divine proclaimed Abraham would have children *with Sarah*, and in the next chapter that happens, too. Sarah gives birth to a healthy son and names him Isaac. Once Sarah has a biological child, she drops any pretense of being Ishmael’s mom like a hot potato.

She doesn’t drop her anger though, or her jealousy. Ishmael and Isaac, not far apart in age, start growing up together in the same household. They’re just little guys, and haven’t learned any of their parents’ hostility. Sarah sees them happily playing together, and rather than being touched by that scene, becomes enraged. In her logic if Ishmael sticks around, he could become Abraham’s heir, so Sarah demands that Abraham kick out Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham shows a faint glimmer of morality for a second and questions if sending Hagar and Ishmael to go fend for themselves in the wilderness is really the right thing to do. But God steps in, maybe knowing that this is Hagar’s only chance to find freedom in a world that would otherwise never give it to her, and tells Abraham, “let her go, I’ll take care of her.” Was God really silent this whole time on this practice of slavery? Or was God screaming at Abraham, and Abraham just finally opened his ears for a moment? There’s a message in the Bible, and a piece of God’s character, that I struggle with. And it’s this reality that God is capable of loving both Sarah and Hagar. God can manage to still find a few ounces of usable good in this story. It’s a bigger love than I know.

Hagar and Ishmael set out alone, and Hagar, realistically, believes they are doomed. They’re in the desert, they can’t go back home, there’s no settled land anywhere near them, and the meager rations they carried by hand will run out very soon. Hagar sits down and sobs, and hopes she won’t have to watch Ishmael die.

What happens next is the work of the God we know, who creates a well in the desert, saves Hagar and Ishmael, and plans as bright a future for Ishmael as Isaac will eventually have. This is unsurprising, it’s the Good News we expect and rely on from the Divine.

What should have surprised us is the thing we’ve protected our brains by becoming numb to. Abraham, Sarah, and Lot, and their total comfort with slavery and sexual violence. Their total self-centeredness, and their desire to succeed at any cost. Unfortunately, this is the face of human greed. The Bible is an anthology of stories about people so real it hurts, and the good, bad, and downright ugly of their journey with God. They’re our ancestors in the faith, but we don’t have to support their actions. Instead, we can learn from their mistakes. Those lessons are a gift from our ancestors.

Perhaps the greatest way we can learn to do better is to stop turning blind eyes to the Hagars among us. It’s hard, because most of our stories are told from the perspectives of the Abrahams and the Sarahs. I was reminded this week of an African proverb that says “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” Our brains have been taught to pay real close attention to the stories of the rich, the white, the men, the able bodied, the free. We struggle so much to resist the pull of those stories that this last week we all sat through a days long unfolding news drama about five wealthy, white people who paid a quarter million dollars a piece to take a hastily built submersible in international waters to view the wreck of the Titanic. When they stopped communicating with their friends on land we spent incalculable amounts of time and money on their rescue, watching the ticking clock as they would eventually run out of oxygen. Tragically, they died shortly after they went off the grid, likely because their craft failed to withstand the water pressure of the ocean and imploded. I want to be very clear, these are five lost lives, and it was completely right to worry for them, value their lives, try to save them, and mourn them. What I was troubled by was the disproportionate amount of attention we gave them, and our rubber necking. Remember Lot’s wife? Even when we couldn’t help, and we knew that, this disaster was like a train wreck, or a burning village, and we couldn’t look away, even if it made our souls salty. The jokes I’ve seen pop up on social media confirm that human nature is as capable of darkness as it has ever been. Meanwhile, I had to dig to find any news coverage of a much deadlier ocean disaster that happened just over a week ago, off the coast of Greece, when a ship holding more than 750 migrants headed for Italy capsized, likely due to inappropriate actions by the coast guard. The migrants on board were overcrowded, had run out of food and water, and were succumbing to exhaustion and dehydration before they were thrown overboard. To date, just over a hundred of the migrants have been rescued from the sea. They were Hagar and Ishmael, migrants fleeing a hostile homeland, running out of rations, coming face to face with doom, and going unheard while online views of the 1997 movie Titanic spiked. 

God is screaming. We care, and often a whole lot, but about the wrong things. Can we stop rubber necking at what we can’t help long enough to turn our eyes where God wants them to be? The hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the stranger are out there, the Hagars and their children. And they need us.

Amen.

*Hymn I Need Thee Every Hour

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Listening God,

Hear our prayers as we come before you.

Hear the ones who are crying with pain in their heart.

Hear the ones who are weeping with grief long into the night.

Hear the ones who are sobbing in their loneliness.

Loving God,

Heal their pain.

Restore their lives

Mend their broken hearts.

Leading God,

Lead us through the dark valleys.

Lead us through troublesome times.

Lead us to our home with you.

Teach us to listen to your voice,

That we may hear the cry of the needy and respond.

Teach us to love that

We may offer care that brings others to you for healing.

Teach us to lead,

With your vision so that we not lead others blindly through life.

Through your son who taught us to pray:

~ written by Rev Abi, and posted on Rev Abi’s Long and Winding Road blog. http://vicarofwadley.blogspot.ca/

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                                    The Summons                                  #2130

Benediction

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant