Healing the Family Tree (Genesis 21:1-20)

A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

June 30, 2008

The roots of our family tree go deep into the history of humanity living on this earth. The roots of our family tree reach back to that moment when God spoke to our ancestors in the faith, Abraham and Sarah and promised them a child. God promised that from this child would come a great people as numerous as the sands of the desert or the stars in the sky; and through this child all the world would be blessed. But the promise had been unfulfilled and the husband and wife well advanced in age were long past the time of bearing a child. And Sarah’s hope that she would bear a child, turned to desperation. She looked upon Hagar the comely Egyptian slave woman and the scheme was hatched. She would offer Hagar to Abraham and Hagar would bear the child that Sarah could not. Abraham the father of our faith was not always the most admirable of characters, a classical biblical hero with feet of clay. So the deed is done and Hagar has a baby and his name is Ishmael. But somehow the birth of a son has not brought to Sarah the peace and fulfillment she sought. Scripture suggests that all it took was a glance passing between Sarah and Hagar to plant a seed of jealousy that would bear the bitter fruit of betrayal, estrangement and finally abandonment. Not once but twice in the biblical narrative, Sarah causes Hagar and Ishmael to be cast out of the family and abandoned in the wilderness. But the God of Abraham and Sarah was also the God of Hagar and Ishmael, a God who heard their cries and is moved with compassion to save them. The founding story of God’s people is the story of a family rent in two. The narrative of one family becomes two fractured narratives, forever distinct, but interwoven. For you see, god was faithful to the promise made to  Abraham and Sarah and eventually they have a son named Isaac and God makes a new promise to Hagar and Ishmael that from them God will create a great people as well. This story expresses in mythological terms a great turning point in human history when one people became two. At this turning point, the Jews, descendants of Isaac went one way and Muslims; the descendants of Ishmael went another. And to heal the brokenness of the human family, to heal the family tree we begin with this story.

I do consider myself to be a student of the Bible. But until I went to the Holy Land I had not yet discovered even noticed this text in Genesis 21. My fellow Presbyterians on this pilgrimage teased me mercilessly about my new found obsession with the story of Hagar and Ishmael and how I never passed up an opportunity to talk about what meaning it has in the world of Islam.  We were fortunate to have conversations with two different Imams who were willing to talk about this story.  One of the Imams was from the Palestinian town of Nablus. I mentioned him to you a couple of weeks ago because his daughter had investigated the killing of a Palestinian boy at an Israeli security checkpoint. He was an older man, very austere and formal who at first did not make much eye contact. From him and from other Muslims we learned that according to Islamic tradition, Abraham continued to love Hagar and Ishmael and remained in relationship to them.  One legend has it that Abraham spent his days with Hagar and his nights with Sarah. But a core belief in Islam is that the son Abraham placed on the altar of sacrifice was not Isaac as Jews and Christians believe, but Ishmael. Muslims also believe that their Holy city of Mecca is located at the very place where Ishmael discovered the spring of water in the desert that saved his life. Islam also believes that Abraham and Ishmael together built the first mosque in Mecca. Our conversation with the Imam had reached the place where we were invited to ask questions. And I said to him: This story of Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represents a painful break in the story of God’s people. How do we heal the family tree? Then the Imam turned and looked me square in the eye and said that is exactly what I think is our challenge. And that is how I have spoken of it at interfaith gatherings around the world.  Something about the eye contact and the softening of this Holy man made me feel that a connection had been made and that we had tapped into an image that would help us as Muslims, Jews and Christians to do the healing work that we need to do. Part of the way that we are called to heal the family tree is to learn about our differences but also as branches on the family tree to recognize that we have a common trunk. Muslims, Jews and Christians have much more in common than we may suppose. To use a different metaphor than the family tree, if the three religious traditions were circles they would clearly be overlapping circles. And what lies between all three circles, what stands as the trunk of the tree, is our faith in the One God, the God of Abraham who is calling into a being a great people who will bless the world.

How do we heal the family tree? Understanding and respecting our differences and claiming our commonality can position us to go further in the work of healing. Here and there healing of the family tree can happen in moments of gracious, prayerful communion.  Throughout our time in Palestine we grew accustomed to hearing what is called the muezzin, the Muslim leader who summoned all faithful Muslims to prayer. This call to prayer is sounded over a loud speaker at different hours of the day.  A Muslim told one of the members of our delegation that Islam got this call to prayer from Christianity, the ancient Christian practice of the prayers of the hours. Once while in Bethlehem the Muslim call to prayer was sounded and in the public square opposite the church of the Nativity hundreds of Muslims knelt in long lines to say their prayers together. I was struck both by the acting out the prayer with their bodies and by the power of their collective witness. Doing their prayers in unison seemed to me to be a good antidote to Western individualism.  I remember late one night in Bethlehem while staying with my Palestinian family I was lying in bed reading Karen Armstrong’s history of god by flashlight.  Just then the Muslim call to prayer sounded across the city. I laid my book on my chest closed my eyes and allowed the chant to wash over me. The prayer chant in the Arabic language with its beautiful intonations and its swerving half notes seemed to dissolve my soul in utter surrender to God. A few minutes later when the prayer chant was finished I realized that I had been in a deep moment of prayer. I picked up my book again and literally read these words from Karen Armstrong. The Koran, the Holy book of Islam is not so much something to be read as it is spoken word to be heard. Muslim faithful will testify that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound.

We heal the family tree by learning about our differences and our common ground. We heal the family tree when we are given moments of communion.  But healing the family tree will require us to face great traumas that have occurred. Each of us knows this truth about families. There is much healing work that needs to be done in the story of any family. The Bible has offered us an insight that has been confirmed over and over again by psychology and family systems theory. That blessings and curses, goodness and trauma alike can be passed down from generation to generation. We are beneficiaries of so much good that has been passed down to us from previous generations. But sometimes we are recipients of the hurt, and pain and even abuse and trauma of previous generations that also gets passed down as well. Each generation has the challenge and opportunity to interrupt the cycles of violence that ripple from one generation to another and to heal the family tree.  And what is true of our individual families is true of the entire human family. Whole peoples have experienced traumas that if not healed will continue to ripple down through time in destructive ways. Certainly the Jews have experienced those traumas at an almost incomprehensible level. Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed over 20 times. The destruction of the temple is still mourned at the Wailing Wall. And of course there is the holocaust. Ever since I was a child I have been deeply gripped by the story of the Holocaust, horrified that human beings were capable of doing such evil to other human beings. And I have long felt that the Christian church bears exceptional responsibility for the Holocaust because Christianity has allowed a vicious strain of Anti-Semitism to exist throughout our history.  All of this filled my heart and mind as we went to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem to bear witness to this great wound in our family tree. More and more, I am coming to the realization that Israel as a nation and that much of Judaism around the world are living out this still unhealed trauma of the Holocaust. We could call it a kind of collective post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Surely Christians and Jews must stand forever as allies to make sure that never again can a holocaust happen to the Jews or to anyone. But tragically, I believe that Jews are acting out the Holocaust trauma in destructive ways that replicate the kind of oppression that they once experienced under the Nazi’s. I was reminded of that terrible maxim of history, that todays oppressed become tomorrow’s oppressors when I saw graffiti written on the wall that split in half a Palestinian village. The graffiti said, “Welcome to the Warsaw ghetto”.   Christians must accept responsibility for the Holocaust by reaching out in friendship to Jews. And by combating any sign of Anti-Semitism. And we must pray for the healing that only God can make happen. We cannot allow the memory of the Holocaust to be invoked by some Israeli’s as justification for whatever they wish to do to the Palestinians. And we cannot allow any criticism of Israel to be dismissed as Anti-Semitism. If we allow this to happen the trauma of the Holocaust will continue to be passed on down to new innocent victims.  

You see the Palestinians also have their traumas to deal with. Going back to the roots of the family tree, the memory of the crusades is still visceral. I watched a documentary on the 3 Christian crusades this past week which by the way, unleashed a holy war not just against Arabs but against Jews as well. And a Muslim scholar said that Arabs today still talk about the crusades as if they happened yesterday. And of course there is the trauma that really did happen only yesterday- 1948. The Nakba or catastrophe. You see how these narratives came together while we were there.  Israel was celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948.  But along side of Israel’s anniversary celebrations, there was a parallel commemoration being carried out by the Palestinians that was an occasion of mourning for Palestinians as they remembered 1948 as the "naqba", the catastrophe that dispossessed them of their land, destroyed countless villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. These two competing and conflicting narratives, the narrative celebrated in the 60 anniversary of the Jewish state, and the naqba, or catastrophe for Palestinians became the central parable of our whole time in Israel –Palestine.  And these two narratives are locked in a deadly struggle that threatens both with mutually assured destruction. For Israel –Palestine to have a future, there must be mutual respect for each narrative, for the traumas that each have experienced. And out of the conflict of two narratives must come one narrative of peaceful coexistence, one narrative of two people living together in peace and in equality.  

last week I mentioned one story of hope that in fact these two narratives were becoming one; that of Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost children to the conflict who are coming together to find healing for themselves for their families and for their nation by telling their stories and working for peace. I want to tell you another story of hope that we encountered.  We met with an organization called Musalaha which in Arabic means reconciliation. This organization works on a variety of fronts for reconciliation between Palestinians and Jews. Musalaha understands that there is well founded mistrust on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Both sides can produce a long list of failed promises and violations of previous agreements. There exists a vicious cycle of breaking faith and responding in kind that only continues the conflict and violence. No matter how well founded the mistrust may be, there will be no forward movement toward peace without some ability to trust the other. Emotionally and spiritually mistrust is difficult to overcome. In order to begin trusting someone you don’t trust you have to put in hard work at relationship building, through communication and understanding. Musalaha approaches this task of reconciliation through a ministry of Desert Trips for Palestinian and Israeli youth. In the neutral environment of the desert, these young people are alone with each other and with God.  There in the desert Israeli and Palestinian young people to learn about each other’s stories.  It is in such small, seemingly insignificant initiatives of reconciliation that a new narrative of peace is being constructed. All well and good you might say but on such a small scale: How can this ever bring peace to Israel –Palestine? I wondered the same thing. But is this not the way God works in human history? The One God, the Sovereign God of the universe and of all nations, the God who works in human history on a scale that we cannot even imagine is also the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Hagar and Ishmael the God who works at the microscopic level within individuals and with families, bringing about reconciliation and peace. 

This is the God we believe in, the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Hagar and Ishmael, the unseen Author of the human story who is always behind the scenes bringing about healing, reconciliation and peace. This elusive surprising God drops signs of grace in human history and leaves clues in our sacred stories. There is one such sign or clue in Genesis 25 that recounts the death of Abraham. It’s says 25:8 Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron,  east of the great Oak of  Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried with his wife Sarah. It’s a throwaway line and a footnote that could easily escape notice. Two brothers Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury  their father Abraham. Is it reading too much into the text to wonder if some kind of reconciliation might have taken place that two sons could come together to honor their father in death? Except this God of ours is always hidden, behind the scenes working reconciliation where there is estrangement.  Last week I shared with you stories of the terrible violence that is going on in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Hebron, older than Jerusalem is sacred to both Jews and Muslims as the burial place of Abraham, the spiritual father of Jews, Christians and Muslims. The ancient Mosque in Hebron not only has the tombs of Abraham but Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca and in an adjoining synagogue there are the tombs of  Jacob and Rachel. We heard that the Muslim call to prayer that day in Hebron but we arrived at the mosque after most of the Muslim worshippers had returned to daily life.  As the place between the tombs of the patriarchs was almost empty I knelt down and placed my face on the prayer rug and prayed. I prayed that I might truly surrender my life to the One God.  I prayed that healing will come to the great family tree all the children of Abraham might be reconciled. And I prayed to the One God that we might surrender ourselves to our true calling to be a great people through which the world will be blessed.  The God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Hagar and Ishmael, the One God, Holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims is still in history creating a great people whose destiny is to be a blessing to the world.