July 31, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Barrenness and Abundance

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 55:1–9
Genesis 21:1–7
Matthew 14:13–21

Hope is the name of an attitude in which
we dare to commit ourselves to that
which is radically beyond all human control.

Karl Rahner
Theological Investigations

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It is with no small measure of fear and trembling that I come before you this morning to reflect with you on the scriptures we have read during worship. Perhaps that is true each time the preacher enters the pulpit and seeks to engage in a one-way dialogue with the gathered community and to search God’s word for meaning for the community. Today, however, because of the subject and the text I’m going to focus on, I’m a little more nervous. I want to focus today on the story of the birth of Isaac in which we are told in the text that Sarah is an old woman when she gives birth.

From reading around the text we understand Sarah to be infertile, to be barren, as the Bible so harshly puts it. We need to be sensitive because we know people in this family of faith, and I’m sure you know people in your own circles, for whom dealing with infertility has been an important part of their life, some with perhaps happier outcomes from that than others. We also, of course, celebrate people who live in singleness and live full lives without giving birth to a child. So we need to be careful and sensitive when we are reflecting on texts that bring in such situations as this.

Karl Barth, the great German theologian, once said, “The Bible is a strange book,” and perhaps it’s no stranger than here in the stories of the prehistory and ancient history that we have been exploring over these past few weeks during John Buchanan’s sermon series. We are grateful to the matriarchs of scholarship who have, during the twentieth century, helped us to understand something about the context in which these texts were written and interpreted. Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza is one of the greats of feminist biblical scholarship. She writes in an article on interpreting these traditions, “The Hebrew and Christian scriptures originated in a patriarchal society and perpetuated the androcentric (male-centered) traditions of their culture. Today feminist analyses have uncovered the detrimental effects of these traditions on women’s self-understanding and role in society and in the churches. Christians,” she says, “both women and men, consequently face a grave dilemma. On the one hand they seek to remain faithful to the life-giving truth of the biblical revelation and on the other hand they seek to free themselves from all traditions and sexist concepts that hinder their human and Christian liberation.” And so it is in the context of that tension that Schussler-Fiorenza offers that we were engaging in this text this morning.

I thought a helpful way to approach this dilemma might be to use a favorite story of mine from the great sage Anthony de Mello. He imagines a scripture that goes like this: “A farmer owned a goose that laid a golden egg each day. His wife, an avaricious woman, could not resign herself to a single egg a day, so she killed the goose in the hope of getting all the eggs at once. An atheist, hearing this text scoffs, ‘A goose that lays golden eggs; it goes to show the absurdity of your scriptures.’” De Mello also reflects on a religious scholar reading the text who bombastically says, “The Lord revealed the existence of that goose, so it must be true no matter how absurd it seems. Different schools of thought explain it differently; what is called for here is an act of faith” and so on and so on. In the end, de Mello says, “it is better to teach people the evils of avarice than to promote belief in golden eggs.”

And so, to the text. Opening his article in Alter and Kermode’s Literary Guide to the Bible, the Old Testament scholar J. P. Fokkelmann writes this: “Genesis is the first of the thirty-six books of the Old Testament and much in it is used as a basis for, or creatively incorporated into, numerous passages further on in the Bible.” I think that’s good justification for John Buchanan’s frequent exhortations over these past few weeks on the importance of having some biblical literacy of these earliest stories of our faith tradition. So in John’s absence we’ll give him thanks for those exhortations.

John has been looking at many of the stories around the patriarchs—Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. We’re going to take a little step back today and go to the birth of Isaac, or more precisely, what we’re reflecting on is about Sarah giving birth to Isaac. This is an important thread in the whole story that scripture tells of God’s relationship to humanity and of humanity’s relationship to God. And it is fundamental, of course, to the Abrahamic tradition.

I’ve been helped on this journey through scripture by three great reflectors on the Bible: Eli Wiesel, the Nobel prizewinner and Holocaust survivor; Walter Brueggemann, well-known professor and writer of a commentary on Genesis; and a very interesting feminist biblical scholar called Mary Callaway. Eli Wiesel, in one of his lesser-known books, called Wise Men and Their Tales, looks at the Talmud and the Hasidic masters of Judaism and how they add layers of interpretation and deal with the text. One of those he looks at is the story of Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac. “This story is complex” writes Wiesel, and, of course, he’s right. It is complex. Before the birth of Isaac there are a series of stories that are a kind of a mix of how Abraham and Sarah engage in deceit and experience revelation, hear God’s promise and respond in unfaithfulness. There’s a bizarre sexual intrigue in Egypt in which Abraham describes Sarah not as his wife, but as his sister. There is faith in God and scorning of God. So we are faced with a story full of reversals and deceits.

After the birth of Isaac, it doesn’t get any easier. These stories include the harrowing tale of the treatment of Hagar and Ishmael and then the mysterious and complex story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. And yet at the center of all this, the heart of these stories, is the promise of God, the promise that God makes to Abraham that a great nation would be made of Abraham’s descendants and God’s promise to Sarah that she would be the matriarch. This is where we get to the paradox in our theme today, because Sarah, who is promised to be the matriarch, is barren. She’s unable to give Abraham a child. And so this theme, which will come back in cycles and scripture, is presented to us—the theme of the barren matriarch. Sarah, because of her situation, laughs at the promise of a child that God makes to her. That laugh comes back, of course, in our text not as a scornful laugh but a laugh of joy, and indeed there is word play here in the original text because the name Isaac means “he laughs.”

On Sarah’s scornful laugh and disbelief, Brueggemann is sympathetic, for, he says, “faith is not a reasonable act which fits into the normal scheme of life and perception.” He goes on: “The promise of the gospel is not a conventional piece of wisdom that is easily accommodated to everything else.” Then despite Sarah’s response, God is faithful to the promise made. Sarah gives birth, and what Fokkelmann describes as “the problem of continuity,” which her barrenness has caused, is overcome by God’s action. The story can continue because of God’s action in the miraculous birth of Isaac. Brueggemann again helps us to refocus: “The birth of Isaac drives us away from ourselves to total and singular reliance upon the God who is faithful.” So Sarah receives the child and gives birth.

We pull our lens back a bit and focus not just on this particular story but note how this theme of barrenness and abundance and barrenness overcome becomes what the scholars call a trope—a literary device that is used to describe God’s faithfulness to the promises that God makes to God’s people. Remember that in Genesis Sarah is not the only matriarch who suffers from barrenness. The patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—each one’s wife is infertile: Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. It becomes a cycle of the story of the blessing and how the problem to the blessing is overcome.

That theme is reframed in the story of the birth of Samuel, the great prophet who anoints David; Samuel, whose mother, Hannah, is barren and goes to the temple and prays so fervently that Eli, the priest, thinks she’s drunk. When Eli hears her story, he prays that God will bless her as indeed God does. And in this Hannah is prefiguring or looking forward to two central miraculous births in the Christian tradition: Elizabeth—the barren, older Elizabeth—giving birth to John the Baptist and then Mary, her cousin, who, when she gives birth to Jesus, according to Luke, sings a song, the Magnificat, which parallels the song that Hannah sings when God blesses her with the birth of Samuel.

But it’s more than that in scripture. It’s more than just these miraculous events that happen to individuals where this theme is replayed. Mary Callaway, in a very fine article called “Sing, O Barren One,” looks at how in the prophetic tradition of Israel and particularly in the prophet Isaiah this theme of barrenness overcome becomes a message not to an individual but to the whole of God’s people, to the community. Isaiah is the prophet who warns of the coming desolation that will happen to Israel because of Israel’s unfaithfulness, and then in the great words of Isaiah 40, the restoration is promised: “Comfort, comfort you my people, says the Lord.” And then that prophecy that we read together today, the promise of water and of food that upends the economic structures: “Come without money and be filled.” That happens as the climax of the prophecy that begins in Isaiah 54, which at verse 1 goes like this: “Sing, O barren one who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in travail! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord.” And so the prophet is using the tradition of the barren one who gives birth to multiple descendants to articulate the promise of God to God’s own people that, despite the horror and desolation and brokenness of war and conquest and exile, God will restore the people’s fortune, God will bless God’s people. Brueggemann sums this up beautifully in his description of the birth of Isaac: “By God’s powerful word God has broken the grip of death and hopelessness and barrenness.”

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see in the story of the feeding of the 5,000 something of this same promise of a God of abundance in a place of barrenness. The text tells us that the feeding of the 5,000 takes place in a time of particular desolation for Jesus. Jesus has lost John the Baptist and is looking for quiet and solace and prayer, but the people follow him. We’re told that they end up in a deserted place, sometimes translated as a desolate place. And there with so little, Jesus feeds the 5,000. A beautiful poem holds some of this—the feeding of the 5,000. Written by an American poet, a woman called Vassar Miller, the poem’s called “Oblation,” an ancient word for gift.

I kneel
my heart in my hands—
a cold fish,
a stale loaf.

What are
these among so many?
Lord, your business
is to know.

I rise,
my body a shell
heavy with
emptiness.

You whom
worlds cannot contain
not disturbing
one pulse beat.

My bones
being boughs aflame
with thy glory,
Lord, suffices.

A poem about emptiness and fullness. I hear echoes of those lines of Richard Wilbur, which are so relevant I think to this story. He writes

whatsoever love elects to bless
brims to such sweet excess
that can without depletion
overflow.

There is God’s promise to Sarah, to the matriarchs, to Hannah—God’s promise to God’s own people, God’s promise to you and to me and to our world that we will move from barrenness to abundance. So as we hear Eli Wiesel say that when we read the stories of the patriarch and matriarchs “their present is not only our past—it is our present too,” then we can search our hearts and our lives and acknowledge places of desolation and barrenness and brokenness and hear God’s promise that we will be taken to a place of fullness and healing and abundance. As we look around the desolation and barrenness of our world racked by terror and bombs and war, we can still hold on to that hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, the promise of God, and indeed we take the opportunities to celebrate and pray and give thanks when we see inklings of that hope and abundance in our world—perhaps this weekend joining with our brothers and sisters of all Christian traditions in Ireland as they pray and celebrate the hope of peace and goodness and abundance coming to that troubled land.

And so a prayer to end, a prayer that is really a Eucharistic prayer, a prayer for communion. And although we don’t receive the elements of bread and wine in our service this morning, yet the elements of bread and cup are there on the table in front of us to remind us that always when we gather, even when we don’t receive bread and wine, we gather in the context of communion, of community with each other and communion with Christ. A prayer by English writer Kate Compston:

Thank you
scandalous God
for giving yourself to the world
not in the powerful and extraordinary
but in weakness and the familiar:
in a baby, in bread and wine.

Thank you
for offering, at journey’s end, a new beginning;
for setting, in the poverty of a stable,
the richest jewel of your love;
for revealing in a particular place,
your light for all nations.

Thank you
for bringing us to Bethlehem, House of Bread,
where the empty are filled
and the filled are emptied;
where the poor find riches
and the rich recognize their poverty;
where all who kneel and hold out their hands
are unstintingly fed.

And thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ, whom to know is Life abundant and whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church