Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 25, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 86:1–10, 16–17
Genesis 21:8–21

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A few short weeks ago we commissioned folks from Fourth Church who were going on one of our summer trips, including all of the junior high youth and adult leaders sitting down front here who will be leaving right after this service for a week of service in St. Louis. During that commissioning, I offhandedly mentioned that we needed one more adult leader, and within hours of that remark I was approached by six different people offering to go.

I drew two conclusions from this episode. First, I really should announce the need for youth ministry leaders in worship more often. Second (and more importantly), this is a great church filled with people eager to support its young people.

Too many people in this case. The arrangements with our host in St. Louis were already made, and we really could take only one more person. I had to pick. I had to choose. And then I had to call five people to tell them, “Thank you, but you weren’t picked.”

That part stinks. People were gracious and understanding, of course, but still, not being picked stinks. And it happens all the time; we are not picked far more often than we are picked. The odds are stacked against us: hundreds of applicants for a single job means you’re not likely, at the outset, to be hired. Sixty-one thousand two hundred twenty-one high school seniors applied to Harvard last year. One thousand nine hundred eighty-four were admitted. Ninety-seven percent of hopeful high schoolers weren’t picked.

None of the comments I have submitted to the YouTube videos of various fountain pen channels have yet been picked to win a pen giveaway. None of them ever will, probably. I get the math, but I’m still disappointed. It stinks to not be picked.

Most of the time we don’t get picked.

Call us Ishmael, because Ishmael didn’t get picked either. Ishmael, son of Hagar the Egyptian, is not the chosen child. His younger half-brother Isaac is chosen instead of him. Ishmael’s role in the story is the one who wasn’t chosen, and the story is entirely about being chosen.

This story starts in Genesis 12 when God plucks a childless couple, Abram and Sarai, out of obscurity and promises to make them a great nation, to bless them and to bless all the families of the earth through them. And from that point the rest of the biblical story is about this people, the people God picked, how God promised them a land; how God delivered them from bondage in Egypt and gave them a law, a way of life, to live by; how God brought them into their promised land; how God sent prophets to them; how God accompanied them in exile and then led them home again.

The Bible is the story of the picked people — all of it. Even through Jesus, because Jesus comes with a genealogy of the chosen. He says that his primary mission is to his fellow picked people. The early church, then, is made up entirely of those people, that is until some non-picked people find their way in, and guess what? They’re picked too! Their pastor, the Apostle Paul, writes some of them a letter in Galatians and rehashes this same story, the story of Sarah and Hagar, and he tells them, “You, my friends, are children of the promise like Isaac.”

Ishmael, according to this, is not.

We might regard this distinction with scorn. Isaac and Ishmael, children of the promise and children of the flesh, picked and not picked? Seems kind of arrogant.

But the promise of God doesn’t operate on human criteria.

The child of the promise is a miracle. Isaac shouldn’t be. He’s an impossibility, the punchline to a joke his geriatric parents used to laugh at. Abraham and Sarah, from the time they are introduced in the story, are defined by two main characteristics: they are old, and they are childless, which in a society like theirs is a curse. And it’s worse for Sarah than for Abraham, because the story sees fit to explain it to us like this: not that “they don’t have children,” but that she is barren. She has no child.

Abraham and Sarah are not the people you pick to found a people.

And yet here is Isaac, as real as the nose on his mother’s face: promised as security for his parents’ future and the future of a family of descendants they can’t even imagine, more numerous than the stars of the sky. Promised and then promised again and then (check watch) promised again.

Yes, here is Isaac, fully weaned and everything. It’s hilarious.

His name actually means “laughter,” because at his birth his mother said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

Isaac, you see, is the fulfillment of God’s promise that weeping may last for the night but joy comes in the morning; that those who mourn are blessed, because they will be comforted; that the Lord does not see as mortals see, who look on the outward appearance; that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Isaac is all the sign we need that the grass may wither and the flower may fade but the word of our God will stand forever, amen?

Isaac is a sign of God’s promise, and this promise is for you, for your children, and your children’s children. The promise of God doesn’t pick whom we would pick; it is for all of those whom no one picks or even pays attention to — the overlooked, the passed over, the laughed at, the put off and put out; the ones without health insurance or an inheritance or a 401(k) or a house to hand down to their own kids; the ones with more regrets than degrees and who doubt more days than they believe.

The promise is for the people who can only laugh at it, can only laugh at being found in a church of all places, wretches who were lost but have been found.

Yes, the promise is for you. You, my friends, are children of the promise.

The best thing about this promise is that it’s free. You don’t have to deserve it or earn it or qualify or get preapproved for it. It’s a gift. It’s free.

But it’s not cheap. There’s a difference. Sarah knows deep in her soul what this promise is worth. So she will cling to it with her life. She will resist anyone who might threaten her Isaac’s inheritance.

Ishmael is not a child of promise according to Galatians, again, but a child of “the flesh.” Ishmael is born of Sarah’s scheming, her hedge against the ridiculousness of the promise that she would have her own child, at her age. When she’d heard enough of promises without any actual results, she took matters into her own hands and told Abraham to marry her servant, the Egyptian named Hagar, and to produce an heir through her.

What must it have cost Sarah to suggest that? For Abraham to agree to it without a word? When it actually worked? What it must have cost Sarah to watch her handmaid prepare a nursery for her husband’s child? It cost more than Sarah wanted to pay; she turned on Abraham, who threw Hagar under the bus just as quickly as he’d agreed to marry her, and then Sarah really let Hagar have it. It was so bad Hagar ran away.

That outcome probably would have suited Sarah, but Hagar came back. Hagar came back and Ishmael was born and Sarah kept waiting. Well, now her wait is over, and she’s going to make sure her servant and his son stay gone for good.

It’s the laughter that sets her off. Did you catch that? Sarah sees Ishmael laughing, and in response she demands Abraham send him and his mother packing. Some ancient rabbis speculated that Ishmael laughed in mockery at Isaac, or that he laughed at the banquet guests, questioning why they were celebrating at all, since he was Abraham’s firstborn and so the inheritance was his. But the story doesn’t say anything like that. It only says that Sarah saw Hagar’s son laughing.

And to Sarah, that laughter sounds like a threat. Her vision of God’s promise only has room for one. Ishmael doesn’t fit in the vision of the “traditional” family Sarah was promised, so she kicks Ishmael — and his mother — out of the house. Ishmael is a teenager (despite the story’s mention of a shoulder sling, the math of the story suggests that he is about seventeen years old when Sarah kicks him out).

Here on the last Sunday of June, Pride Month around the world and here at Fourth Church, we know very well that the experience of being kicked out of a family because you don’t fit someone else’s vision of what a family is and should look like is one many LGBTQ teenagers are still having.

Last year the Trevor Project released research that showed that LGBTQ youth are “overrepresented among young people experiencing homelessness and housing instability in the United States.” Twenty-eight percent of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives, 35 percent among transgender and nonbinary youth. Fourteen percent of those youth reported that they were kicked out or abandoned, and 40 percent of those said that was because of their LGBTQ identity.

These are more than statistics. They’re stories. This may be your story, or the story of someone you know and love. Maybe it’s not a story of being kicked out of their house. Maybe it’s a story of hiding until it was safe to come out. It may be a story of family who wouldn’t come to the wedding and don’t want to visit. It may be a story of harassment and discrimination and threats, even violence.

Your story belongs here, just as Ishmael’s story belongs here. The church’s story is not complete without the stories of LGBTQ persons, just as the story of Abraham and Sarah and their promised child is not complete without the story of Ishmael.

Several members of our church are at the Pride parade this morning, wearing matching T-Shirts, led by Pastors Nancy and Nanette. They’re there to share a fuller story of God’s welcome of all people.

Somebody they might run into in the parade is Sarah Cunningham, who will be marching with her organization Free Mom Hugs. My wife and daughter marched with them in the 2019 parade. Free Mom Hugs is what a fuller vision of God’s promise for all people looks like in action.

In 2015, Sarah, whose son came out to her as a teenager, attended a Pride festival wearing a homemade button that read “Free Mom Hugs,” and she just stood on the street with her arms out offering anyone a hug who wanted one. One young woman told her she hadn’t been hugged by her mother in four years. So Free Mom Hugs went from being a button to being an organization.

Then in 2018 she posted this to Facebook: “PSA. If you need a mom to attend your same-sex wedding because your biological mom won’t, call me. I’m there. I’ll be your biggest fan. I’ll even bring the bubbles.” People took her seriously, and she found herself not only standing with people at their weddings but also officiating them. She recruited others to join her. In addition to attending weddings, people started sending wedding gifts and care packages (that’s how Meredith got involved).

Sarah wants people to know that they are treasured — that even though who they are might not fit in somebody else’s vision of family, they most certainly fit in God’s.

God’s vision for God’s family includes Ishmael and Hagar. There is still a promise for them. There always has been.

“Laughter” is the meaning of Isaac’s name. Ishmael’s name has a meaning too. It means “God hears.” And so God hears Ishmael and Hagar in the desert, in the same way that God will hear the descendants of Ishmael’s brother during their desert ordeal in Egypt. And in the same way that God will be with the “picked” people through the exodus and exile and everything else, God will be with and will remain with Ishmael and Hagar and their descendants.

The story is not complete without them.

“For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind” is how our hymn will put it. Indeed, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.” That mercy is so wide and so expansive as to be hilarious. As we sing it, we should be laughing, laughing that that mercy includes all of us, those of us here in the sanctuary and those of us worshiping online; those of us just joining the congregation today, and those of us who have been here for many years.

We, friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac. Like Isaac, and like, so, so, many more, like Ishmael.

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church