The first Sunday I was here I told you not to believe everything I say, and last Sunday I told you that Abraham and Sarah came from Turkey. At least twenty people told me I was wrong.  That means that some of you are actually looking at your Bibles.  Abraham and Sarah weren’t from Turkey; they were from the land of Iraq. Now that we’ve got that straight, you can listen to my sermon for today.  At least I know you’re listening.

One of the interesting things about us is that we have a strong desire to have control of our lives. We get very uncomfortable if we think we have lost that control. We also think that we can look into the future, that we can plan prudently for our future, and that our future is in our hands. We want to think that we have control of the future. But life isn’t like that.  I can tell you after twenty some years of being a pastor, I often run into people who don’t have a really strong faith. When life throws them something that they are unable to control, they get angry with God. They think it is God’s job to make sure that their lives go the way that they want them to go. I’m not saying that is not a normal or natural response, but it seems almost futile to me because it is based on some assumptions that are probably wrong. It also is based on an assumption that our lives are under our control.

In this modern age, particularly in the western world, we live with the notion that we are the center of our world. Sometimes we Americans misunderstand the freedoms that we take so dearly.  We think freedom is what we want for ourselves and what we want our lives to be. We think freedom is freedom from restraint, freedom from having to think about a bigger picture, freedom from responsibility. We basically look at our lives in that way. The church historically has said, particularly after the Reformation, that we always need to see that life is about God first. That God is the giver of all life. It is simply our task to search and to know what it is that God is teaching us in our lives. If we know who God is, we may know who we are. By the way, I said that in the beginning of my sermon last week, but all learning is repetition so you now you get it again, so you will remember it.

I’m going to take off on a little variant from that. I was up late one night watching an infomercial. I feel about infomercials like I do about all those harassing phone calls we get from people trying to sell us things. Those people wouldn’t be calling if someone weren’t buying their products. Sometimes I’m angrier with the people that are buying than I am with the people who are trying to sell. I watch these infomercials and wonder, “Who is buying this stuff.” Obviously someone is or they wouldn’t be spending the money to put it on TV.  This guy had some real-estate scheme and he said if you weren’t a multimillionaire, somehow you had made a mistake in life. All of you who aren’t multimillionaires stand up now and feel bad that you’re not a multimillionaire. And then of course if you were to buy into this scheme of his, then he had all the reasons to explain how you were going to be a multimillionaire.  He unknowingly made a couple theological assumptions. One was that any prosperity that comes into our lives is our own doing. Second, is that there is a plan, and if you follow the plan, you will get the end product. If you believe we are not obsessed with this as a culture, go to any bookstore and look at the number of self-help books. There are a lot of people making money telling you how to loose weight, how to get rich, how to find someone to love you, and the list goes on and on. There is an assumption that we have in our culture that we are the creatures of our own destiny and that if we simply follow the plan that we will get what we want out of life.

Now we find Abraham and Sarah. God says to them, “I promise you as many decedents as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea.”   They become old.  Sarah was in her nineties, I think.  How many women in their nineties want to have a baby? Sarah and Abraham waited and waited and waited. Sarah decided that God made the promise and she needed to act on that promise. So she did what was a culturally accepted thing.  Back then it was a very common practice. Her hand maiden, Hagar, would mother a child by Abraham so that Sarah would have a child that would be hers legally.  That would  take care of the matter. The thing I love about Hebrew scripture is its honesty about human nature. The matriarch of the faith is not looking too good in this story. She has taken care of the problem. Then, low and behold, in her nineties, God gives her the child Isaac. He was coming all along if she had only waited. Some time later she was watching Ishmael, the son that was mothered by Hagar, playing along side her son Isaac. And she thinks, “My own flesh and blood might not get his inheritance. I need to banish this child to the desert.” This basically means Sara intends to kill Ishmael, because once they went out into the desert, it was over. I want you to understand it is the subtlety of these stories that have such a powerful meaning. As this story develops, we see Abraham going to God asking, “What do I do? I feel pulled between what I know is right and my commitment to my wife.” And God says,   “Just trust me.” Abraham does something that I have a very hard time doing. He trusts that what God says is true. So he prepares a meal and some water and sends Hagar and her son out into the desert.  We then find that Hagar has run out of water and she has run out of food. She knows that death is imminent for her child.  She places Ishmael under a bush and she goes far enough away so that she can’t hear him cry. She cannot stand to listen to her baby die. Part of the background of this story is that the Hebrews believe that a person who saw God would die because God was so much holier than humans. In Hebrew scripture God would often disguise Himself as an Angel. So an angel comes to minister to Hagar and tells her not to fret.  Not only will her son live, but God will bless him. And then he shows her water. We are told that things work out just fine. The interesting thing here is that the Hebrews knew the place where this happened by name. Directly translated from Hebrew, it meant “She saw the face of God and did not die”. Isn’t that a wonderful story? God in his playful way came into a moment that looked like certain disaster and fixed it.

There are three things from this powerful story I want to tell you.  One is that we have a tendency as human beings, to not wait for God’s promises but to affect them ourselves. I read a book this summer by Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He has an incredible mind and is a very spiritual man. He wrote a book called Lost Icons, which I would recommend to any of you.  It is about some of the things that our culture has lost. One of the things that he talks about is the fact that we have lost our ability to wait and to mediate because we are action oriented. We feel that we have to take action. We don’t sit in that moment when something happens and wait and feel and experience it. He says that is the often the time when the most spiritual things in our lives happen. Not in doing, but in waiting and listening to God’s response to those things that have happened to us. How many of you have known the Sunday School answer to life that God will take care of you and loves you no matter what. And yet something happens in your life that you can’t see around the bend, and you decide that you have to take matters into your own hands. I think every one of us here could raise our hands to that, right? That’s the first thing.

The second thing that we see is a theme that runs through the stories of Abraham and Sarah.  Abraham always knows to wait faithfully and that God will respond. That’s the key to what Abraham has to teach us— patient waiting. We learn we have to pull against human nature and our basic cultural preferences.  Sometimes we have to wait for God’s promises to come true in our life.

The third, and more important thing, is about God’s grace in this world.  God cleans up the messes that we often create in our lives. Sarah unjustly uses Hagar to bring her a child and then sends them out to die.  God continues to bless not only Abraham and Sarah, but also that one woman that got caught in Sarah’s plans. There is another powerful part of the story. Tradition has it that Ishmael is the father of the Arab people. Many in the Muslim world trace the story of their link with Abraham with Ishmael. It’s interesting to see that in this story God is blessing both the Jews, that would come later, and the Muslims. And, by the way, the Apostle Paul would say that we Christians would be grafted onto the Abraham covenant by adoption. So we find ourselves living in the tensions of the modern world in which these three religions, which have their very basis of this biblical faith, pull and tug against each other.  We ask, “What is the answer?” Part of the answer may be to pull out our compass and decide how we are going to fix this. Part of it may be to wait patiently and see how God may be fulfilling His promises even today in this church. May we all learn to stand and wait for the promises that God has given us. To wait patiently and not try to fix everything that comes in our life. To hear that words of a Psalm and know that Gods steadfast love and faithfulness endure with us forever.   It is upon that promise of God and not our own doing that we live our lives. Let’s bow our head for a word of prayer.