Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7
Last Saturday, while we were celebrating the Elmira Pride Festival in Wisner Park, Western democracies and, in our case, former democracies, were also observing the anniversary of D-Day, the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy that marked a decisive turning point in the Antifa war against Nazi Germany. The massive death toll included thousands of civilians, part of the story that is rarely told.
Americans back home first learned of Operation Overlord from the radio. They could listen to F.D.R. speaking from the White House, or legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow reporting from London. Radio news eventually gave way to television news, and both, along with print journalism, failed under the onslaught of the World Wide Web. Today’s media landscape is Balkanized, everyone’s reality decided by secret algorithms that tell them exactly what they already want to believe, or in some cases, what nefarious forces want them to believe.
Of course, there are human holdouts, a resistance of sorts. In the world of radio, this includes those devoted to Howard Stern, probably not super represented in this congregation, and the NPR crowd, definitely super represented in this congregation.
Among the last of the great network radio news anchors was Paul Harvey, who died in 2009. For over half a century, he was a familiar voice on ABC-affiliated stations. He was often criticized by other journalists for slipping seamlessly and often opaquely between news content and advertisements. Was he reporting or selling? One of his catch-phrases, and he had a few, became the name of a stand-alone show, “The Rest of the Story.”
That title, which I have appropriated for today’s sermon, might be a good subtitle for most of my sermons actually. If Socrates, who I mentioned last week, is reported by Plato to have declared the unexamined life not worth living, I might say that the unexamined story is not worth telling. I want to know, as did Paul Harvey, the rest of the story.
The rest of the story when it comes to the biblical patriarchs is that Jacob was a thief, his Mommy dearest not worthy of our praise, and his father Isaac, the child of the promise, was Abraham’s second son, not his first.
Let’s review: God called Abram and Sarai into covenant, instructed them to migrate from Ur to Canaan, from modern day Iraq to modern day Israel, and promised that through them all nations would be blessed. And let’s just pause there for a moment and note the “all nations” in that sentence, which is at odds with the notion of one chosen people.
Sarai, soon to be renamed Sarah, is past childbearing age. She arranges for Abram now Abraham to have sex with her Egyptian slave Hagar in order to produce a male heir. The result is Ishmael. He is his father’s pride and joy, though Sarah is jealous of Hagar’s elevated status as mother to the heir, and behaves badly. That is, until this three-in-one proto-Trinity in today’s reading shows up, and promises that Sarah will have a son of her own, and she gives birth to Isaac.
And here ends our reading. But it shouldn’t. Hagar and Ishmael are cast out, and nearly die in the harsh wilderness. Jewish identity would sanctify this act of cruelty, declaring it to be God’s will, just as they declare it God’s will when Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, steals the birthright of his older twin, Esau. Of course, the Bible often undermines its own claims of exceptionalism and purity, and this story is no exception. Ishmael is also promised that he will become a great nation.
In the Islamic tradition, Ishmael is understood as the forefather of Muhammed, in much the same way David is understood as the forefather of Jesus, each man an embodiment of a divine promise. Both Islam and Christianity would evolved as radically open, evangelical, while Rabbinic Judaism would transition for evangelical to insular.
As defined by those ancient stories, the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac remain locked in conflict to this day.
When it comes to biblical historians, you have the maximalists, who believe everything in the story is true, despite the obvious errors and contradictions, and the minimalists, who believe it is all fiction, despite the obvious historicity.
I tend to land somewhere in the middle. I believe there is a historic event underlying the Exodus story, that David was real, that Jesus was real. Some things I accept as myth, the Great Flood story borrowed from the Mesopotamians, the Garden of Eden, the race of giants created when angels slept with humans. Don’t remember that part? Go back and re-read Genesis.
With the biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I have no idea if there is historic memory in there somewhere. Some scholars argue that these are separate hero traditions that have been merged. A serious look at the story of Abraham and Isaac must consider that in one layer of the text, Abraham does kill his son, so how does the lineage continue? Zombie Isaac I guess.
This is all less interesting as an investigation into what can never be proven, and more interesting in asking why the ancients created these stories, and whether we engage in the same type of behavior, writing people to the margins. We’ve learned to notice the rest of the story, and have seen that attentiveness lambasted by those in the main narrative, mostly men of European descent.
In many ways, the Judaism of the Yahweh cult and the Temple was an outlier in the context of the Ancient Near East. Other cultures conflated earthly power with divine power, viewing kings as gods or at least demigods, kind of like today’s MAGA cult. The AI-generated images of Trump with a physique worthy of Superman can only be considered idolatry, a sort of MAGA Gilgamesh.
Jews never made this mistake of confusing human kings with gods, and always had a love hate relationship with human rule, believing that Yahweh was the only rightful ruler. Even the greatest king in the Jewish story, David, is remembered as deeply flawed.
Covenants between Yahweh and the Israelites were constructed like treaties between an overlord and a vassal. They were the only culture of their time that refused idols, refused to depict Yahweh as human, animal, or hybrid. They were possibly heirs to the brief religious creativity under the Pharaoh Akhenaten, when Egypt was a monotheism and their god was depicted, if at all, as the Great Disc of the sun, never as human.
Though tradition claims Moses wrote the Torah, the five authoritative texts that begin with Genesis, the Creation Myth and the Patriarchs, the earliest layers appear to be from two or three centuries later, some psalms that may originate with David. After Solomon, the divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel had their own traditions. They would begin to be merged after Israel fell, as refugees brought Israelite traditions and monotheism to the south and Judah experienced a brief period of relative freedom. The story they write is this single-line narrative.
The rest of the story is Ishmael. It is Rahab the prostitute in Canaanite Jericho who shows up in the genealogy of Jesus. It is the actual Canaanites who were erased in the story, but not erased in the archaeological record. The horrific tales of crimes against humanity in the Book of Joshua are not true.
Sadly, the horrific tales of crimes against humanity here in America are true, as we remind ourselves each week when we acknowledge the stolen land and lives of indigenous people, the stolen lives and labor of abducted and enslaved Africans. Our own Congregationalist tradition, while often deeply engaged in the work of liberation, still bought into the narrative that Europeans arrived on a mostly empty continent, encountering only a handful of primitive tribes. I was at General Synod in Long Beach, California in 2013 when we voted to repudiate this “Doctrine of Discovery,” the justification for genocide.
The rest of the story is the Iranian people who do not support the Ayatollahs, the Cubans who love their country but not their government. It is the young Russian man on the front line in Ukraine who didn’t have enough money and power to escape the draft.
It is Ishmael, Hagar who does not want to watch him die, and the story of a divine source of clean water. Clean and fresh water is still a holy thing, twenty-five centuries after this story was written.
The rest of the story is part of your life, part of this community, part of this church. We do our best to embrace it, to tell it, to claim that part we can celebrate, to wash away the shame of the parts we cannot celebrate, to believe that the goodness of God can be found in all of the stories, if we only have hearts that are open, if we only have faith. May you live into the rest of your story, whether that is the story of a great nation, or an afternoon nap and burgers on the grill. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
David Hockney died this week. An influential artist and stage designer, he came out as gay while studying at the Royal Academy of Art in London, when homosexual acts were still considered a crime in Great Britain. This week, our Prayers of the People focus on creativity.
Let us pray.
Holy Mystery,
Creation is Incarnation,
from the impossible glow of magma,
to the empty locust shell on a tree
crumbling into star stuff,
the alarm cry of the rabbit,
and the love cry of a pop song.
We thank you for filling us
with holy imagination
and a talent for the might be,
for David Hockney’s California
and Victoria Amelina’s Ukraine,
the poet killed by Putin’s aggression,
for comedians in jail cells,
and drag queens who dare to dance.
We thank you for Anthony Bourdain,
and that urge to peel one more clove,
for Francis of Assisi and a vision in the sky,
for You in us, and us in You.
People saw You in Jesus,
who made people whole with a touch,
with a word,
so we pray the kin-dom prayer he taught us, saying:
Our Father…
COMMISSION AND BENEDICTION
Emily Dickinson wrote:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies —
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
We tell it slant and tell it straight, stories of an immigrant named Abraham, a fugitive named Moses, and refugee child named Jesus who grew up to die in government custody.
May the ancient stories inspire us to live today, to live God’s upside down kin-dom into the world, one act of love and resistance at a time. Amen.