Hilton Head Island, SC – January 23, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 12:1-8; Genesis 16:1-6, 15-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse, and by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.” – Genesis 12:3 (RSV)
When I was in seminary sixty years ago, there were no biblical scholars I knew about who doubted that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses actually lived. When I was doing research for a book I wrote forty years ago, I came across someone who seriously questioned whether any these biblical characters ever existed. All of those people, the scholar said, were fictitious storybook characters intended to illustrate theological points, but they were not flesh-and-blood people who actually lived at particular periods of time.
When I first read that, I was mildly incensed, if it is possible to be mildly incensed. How presumptuous of this man to make such a preposterous statement, thought I. I still think it is unjustifiably presumptuous to declare that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob et al didn’t exist, but especially to say such a thing about Moses. I admit that I don’t think Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, or probably even any parts of the Pentateuch, but I am convinced that many if not most of the people written about from Genesis 11 onward were historical, not fictional. As unorthodox as I have become in my old age, I am not that far beyond the pale.
Our seminary professors and the books they assigned to us taught that Abraham lived sometime around 1800 BCE, and Moses about 1250 BCE. These two men, in my opinion, are the most important of all the biblical patriarchs. And, according to the Bible, were it not for certain key historical events occurring, we never would have heard of either of them. For example, had Abraham not followed what he was convinced was God’s directive to leave his homeland in Mesopotamia and to go to the land of Canaan, the Bible would never have mentioned him. The same is true for Moses. Had his mother not put her infant son into a basket in the bulrushes growing along the Nile River when the Egyptian pharaoh had ordered all the male Hebrew babies to be killed, Moses never would have made it into holy writ either.
From that we may deduce that events which seemed relatively unimportant at the time can turn into momentous occasions from the viewpoint of hindsight. That is certainly true for Abraham. He was born in the ancient city of Ur in what is now southern Iraq, near where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join together to pour their life-transforming waters into the Persian Gulf.
At birth Abraham was born with the name of Abram, or Avram as the Jews call him. “Abram” means “Exalted Father.” It seems odd to us to give that name to an infant male, but we may assume that his parents thought he had a bright future ahead of him, which indeed he did. His father Terah decided to take his family and migrate to the land of Canaan, which stretches along the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea. However, when they got to the land of Haran, which was somewhere in northern Syria or south-central Anatolia (the country of Turkey on today’s map), Terah decided to settle there instead.
Scholars argue whether Abraham was a “monotheist,” believing in only one God, or a polytheist who nevertheless chose to have faith in only one God for himself, whom he called Adonoy, (the) “Lord.” You may never have wondered about that, nor did I, until I started reading some of those questioning commentaries. I have no reason to wonder whether Abraham ever became a monotheist. Genesis says he did, and that’s fine with me, and I hope for you as well.
In any event, Genesis, Chapter Twelve is one of the most important chapters in the entire Bible. It begins with these words: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and you father’s house to the land that I will show you.’” In other words, God wanted Abram to complete the movement from Ur to Canaan which Abram’s father Terah intended to make, but didn’t. Furthermore, God told Abram He would make a great nation of Abram’s offspring. “I will bless you,” God said, “and by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves” (12:3). Because of Abram, the Exalted Father, all of the peoples all over the world would be blessed.
However, there was a serious problem here. Abram was not yet a father, let alone an exalted father. His wife was Sarai, a name which means God Is Prince. For the next five chapters of Genesis they produce no children. Abram is in his eighties, and Sarai is in her seventies, and the possibility of Abram living into his name appears dimmer and dimmer.
But as you heard in the second reading, Sarai reluctantly tells Abram that he’d better have a child by her slave woman, Hagar. When Sarai learns that Hagar is pregnant, though, she is both angry and jealous, and she so terrified Hagar by her wrath that Hagar fled into the desert.
What I didn’t read was that while Hagar was in the wilderness, an angel appeared to her. Remember from last week’s sermon that I told you the Israelites had never heard of angels until they were in Babylon in captivity in the sixth century BCE. It was there where the scribes wrote down the myths and stories of Genesis, inserting angels into the stories wherever they seemed to fit, and this is one of the places where they did that. The angel tells Hagar to go back to her mistress, and Hagar is to submit to Sarai. This she does, but probably with much hesitation.
In the next section of the Abram saga, Hagar gives birth to a son, and she names him Ishmael. That name means either God Is Listening or God Hears. The name suggests that God heard Abram’s prayer to have a son, and Ishmael was the result of that prayer. But when Ishmael is born, Sarai thinks Abram pays too much attention to the baby and his mother. As Mr. Shakespeare told us, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Sarai once more forces Hagar to take Ishmael and go out into the trackless wilderness, and we never hear of them again. In the Quran much is said about Ishmael, but nothing in the Bible. It is a sad ending to a sad story.
You also need to remember that in Genesis 17, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham (which means Father of Nations [plural]), and He also changes Sarai’s name to Sarah (Princess). But they still have no children, and at their ages, they are unlikely ever to have any. Despite this bleak prospect, when Abraham is one hundred years old, and his wife Sarah is ninety years old, Sarah gives birth to a baby name Isaac. About the veracity of their reported ages I encourage you to decide for yourself. You’ll hear a little about Isaac in next Sunday’s sermon, but a lot more about his son Jacob the shyster.
For today, I’ve told you as much as I’ve told you because from it you may deduce how Abraham became the Father of Nations (Plural). He had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. By the ancient traditions of the Middle East, reaching back almost four thousand years, Ishmael was the original progenitor of the Arabs, and Isaac was the original progenitor of the Jews. Both the Muslims and the Jews officially agree on this, and it’s about the only thing they do agree on.
But I remind you of this: the Arabic name Ibrahim is common among Muslims, and Ismail is perhaps even more common. Understandably, though, there are few Ishmaels among Jews.
You may have many questions about certain aspects of Abraham’s story, but you’ll likely find few totally satisfactory answers. Either we accept the general truth of what is being reported, or we don’t. If we don’t, we find ourselves left to our devices, and the going gets exceedingly tough. We all need God, hard as He is to understand sometimes.
On the front of the bulletin today is a quote from Frederick Buechner in his splendid and humorous little book called Peculiar Treasures. It is a collection of short descriptions of some of the main and sometimes offbeat characters in the Bible. Of Abraham the gifted writer says, “If a schlemiel is a person who goes through life spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle is the one it keeps getting spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle.”
People take advantage of Father Abraham. Sarah takes advantage of his singularly admirable love for Ishmael by forcing Hagar to leave them and to go out on their own and take the little boy into a probably awful and unknowable future. When Abraham and his extended family get to Canaan, Abraham’s nephew Lot takes as his portion of the future land of Israel the rich bottomland of the Jordan Valley, leaving Abraham with the rocky mountain ridge that runs north and south through the entire country. The Hittites charge Abraham too much for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron which he purchased as a gravesite for himself and Sarah, as well as for his son Isaac and his descendants, including Jacob the shyster. All three of these men and their wives are buried in Hebron. Abraham willingly pays the price they demand, knowing he is being swindled. Abraham is a noble human being beset all his life with people who try to get the best of him, but he remains steadfast to God despite all these challenges.
Buechner says of him, “In spite of everything, however, he never stopped having faith that God was going to keep his promise about making him the father of a great nation…. There was a group photograph he had taken not long before he died. It was a bar mitzvah, and they were all there down to the last poor relation. They weren’t a great nation yet by a long shot, but you’d never know it from the way Abraham was enthroned there with his velvet yarmulke with several great-grandchildren on his lap and soup on his tie.” The Buechnerian anachronisms make the description all the more delightful.
Some of the things the Bible says happened to Abraham probably didn’t happen. Still, he is one of the pivotal people in all of human history, because from him evolve the three great western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of us in these three traditions revere this wonderful old man. His fidelity to God was unmatched, his conviction regarding God’s promise never wavered, and the heritage he bequeathed his heirs has made the world a far better place.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have not always behaved themselves well toward one another. That is our fault, not God’s fault, nor is it the fault of Abraham. Abraham laid the foundation, and we built upon it, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, sometimes very badly. Nonetheless, the three Mammoth Monotheisms have combined to make Planet Earth a far better place than it would have been without our common father, Abraham.
The Rev. Fred Buechner was a Presbyterian parson who never served a congregation. Instead he vocation was to write outstanding and inspirational books for a needy, fallen world. Buechner’s incandescent imagination shall have the last word. He quotes the man whom Genesis indirectly but strongly indicates was the father of the three monotheistic traditions. Looking into the future, Abraham says, “They will all be winners, God willing. Even the losers will be winners. They’ll all get their names up in lights…. Someday --- who knows when? --- I’ll be talking about my son, the Light of the world.” Well stated, Exalted Father and Father of Nations!