A certain man had two sons. They were both sons of laughter. And he loved them both. Sarah was the mother of the younger. On the day when her little boy, Isaac, was weaned, her husband, Abraham, threw a big party. There was lots of laughter. The father’s older boy, Ishmael, was playing with the younger, and Sarah was watching worriedly. Ishmael wasn’t playing rough with his half-brother; it’s just that because he was the older, the firstborn, Sarah realized he would always be a threat to her son’s future.

Isaac, you see, was the golden child, the prince of promise, the boy of blessing. God gave Isaac to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. But Sarah hadn’t seen how that could work, seeing how important things inside of her had not been working for a long time. So about fifteen years earlier, she had concocted a scheme to let her man have a child with her handmaid. Now before you get to thinking how big that was of her, remember that in that culture and time, she could have claimed the boy for her own.

A little bitty problem arose, however. Hagar, Ishmael’s mother, having given Abraham a child when her mistress could not, well, she got a smidgen uppity for a slave girl. Started looking down on the lady of the tent, don’t you know?! Big mistake. Sarah had put up with about all the humiliation she could stand, and now that she had her own miracle boy off her breast, she decided to get the maid and her boy off her chest.

When Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac, the word for play here is a play on Isaac’s name. Isaac means “laughter,” and he was called that because Sarah had laughed at the idea of going through Lamaze classes at her age. But here is Ishmael now laughing at the child of laughter. We aren’t sure whether Ishmael is laughing at him or just laughing with him; we don’t really know if he was playing with his kid brother or preying on him. But Sarah sees the future and doesn’t like what she sees. Only one boy can be the son of laughter. Only one will inherit the promises of God. Sarah’s big mistake, Ishmael, and his insolent mother will have to go.

Abraham is deeply distressed by Sarah’s pronouncement, the narrator tells us. Well, I should hope so! He did love Ishmael, apparently. All feminist sentiments aside, if you’re like me, you are hoping at this moment that Abraham would have stood up to his wife and been a man. I mean, isn’t that what Old Testament is all about—the patriarchs, right? Not the matriarchs! What’s worse, God comes along and tells him to listen to her. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, God says. Say what? Where’s all that man is the head-of-the household stuff?

God works the divine plan on the back of a napkin, it seems. We think of God having a blueprint for salvation that has to be followed to the letter, and if it isn’t, God will find another builder. But God actually uses all the blunders human builders make along the way and keeps adjusting things on the fly. This is just the way God is.

God didn’t step in and tell Abraham not to allow Hagar into his tent because only trouble would come of it. Lots of trouble has come from that bad beginning, but when Abraham looked at his boy Ishmael, I don’t think he saw anything but his boy. And what’s more, God didn’t dismiss the boy, even when God told Abraham it was okay to dismiss him in accord with the Sarah solution. God promised that though Isaac’s seed would inherit the promise of bearing the name and the land, Ishmael would become a nation also.

Which, once again, should tell us something about ourselves. God can make a difference among people for various purposes, but that doesn’t mean God leaves anyone out. I may wish I could paint like Ed Knippers, and if I could preach at 84 as well as Sid Reber sings, I’ll be happy. But God uses each of us and all of us according to our particular gifts. We sometimes look at our siblings and think one is favored over the others— and sometimes that is true among human parents—but God has a blessing and a future for each of us, not just some of us.

Furthermore, sometimes we get the idea that if a relationship starts out under wrongful circumstances, then everything and anything that comes from it is doomed. Is that so? Was Ishmael unaccepted by God just because he was unaccepted by Sarah? No, God promised to make a nation of him, too. God blessed Ishmael. Hagar found a wife from Egypt for her son. Ishmael is claimed to be the father of Arab peoples, and Muslims claim him as their spiritual ancestor. God can take things that weren’t intended and make things that fit God’s great design anyway. But we have to accept who we are and let God make of us what God will.

On his 75^th birthday, conductor Msistlac Rostropovich told about his first struggle for survival. My mother told me that she really didn’t want to have a baby at that time and that she tried to get rid of me with some medicine her gynecologist gave her. I ended up coming out one month late, and one day I said to her, “Mother, if you had to keep me for 10 months, you might at least have given me a more acceptable face.” She said, “My son, I was busy with your hands.” [New York Times, cited in Context (June 15, 2002): 8.]

Ishmael may have wanted to be Isaac, but that was not his calling. He may never have been meant to be, just the way many of us were not planned and may have at times felt unwanted. But this is story with such amazing honesty that it should knock us all in the head a bit and say, “Get over yourself.” Planned or unplanned, accepted by the world or unaccepted: God accepts you, and God makes plans for you. It’s more important to lean into the plans God has for you now that you are on the scene than it is to bend over backwards looking for whether you were planned in the first place.

All right, back to the story. Abraham sends the boy and his mother packing. Well, we would have thought that, but he seems really to send them backpacking. A little bread and a skin of water and they’re off into the desert. Now what is that about? Here’s what I hope. Maybe Abraham agreed to send them off, but by giving them so little to go on, he knew they would not get far without his being able to keep them supplied on the sly. They’d have to stay close by, and then he could watch over them. Maybe. But maybe this is just one more example to us of how unvarnished the Bible is, of how utterly amazing it is that we get these stories of people of faith who act like such dolts. Maybe that’s why we can trust the Bible so much, because none of us would have written it up this way. We’d have cleaned it up and sprayed some cologne all over the characters. On the other hand, this is a perfect opening for God again. We get to see again how when people are abandoned and unaccepted, there is an ear in heaven that hears and answers. The name Ishmael means, “God hears.” And so God does hear.

When the bread and water have run out, when all the supplies are gone, when unacceptable Hagar and her unaccepted boy, Ishmael, have spent every last resource they can find, Hagar cries out in desperate anguish, and God hears … the boy. Odd detail there! Hagar cries out and God hears the boy whose name means God hears. Here again we have a subtle note in the storytelling that tells us that God is keeping his word to the son of Abraham. God will not make a nation out of Hagar but out of Ishmael. The outcast of the world is welcome in the home of God. The world casts away; God redeems.

If that is the force of the text, then we must stop using this text to reinforce the divine right of Israel over the Palestinians. Yes, Isaac was promised the land and Ishmael has become a nation. But the whole gospel story is about healing and reconciling rifts, not justifying them. Even if its Israel’s have a biblical claim to the land, they must act with hospitality to welcome the children of Ishmael now in that land. And the same must be said to the Palestinians. Terrorism against the children of Isaac cannot be justified under any circumstances. When God provides water and life for Hagar and Ishmael, it is a sign that God is looking out for the well-being of his children. They are not to take revenge on their half-brothers but instead to learn to embrace them as full brothers.

Turning things another way, St. Pius X Catholic Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, took out an ad in the paper during Lent this year inviting people to “come home, to return to church again.” They issued a special welcome to single, twice-divorced, under 30, gay, filthy rich, black and proud, poor as dirt, can’t sing, no habla Ingles, married with pets, older than God, more Catholic
than the Pope, workaholic, bad speller, screaming babies, three-times
divorced, passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, tourists, seekers, doubters, bleeding hearts … oh, and you. [U. S. Catholic (May 2002).]

This is a step toward welcoming Ishmael home. Every time the church follows God’s lead by hearing the cry of Ishmael and welcoming him home to the family of God, we bear witness to the salvation of Jesus Christ and the communion that is ours in him.

In his Civil War saga, April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik tells of one such moment. The South was beaten and beleaguered. The congregation of the socially- upper-crust St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, was in the pews. As the minister, Dr. Charles Minnergerode, began to administer Holy Communion, something happened that sucked the air out of the building. A tall, well-dressed black man rose from his seat in the western gallery—which was reserved for Negroes. He strode toward the communion table to take his place at the kneeler. This had never happened before. The strict custom was that all whites would receive first and then the blacks. But this was a new day, and this proud black Christian wanted to know whether the war was worth it.

The minister was embarrassed and sadly immobilized. No one moved for a long, long time, until at last a distinguished but gaunt-looking gentleman with snow-white hair and gray beard rose to his feet and made his way to the table. He knelt beside the black man and prepared to receive Christ alongside his black brother. Only after watching Robert E. Lee act in fellowship with his darker estranged brother did the rest of the church follow. [Perennial, 2001: 362-63.]

Somewhere, unaccepted Ishmael laughed with his unexpected brother, Isaac. And the bosom of Abraham was filled with joy at last.