06/21/2026
Here's my sermon for tomorrow at St. Andrew's. You are all welcome to join us. We'd love that! With abiding love, Mother Barbara
I would like to say our readings today are full of innocence, intrigue, and invitation, because this is the good news, right? But they aren’t. They are full of conflict, jealousy, and betrayal.
We hear the harrowing and horrific tale of Hagar and Ishmael being sent out into the wilderness to die by Abraham at Sarah’s directive. Our hearts shatter when we hear Hagar pleading to be spared from watching her child die, for we can imagine nothing worse, but leaving her child to die alone, what mother would do that?
Our sense of injustice rises in our throats and we want to scream to God on behalf of all the people who live now as Hagar did then – cast out from the center of society because of the racial and ethnic prejudice of the privileged, the ones with power over someone else’s life; we cringe at the thought of this enslaved foreign woman forced into surrogate motherhood, and even though she produced an offspring which allowed Abraham to live up to his part of the covenant with God, she had no rights, no claim over her life or that of her child.
We hear of jealous Sarah, who told Abraham to send his son by Hagar off to die, and who, just a chapter later, in almost a parallel story, is told that Abraham took their son, her beloved Issac, off to die, as God had commanded. Was that retribution? Was that to teach Sarah a lesson? We know her heart was shattered by even the possibility of sacrificing Issac, and she became a shadow of who she had been, when she imagined herself to so strong and powerful and presuming to direct the course of God’s action. The only thing we hear about Sarah later is that Abraham buried her.
And Jesus tells his disciples to be prepared for hospitality, yes, but also hostility. Be ready to be persecuted. Adversity awaits you if you speak my truth to the world. And that Word involves dividing families, man against his father, and daughter against her mother, and so on. Following Jesus comes at high costs: be ready for challenges, or don’t follow me. Jesus demands that the disciples get their priorities straight. Following God’s mission must be your highest priority and commitment. You must disregard all other norms of kinship, for if you follow me, you then belong to a force greater than any other which you can bind your heart and soul to here on earth.
There is intentionality around the tension in both stories.
There is also redemption in these stories. God comes through for the marginalized and that is exhilarating news to us. We rejoice that Hagar finds strength in the wilderness, similarly to Jesus when the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested, to be certain and ready to claim his identity and mission. We learn, again, that the wilderness can be a place where we find strength, when we learn the essence of who we are, for it is in the bleakness and severity of the wilderness, when Hagar had run out of food and water in this desolation, that she surrendered her heart, and she named God, as no one else ever had. She called God, “the living who sees me.” Perhaps Hagar naming God brought God into being in that situation in such a way that God was inspired to respond with power and might, truly seeing those who are left to die, those who have no claim on their lives, those who are placed outside the circle. Maybe God listened and later sent Jesus to carry forward her plea for equality and respect for all people.
And at the end of the day, both sons of Abraham built a nation of faithful believers in the one true God; Issac giving birth to the Israelite nation, the Jewish people; Ishmael, giving birth to the Islamic nation, the Muslim people.
Of course, we can’t help but wonder if Sarah’s expulsion of Ishamel, out of her desire to kill the competition to Issac’s blessing, her disbelief that God had a plan to take each child and bring them each to their fullness, each creating nations of faithful people, somehow foreshadowed, or set in motion, the deep rooted enmity that exists today between some of the people of each of these nations. Are we still trying to heal this rupture in relationship in our world today? Whenever will we understand that there is enough of God’s blessing to go around to all people? We don’t have to own it or claim it or restrict others from it. Whenever will we stop living out of a mindset of fear and scarcity and instead understand that God’s love blankets all of creation, equally, fully, abundantly, and everlastingly? There is enough.
But it seems to me that the biggest issue raised in both stories is how we navigate the dilemma of multiple commitments.
Abraham to his wife, who directs him to do something in contradiction to his covenant with God?
Sarah, who was perhaps living out of her sense of call and responsibility to retain God’s plan of her child being the one to carry forth God’s nation, in contradiction to human decency. Clearly this isn’t the only time in history that God’s people killed others in the name of God, believing they were carrying out the will of God by their killing, in contradiction to human decency.
The would-be disciples wanting to follow Jesus but having a commitment to stay at home and take care of their aging parents, or carry forward the family business, or stay for the birth of their child.
And Jesus, who knew he was on the way to Jerusalem to die, wanting to be honest and prepare his disciples for similar persecution, but also wanting to share with them this is the best news they will ever hear.
We often have multiple pulls upon our hearts. Concurrent commitments which draw us in different directions. Our desire to pursue our call to further ministry in the church (lay or ordained) and our family commitments. Our desire to tend to the needs of others and our need for our own self-care. Our love of the ideals of the company we work for and the reality that sometimes decisions are made that are not in the best interest of the whole.
Think of a woman who wishes to be true to her marriage vows but finds herself in an abusive situation. Does she choose her marriage vows over her baptismal vow to respect the dignity of all people, including herself?
Or for those who have a commitment to our country’s ideals, and yet on this 250th anniversary of our birth of our nation, wonder what to do with the gap of what we are committed to and what we see emerging in our country.
It makes me wonder, if we imagine the tension over the centuries between some of the descendants of Issac and those of Ishmael, could be traced back to Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion from full recognition of their humanity and right to live in their land, and we imagine there is still a rupture to be repaired, could that be true for our country as well. Is there a deep rupture of relationships, between the indigenous people and the colonizers, that we are still needing and struggling to repair that is shaping conflict in our country today?
These texts are messy, and they leave us with more questions than answers, more discomfort than ease, more struggling than hopefulness. Yet they also bring more understanding of what Jesus says: that we must lose our lives, all that is not of God, all our choices that do not support building God’s kingdom of Love, all false priorities that tell us that God can wait, that other commitments are more important in this moment, and at some future time, we will give our lives fully over God.
Jesus says we must lose our life for Jesus’ sake to find our life, our true and abundant life. And there is urgency. Jesus means now.
This implies that we must always make Jesus and our ongoing covenant with God our highest priority. Our intentional prayer life helps with this. Knowing the core values of our own lives and our parish helps us when we need to make decisions with multiple commitments tugging at each other. Being willing to deeply listen to God supports this surrender to God’s will. Coming together in community weekly to worship gives us the hope in our heart to keep trying.
For there are times when we will fail. Probably fail miserably, like Sarah and Abraham did, like the disciples who betrayed Jesus did. But the good news is that God’s persistence toward what God imagines for each of us wins out. Each child, although doomed to die in the wilderness or bound on a rock, survived and gave birth to a nation of faithful people, as was God’s plan for them.
So for all of us who have grievously sinned, or broken our commitment to God in multiple ways, who wake up in the morning and plan the day on what we want to do or accomplish, rather than first listening for God’s plan for our day, or for those who have left the church for a season, either by intention or by carelessness of soul, or those who want to have their life, not Christ’s life living through them, we always begin again.
Benedictine spirituality tells us that it is never too late, that this day, we embrace the fresh new start. We come to the altar as faithful people, yearning to do better, desiring to commit more deeply to the ways of Jesus in our lives, eager to find a path to righteousness, ready to soak up the redemptive love of Christ and let it flow through our hearts into our lives, so we have indeed lost our current life to find Jesus’ life waiting for us within.
Somehow, through God’s grace, God pushes away our unfaithfulness, our callousness to grace, our desire for comfortable lives that inhibit us from accepting the invitation to new life in Christ.
God always wants more, wants to give us more than we ask or imagine. God forgives us our inequities, pours grace upon grace, so that, ultimately, our souls will turn toward the light, that spark that was placed within us at our baptism. It is never too late. The door is always open in God’s heart. We need only to open ours.
Amen.
