A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs for Pentecost 3, Proper 7 Year A                

Genesis 21: 8-21; Matthew 10:24-39

Families. Are. Complicated. I have yet to meet anyone who wouldn’t agree on this, and honestly , f someone told me that they had a perfect family I would wonder what they’d been smoking. The other day (on the way home from a visit to my family in Virginia), I heard someone on the radio comment that she couldn’t understand why some businesses advertise by saying, “We treat you like family.” Given the nature of most family dynamics, that should send most potential customers running in the other direction. But it doesn’t. Because the idea of family draws us even as it drives us nuts. But there you have it. It’s complicated.

And so it is with Hagar. Our first lesson this morning is a continuation of last week’s text from the Hebrew Bible, in which Sarah and Abraham become the proud parents of Isaac. But the Lectionary left out a chunk of the story. You see, after God promised that Sarah and Abraham would have a child, even at their advanced age, some time passed with no child, and Sarah began to panic–she ran out of patience. So she took matters into her own hands and said that Abraham should father a child with her Egyptian slave, Hagar.

And immediately things got, complicated. To make a long story short, Hagar, who as a slave had no choice in the matter, became pregnant by Abraham. Her relationship with Sarah soured (not surprising)—she became contemptuous of her mistress. Sarah in return became abusive of Hagar, and Hagar ran away. While in the wilderness God saw her, and told her to return to Sarah, but first announced to her that she would bear a son, Ishmael, and that he would be the progenitor of a great multitude of descendants. And in response, Hagar does something that no one else in the Bible does: She has the audacity to name God to God’s face; El-roi; “God who sees.”

Yet she is generally known only as the mother of Ishmael and then forgotten. She only appears two times in the Bible. (If you don’t count a reference to her in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.) Her story of slavery, abuse, rejection, and expulsion is a painful one. It is listed by theologian Phylis Trible as a “text of terror”. There is no way to whitewash it and still be a responsible reader of Scripture. There is always the temptation to avert our gaze from difficult episodes such as this. But if we did that we would be ignoring a substantial chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures. And we can’t do that, any more than we can avoid dealing with our own family dramas. This is the story of God’s family—the human family. And just as we need to find healthy ways of handling difficult relatives and dynamics, we can benefit from finding healthy ways of reading some pretty troublesome and disturbing stories in Scripture.

Which is one of the reasons the Jewish Bible study practice of Midrash is so helpful. This is an ancient tradition; a method of viewing scripture through the lens of questioning; of a conversational encounter, with God, with the writings of learned rabbis, and with each other. Midrash is a liberating tool that encourages wondering. We are encouraged to ask a crucial question: Where is God in this? The answers may be difficult, but with God’s help they can be fruitful and transforming.

So where to start a midrash exploration of Hagar’s story today? We see a woman who is doubly cursed: exiled from bondage, with no more than a little bread, water, and her child. In other words, she’s been cast out from frying pan into the fire. The story notes that Abraham is only distressed on his firstborn son’s behalf: As for any concern for the mother of Ishmael, he is simply following his wife’s instructions, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son.” You see, Ishmael jeopardizes God’s Promise to Abraham: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…So shall your descendants be.”* That’s the promise. But Sarah, in her impatience with God, had waited long enough. She had taken matters into her own hands, but now, confronted with the mistake of her lack of trust in God’s promise, she has sought to rectify it by effectively declaring a death sentence for the child and his mother. Where is God in this???

And this is where the midrash comes in. Let’s wonder. Abram sent Hagar away. “And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.” I wonder what Hagar encountered in the wilderness? Since midrash actually encourages inter-scriptural exploration, we can look at other stories of wilderness wandering in the Bible. Certainly the Israelites wandered, and there is a wealth of stories of their journey and their attempts (not always successful) to be faithful to God. Jesus wandered for 40 days after his baptism, tempted by Satan. Both the Israelites and Jesus faced challenges and emerged equipped for the future. John the Baptist emerged from the wilderness as a prophet. What about Hagar? Was she changed somehow? Did she and Ishmael talk with each other? By all calculations Ishmael was actually an adolescent, not an infant, but Midrash texts speculate that he was quite ill, which was why she had to carry him. Was he even conscious, or could Ishmael sense Abraham’s and Sarah’s rejection of him? I wonder–what demons haunted Hagar in the wilderness? Powerlessness? Resentment? Guilt? Fear? Grief? Did she rage at the God she had so courageously named to God’s face? Did she shake her fist at “God Who Sees”, now apparently blind to her plight? Midrash bids us ask, Where does it hurt, Hagar?

We can continue to wonder and wander the scriptural wilderness: What if she and Ishmael weren’t totally alone? Perhaps they were shadowed by the angel that later called out to her. Perhaps the angel heard every word of fury, recrimination and second-guessing and absorbed it, comprehending her pain. Perhaps, just maybe, God’s silence wasn’t divine rejection after all, but divine listening. I asked a minute ago if Hagar was changed. Maybe not, but what if God was changed? What if God was moved as Hagar wandered and struggled and fed the last crumb and drop of water to her son? Imagine God watching and listening as Hagar, spent and out of resources, did the only thing she could do; lament. As testimony to her pain and rejection and in grief for the child she was certain would die, she lifted up her voice and wept. There is no truer, more authentic prayer than lament; it is the dark night of the soul. And the silent, listening God heard her cries and took pity on her. “What troubles you, Hagar?” Where does it hurt?

A midrash exploration of Hagar’s time in the Wilderness is a fruitful way to engage the text and to discover God’s presence between the lines. When we can do this with Scripture we can perhaps learn to do this in our own lives; to ask, “Where is God in this?” But it should by no means minimize or marginalize suffering—ours or anyone else’s. There is always a risk that assurance of God’s abiding presence becomes mere platitude or Facebook meme, which does a huge disservice to those who suffer. We are meant to gaze upon Hagar’s story and to grieve for and with her; to witness to her abuse, rejection and exile. We are even within our rights to question God. Midrash encourages it.

For example, the fact remains that as Hagar was sent packing God was silent. This is, after all, a story about the Promise, and as such it speaks a hard truth. God promised Abraham and Sarah a legacy of countless heirs, and their rejection and exile of Hagar assured that legacy. But I still struggle with any general assumption that what happened to Hagar was God’s will. I simply don’t believe that God wills human suffering, Promise or no Promise. God didn’t tell Sarah to violate God’s trust and take matters into her own hands; Sarah chose to do that. God didn’t exile Hagar and Ishmael; Abraham did. The fact is that people do stupid, mean, cruel and thoughtless things to each other, but that doesn’t mean that God wills it, then or now. Like it or not, this story reflects the very real frailty of the complicated human family, and our family story is all-too-guilty of projecting our own baggage and selfish motives on God rather than looking in the mirror.

I read something the other day that sums it up: “I screamed at God for the starving child until I saw the starving child was God screaming at me.”**

The good news is that God perseveres. We can trust that. God continues to work within the framework of the gift of free will and the resulting complications and chaos that accompany it. In our Gospel today Jesus alludes to the same idea when he says that he will set a man against his father, daughter against mother; that one’s foes will be part of one’s household. God’s call entails the risk that relationships will be disrupted. But that stress on relationships is because of humans’ choices about how they will respond to God’s invitation to new, transformed and abundant life. Jesus’ entire life and ministry was about reminding everyone, from Temple authorities to lepers, that God is the God of the outsider, the rejected. The Hagars. Jesus knew that what he proposed was not the status quo, and that can be difficult for those who are afraid to risk change and for those who, like Sarah and Abraham, struggled to trust that God’s promise would be steadfast; that God will not give up on God’s dream, no matter how many times and ways we are tempted to screw it up.

So we must be clear-eyed about the suffering and trials of Hagar. We can’t soften their impact, though we can witness to her lament and, through closer and imaginative reading, ask her where it hurts. In doing that, we gain a window on our own lives and the lives of our neighbors. Hagar’s suffering is redeemed through us; it calls us to see and hear her lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of our time, and it further calls us to offer them God’s healing wherever we can, like a well of cool water in the harsh wilderness. And by God’s grace and with God’s help, that’s not really complicated at all.

*Genesis 5:15   ** –unknown

 

Three folds of the cloth yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear. Frost, snowflakes, and ice, all in water their origin share. Three Persons in God: to one God alone we make our prayer.

Ancient Irish poem to the Trinity                                                            

The Trinity emerging in historical experience.

For the first generation of Christians, their radical transformation on the Day of Pentecost was a confusing, yet exhilarating experience. They had an experience of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the Eternal One, creator of heaven and earth, whose dwelling place was far away. The Law had been given by God as a gift of his presence, yet in another way, it also emphasized God’s distance.

For the first Christians, their experience of Jesus posed something of a conundrum in relation to the God of their Fathers. As they had lived through the roller coaster of events and emotions of Holy Week, and Easter, they could not shake off their undeniable gut sense that in the life of Jesus, they had had an experience of God, no longer remote, but God as part of their everyday lives in the world.  Their hearts had been set ablaze by an experience of God face to face: living, breathing, walking, in whose gaze they discovered new selves and a new sense of God.

Then on the Day of Pentecost, a new and unexpected experience crashed in upon them as they encountered the living Spirit of Jesus. No longer Jesus the human person whom they had known as a part of their lives, but the dynamic power of Jesus now fully experienced from within. What really confronted all their hitherto expectations was their direct experience of God, no longer solitary, but dynamic, relational and communal.

The first generations of Christians lived out their new experience of God, it seems without too much controversy. As Luke in Acts reveals, they lived the life of dynamic, energetic, and empowered transformation. Yet, the New Testament nowhere describes God in the language of the Trinity. The first Christians didn’t need to think about the nature of their experience of God because they were too busy living it.

The Trinity solidified in doctrine

The doctrine of the Trinity as we have inherited it today is the result of a need that arose with the passing of time. In the early days of any movement, people just live out their experience of inspiration. But as movements grow up, they morph into institutions. Between the third and fifth centuries, the Church grew from a charismatic movement into a powerful institution, second only to the institution of the Empire, itself.

Institutions need to develop official policies to ensure consistency and conformity. For later generations, the conundrum at the heart of the Christian revelation of God became something less to be reconciled through living and more to be explained, protected, and defended. The Church of the first five centuries needed not so much to explain the nature of God as to protect the nature of Christ from being reduced to one of two simple assertions. Was he divine or human?

This question provoked two competing assertions. The first was that Jesus was God masquerading in human form. Being divine, Jesus was not genuinely human in any meaningful way that you and I are human. The second assertion was that Jesus was only a man, although a great man, nevertheless just a human being uniquely attuned with God in the sense of an avatar like Moses, or the Buddha, or the prophet Mohammed.

Yet the conundrum at the heart of the Christian experience was that Jesus was both divine and human, both natures existing simultaneously, yet independently. As an experience that you don’t think about but just live, the notion of Jesus as human and divine is not such a problem. When you begin to need to understand it, to protect and defend it from attack, you need a way to explain what on the face of it, seems absurd.

The doctrine of the Trinity evolves to protect the core mystery of God as experienced by Christians. In Jesus, the divine and the human might lie at polar ends of a continuum, but it is the same continuum. If to be human is to be most like God, then God must first have experienced being fully human.

I don’t think we can imagine the heat of controversy and accompanying violence out of which the doctrine of the Trinity was forged. As the bishops hotly debated the issues in council, their followers roaming the streets in armed bands settled the issues in rivers of blood.

The bishops, steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle applied the best thinking of the day to address the conundrum at the heart of the Christian experience. How can God who is one be also experienced in three distinct ways? The purpose of the Great Councils was never to explain the mystery of God, but to protect the Christian experience of the mystery of God’s divine nature from being reduced to only that which made sense viewed from the perspective of human logic. Good doctrine gives us enough certainty to be going on with while preserving the ultimate unknownness of God from domestication within the limitations of the collective human imagination. 

The Trinity reinterpreted within a contemporary experience

Each generation must interpret the Christian Tradition in ways that maintain continuity with what has gone before while, at the same time, speaks with the particular voice needed in the here and now.  Theology says less about God and more about our current state of awareness of God. Whereas once Aristotelian logic offered a vehicle for theological articulation, today, a psychologically informed understanding of human nature becomes one of our key vehicles for theologically expressing ourselves.

A psychologically informed view of being human reveals how our individual identities emerge through the processes of being in relationship with others. Identity is constructed relationally because who I think I am is to a very great degree shaped by my perception of the ways others experience me.

Being able to contemplate others as separate from our own thoughts is a crucial milestone in human development. As we behold another, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the face of the other looking back at us. All of this is rooted in our earliest experience as infants. Increasing brain development during infancy allows us to gradually build up a sense of separate selfhood as we discover ourselves in our mother’s face. We catch from our mother her sense of us, communicated through her touch, the sound of her voice, and principally through her gazing back at us.

Andrei Rublev’s archetypal depiction of the Trinity, from 1410, shows the Trinity as three identical persons sharing the same loving gaze.  His depiction shows God not as a singular entity but as a relational community. The figures are identical, reflecting the oneness of God, yet at the same time, each figure represents the separate and distinct ways in which Christian’s experience God.

Rublev shows God the creator on the left gazing at God the Son in the center and at God the Holy Spirit on the right. Son and Spirit each encounter themselves in the reflection of the Creator’s face as they mirror God’s gaze. For the identity of the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from the identity of the Creator. What the Councils of the early Church referred to as three persons being of one substance, we might rephrase as three expressions sharing one identity. 

Today, any serious exploration of the Trinity cannot be separated from the debate about gender. The Tradition of the Trinity ascribed masculine identities to the relational elements as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Despite the feminine noun for spirit in both Hebrew and Greek, even the Holy Spirit has been referred to as he. As 21^st century Christians, we hear God’s voice more clearly in nongendered ways. The traditional ascription of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is simply a by-product of patriarchal language and culture. Today we need to be sensitive to the fact that although Tradition has spoken in male terminology, the theological emphasis lies not in the gendered but in the relational nature of the names.

Understanding the relational nature of the patriarchal names, it then becomes possible to avoid the gendered terms and still retain the relational emphasis that binds the members of the Trinity into a unity. It’s common to hear Father, Son, and Holy Spirit referred to as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. However, creator, redeemer, and sanctifier denote economy of function, not unity in relationship. I prefer to refer to God as Lover, Beloved, and Love-Sharer, thus emphasizing the relational quality within the community of God that commends itself so powerfully to us in a world where the presence or absence of being in relationship is the significant measure of meaning and a key indicator of our quality of life.

The Trinity as devotion

Can we recapture in our own time and place a devotional approach to the Trinity?History turns full circle. As it was for the first followers of Jesus living in a pre-Christendom world, so for us living in a post-post Christendom world. Like them, our faith is less and less about conforming to right belief and more and more about living lives of right practice.

At the center of my daily devotional practice sits an icon of the Trinity written in the style of Rublev by Laura Smith, an accomplished icon writer, living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. This icon was a farewell gift to me from Laura and the congregation of Trinity Cathedral. When I gaze at each identical figure seated around the three sides of a table, I observe their mutual gaze of intimate love. This intimation of loving intimacy evokes in me my yearning for God. I too, long to catch a glimpse of my greater-truer self as I  gaze upon and sit before the gaze of the members of the divine community.

Sitting before the icon of the Trinity I am reminded that my identity is constructed within me through the interplay of my relationships around me. I experience myself shaped and reshaped continually through the way I experience others looking back at me.

Participating in the mutual gaze of Rublev’s representation of the Holy Trinity invites me to reaffirm my personhood as the image of God. I am reminded that I belong to a community that is, albeit and imperfect one, nevertheless a reflection of the Divine Community. Fashioned to be a relational being, I discover my individual identity as a fruit of being in divine community.

Three folds of the cloth yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snowflakes, and ice, all in water their origin share,
Three Persons in God: to one God alone we make our prayer.                                                                  

Spirit Imaginings

Picture if you can the moments following the Big Bang. Picture the intense concentration of matter and energy exploding outwards into the vacuum of space. Theologically, the uncreated source and first cause of all energy we name as God the Creator.

In your mind’s eye imagine the arresting image of dark, empty-formlessness covering an impenetrable deepness and the Spirit of God brooding over the dark emptiness of deep space. To my modern mind, this is an image of an organizing energy, an intentional energy that brings order out of chaos, creating form out of formlessness.

The Hebrew word used for Spirit is the feminine noun Ruach. It’s a surprise for many English speakers to realize that the Spirit of God carries the pronoun – she. The feminine principle evokes the images of bringing order out of chaos. Out of chaos, the universe is birthed- a process St. Paul in Romans imagines as the whole creation [which] has been groaning in labor pains until now.

Paul fashions this metaphor further as he tells us that as we too, have a part in the universe’s laboring. We groan, we pant, and we push driven by the hope of imminent new birth. In this state of travail, the Holy Spirit, like a midwife comes to our aid, brooding over our birthing of a new world.

For Luke, God’s Spirit brooding over the empty darkness of the deep at the beginning of creation now broods over the world a second time in a display of pyrotechnic, splendid, terror. For Luke, in this Pentecostal coming the Holy Spirit impregnates our DNA with God. Jesus has now ascended and God becomes built into our very nature empowering us to continue Jesus’ work as the agents for the coming of the kingdom.

*

Having seen the new Wonder Woman movie with my granddaughter Claire on Friday afternoon, I am reminded that Luke’s purpose is not to impress us with pyrotechnics like the latest blockbuster special effects. He wants to draw our attention, not to the manner of the Spirit’s descent, but to the effect upon humanity of the descent of the Spirit. The tongues of flame and the noise and rush of wind are metaphors for a new birth. At the Day of Pentecost the curse of Babel was lifted; difference no longer a scourge of division becomes the source for enrichment. Paul, in I Corinthians reminds us that in each of us, the Spirit takes appropriate expression so that our differences and diversity contribute to the building up of the whole.

Luke’s theological message is that for those born anew as members of the Church, it is no longer the business as usual of the old order;  a business based on discrimination, exclusion, and oppression of differences.

**

In the sonnet God’s Grandeur, the 19^th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, proclaims that:

The World is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil – Crushed.

Yet against the background of this optimistic proclamation, Hopkins questions why humanity is so reckless of God’s gift of creation: 

Why do men then now not reck his rod? (not recognize God’s rule?)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil and wears man’s smudge

and shares man’s smell:

The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Spirit Imperatives

In 21^st-century America the Holy Spirit broods over us still; birthing through us a new world order. If our commitment is not to the common ownership – from each according to ability, to each according to need – of the first Christian Communities, then it must be to the continual renewal of the ideal of the common good.

Among our politicians, lawyers and more latterly businessmen are overly-represented, producing a politics dominated by transactional thinking. This is not a phenomenon invented in the last four months. The early decades of the 21st-century have seen the complexities of society reduced by transactional thinking into a division between winners and losers. Transactional thinking corrodes our civic life to the point where now investment in long-term development is routinely sacrificed to short-term gain. Ideals degenerate into deals and the art of the deal has become the new way of being smart.

As a result, the disproportionate influences of transactional thinking produce a society where childcare, education, support of the elderly and infirm; where access to both legal representation and effective health care are all reduced to buying-power transactions.

Hopkins images our social relations: seared with trade, bleared, smeared, with toil wearing man’s smudge, sharing man’s smell. We have become a society where the differences of race, gender, and class most often translate into differentials of power and privilege. A society where access to the protections necessary for all in a thriving civic society are afforded the few but denied to the many.

We continue in our insensible stupor, failing to believe that climate change is not something that happens to other people, but is actually happening to us. Hopkins: The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod., gives us an image, of dangerous mental insulation in the face of the disavowed realities of lived experience.

***

The birth of the new Spirit-filled order comes as a challenge to the human propensity to distribute power, unequally. Luke’s vision of the Holy Spirit is of the anima – the feminine energy of new birth, embracing and celebrating the rich diversity of being human. Difference, no longer the scourge of division becomes the celebration of diversity as the Holy Spirit broods to birth the Kingdom among us.

The real point in Luke’s description of the Day of Pentecost lies not in the pyrotechnics of the Spirit’s arrival but in the transformation brought about in those gathered on the day. Lives were changed. A community of the fearful was transformed into a community of risk taking, radical living.

The question that should obsess us is not how to mimic early Christian social structure, but to ask what does the experience of transformed risk taking, radical living look like in our own time and place?

For many of us, a key agent for feeding personal transformation into the process for social change is our Christian faith. Yet, we have an expectation of the life of faith letting us off lightly. I believe this is what prevents us really taking this question seriously. We want to enjoy the comfort and sustenance of religion while expecting to escape largely unchanged by its radical imperatives.

We engage in acts of charity towards the less fortunate while failing to contend against systems that deprive whole communities of access to the fruits others of us expect to enjoy. We want to preserve our self-contained privacy from one another’s demands, and to be left untroubled to enjoy the fruits of our own material success, insulated by faith, carefully avoiding any imperative to change our worldview and shift our emphasis for our daily living.

God as Spirit is brooding over the abyss of the world continually calling forth order from chaos, creation from emptiness. At Pentecost God, as Spirit impregnated deep within the human DNA, filling the God-shaped space within us and the emptiness between us empowering us to now become co-creators with God in the healing of a broken world. I give way before the eloquence of Hopkins:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;  

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods –

with warm breast and with ahhhhh! – bright wings. 

Vada Roseberry’s Creation Window, Trinity Cathedral, Phoenix, Arizona.

Listen to God’s Grandeur  Gerard Manley Hopkins