Tag Archives: Abraham

Crying in the Wilderness

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost/A • June 21, 2026

Genesis 21:9-21

In 2009, the Bloomfield Hills Andover High School held our 40th Class Reunion. There were two remarkable things about this to me. One was that it started with a few of us from the old artsy, sarcastic, theatre group—notably both of us who were elected Class Cynic in 1969—reconnecting over Facebook. That spread until the former Cool Kids did what they always did and took it over, completely changing the event into an expensive dinner at a country club. We were 40 years, but the old dynamics still operated, and I ended up growling to Jacquelyn about it endlessly. The other thing that was remarkable was that we all had changed. My best friend came; he used to be a kind of round guy with his hair in a ponytail; I didn’t recognize the skinny, balding guy with the “Richard” name tag. I think that’s when it dawned on me that I had changed too; I wasn’t 140 lbs. anymore, and there wasn’t much left of my long hair either. Our lives unfold, we change, and yet some of the old stuff always remains. 

That’s one of the things I get out of the story we read this morning. This summer, I want to focus on the story of the patriarchs with you, but we have some catching up to do. Two weeks ago, we heard how God called Abram and Sarai out of their home and sent them on a journey to a promise. The promise was a place to live as God’s people and generations to come after them. Now we heard this story about Sarah and Hagar and their sons and Abraham. Just like with the class reunion, a lot has gone on. So first, let’s catch up. Today is like when you missed a few episodes of a series and you have to binge-watch to catch up. 

When we left Abram and Sarai, they were just packing up and moving. They ended up going all the way to Egypt, a long walk. They get into trouble there; that’s a juicy story I suggest you go read on your own. They get kicked out of Egypt, but perhaps while they are there, they acquire an Egyptian maid for Sarai. Along the way, God comes again and makes a covenant with them and changes their names: they become Abraham and Sarah. It’s like losing your hair: life changes you, and they are changed. Still no child, and honestly? Sarah’s really gotten too old for a child. She must have grieved for this, don’t you think? She must have wondered what happened to that part of God’s promise, and Abraham wondered too, I’m sure. How was the promise ever going to be fulfilled?

So she does what women still do. She decides to use the best technology of the time for a woman who can’t get pregnant. In this time, that means getting a surrogate mother. The custom is to officially send your maid to your husband, have her get pregnant with him; I’m not going into all the details. Because she’s your maid, it’s as if it’s your child; because it’s your husband, it’s his as well. So she sends her maid Hagar to Abraham. Hagar has a baby, and he’s named Ishmael, which means “God hears”. So all is well: Abraham has a son, they move to Canaan, and it looks like the promise is working out.

Except this isn’t God’s plan. They’ve missed an important step: waiting for God to fulfill the promise. Instead, Sarah has decided to hurry things along. Our patience and God’s timing don’t always align, and they didn’t here. That doesn’t mean God’s late; it means we’re early. One day, three mysterious visitors appear; Abraham has a big barbecue in their honor. Even today in the Middle East in traditional culture, women and men don’t eat together, and the host doesn’t eat with the guests; he serves them. So the visitors sit down to eat, Sarah is outside the tent listening in, Abraham is getting the food out, and wow! It turns out one of the visitors is God! This is a thing we miss about God: the way God shows up when least expected. And what God says is that in the spring, Sarah is going to have a baby. 

Now these people aren’t stupid. They certainly know there’s a point in a woman’s life where she’s no longer able to conceive. So when Sarah hears this, she thinks what women think when men say things that show they are totally ignorant about women. And she laughs, she laughs so hard they hear her in the tent. God asks about her laughing; Abraham tries to cover up as husbands sometimes do and says she didn’t laugh, but they all know the truth. God asks the fundamental question all people of faith have to answer: is anything too hard for God? It turns out that having an old woman get pregnant isn’t, and sure enough, in the spring Sarah has a baby, and he’s named ‘Isaac’, which means “one who laughs”. Babies are weaned after about three years back then, so that day comes, and Abraham holds another big feast to celebrate. Ishmael, —remember Ishmael?—is about 15. Now we’re all caught up to the story we read today. 

The story starts with a party; it’s important to remember that these people don’t live alone, they are part of a whole group, herding animals. The boys are playing; it may be that Ishmael is teasing Isaac, the Hebrew is obscure. Sarah doesn’t like it and she doesn’t like the idea that Ishmael might compete with her son. Sarah and Hagar have had a difficult relationship all along. So she goes to Abraham and says, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Notice that she doesn’t even name Hagar and Ishmael; it’s “this slave woman” and “her son”. This is how we distance ourselves from people, isn’t it? We have an instinctive kindness that operates when we see someone as an individual, even more when we know their name; when we are going to be cruel, we prefer not to use names, we refer to them by some group. Sarah is proud of her son, she’s proud of her role in fulfilling God’s promise and she doesn’t want that muddied up with Ishmael.

Abraham doesn’t like it but he goes along with what she says. Helpfully, he comes up with these ideas of God’s plan: that both boys will become the patriarchs of clans somehow. So he takes a skin of water and some bread, does what Sarah demanded, casts them out into the wilderness. It reminds me of Adam and Eve: Eve takes the fruit from the forbidden tree and gives it to Adam, remember? He just eats what he’s given. Here, Abraham just does what Sarah says. 

It’s meant to lift up a mirror to our lives: how God’s promise weaves through them, how our pride and anger sometimes get in the way. Of course, the water runs out; of course, the bread runs out; anyone who’s ever fed a 15-year-old boy knows food doesn’t last long with them. So before long, Hagar and Ishmael are starving and dying of thirst. Hagar puts him under a tree, goes off a ways, because she can’t stand to see him suffer. She cries; he’s crying too. There, in the parched wilderness, where silence engulfs the world, perhaps the only sound is their cries. Until an angel, a messenger from God, speaks up and answers the cry. Suddenly, she sees an oasis with a well, and they are saved. I love a happy ending, don’t you?

There’s a lot to learn here about how God works in the world, how God works with us. The first thing is that God’s purpose is like the tide; it can’t be resisted, it can’t be hurried. Sarah and Abraham tried to use Hagar to hurry things along; now Hagar is crying in the wilderness because their plan led to anger and spite. 

The second thing is that God hears cries in the wilderness. Hagar is the first person in the whole Bible to weep; later, we’re going to see that God consistently hears cries. This past week included the celebration of Juneteenth, the day when slavery was finally ended in our country. We have all kinds of words to cover up the horror of that Holocaust. We talk about the “antebellum South”, forgetting that it was a place of oppression for most of its people. We call the places where slaves worked “plantations” when they were really slave labor camps. In those camps, people were treated as less than animals; they were whipped and tortured and literally worked to death until finally a great and awful war, one of its battles on our very doorstep, was fought to end that terrible curse. President Lincoln recognized in his Second Inaugural address the connection between the destruction of the Civil War and the sin of slavery.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp]

God heard the cry of those slaves and freed them, and thank God for that.

Now we read this story, and it challenges us to ask: who are we sending into the wilderness? What cries are coming to God? Who have we refused to name? What cares is God hearing, and how does God intend to use us to answer those cries? If we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who hurt in order to heal; if we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who are crying to give hope. 

At the end of the story, Hagar and Ishmael find new life. Hagar gets Ishmael a wife in Egypt; their story will go on. It’s an article of faith in Islam that the Prophet Muhammad, the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is descended from Ishmael, just as it is an article of faith in Judaism that Jews are descended from Isaac. The Apostle Paul says we are adopted into this family as children of Abraham.

So this is our family story: not everyone acts well all the time. We stumble, but we walk forward. And if we walk forward in faith, following Christ, it can only be that we also learn to hear the cries in the wilderness. For as Paul said, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making an appeal through us. 

Amen

Second Sunday After Pentecost/A

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Laughing With God

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Second Sunday After Pentecost/A • June 18, 2017

Genesis 18:1-15

This is a season of announcements. Graduation announcements suddenly open our eyes to the fact that a person we thought was still safely a child has a new address in the adult world. Wedding announcements invite us to share the joy in lighting the hearth fire of a new family and birth announcements that let us know the candle of a new life has been lit. Usually we know these people and the announcements make us nod. But suppose we received an announcement that a senior woman had just had a baby; imagine getting a message that someone in her 80’s or 90’s had just birthed a child. That would be a shock—probably most of all to her! This story has just such a moment at its core and a question: do we believe God is serious about fulfilling promises?

Abraham and his family are relaxing in the heat of the day,. There is a moment on hot days when the heat itself becomes a presence, when things in the distance tremble, when mirages appear, when the world almost seems to melt. It is just then that Abraham, dozing under some oaks, trying to find a tiny bit of shade, opens his eyes for a moment and sees three strangers approaching in the distance. At first they would have that shimmering, liquid look heat causes; at first, I think, he might assume he was dreaming.

Yet from the first, I imagine Abraham waking, the way we wake if car lights flash and someone pulls in the drive unexpectedly at midnight. I imagine him watching just long enough to confirm this is no dream, no mirage, and then stirring. Strangers are dangerous in the desert. At the same time, desert culture then and now has a code of hospitality. So Abraham stirs; I think of him kicking his foreman, napping next to him, the man waking and looking, seeing the look of concern, getting up, waking the next person down the line in the pecking order and the whole camp stirring, so that by the time the strangers can be solidly seen, the camp is up. Abraham meets the strangers at a distance—a safety measure as much as a gesture of hospitality: what do they want? must be on everyone’s mind.

Feast Time!

Abraham offers hospitality and he offers it in humble language we understand. “Don’t get above yourself” is one of our cardinal virtues. Don’t ever announce you are the best cook, the best anything. “Let me bring a little bread,” Abraham says—and then goes back to the camp and orders a banquet. Imagine the rushing around, the measures of meal that kneaded by women sweating and straining, the cooking in the heat of the day, the barbecued calf on a spit. It’s not a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips; it’s a whole feast. If it were here, there would be deviled eggs and table decorations. If it were here, there would be sputtering about what does he expect us to do on such short notice—and then a determination to do more than anyone thought possible.

All this takes time and that’s fine. Even today in the Middle East, it’s customary to sit and drink coffee or tea and chat before doing business. So I imagine that when the feast is finally served, it is hours later. The strangers have relaxed; the people in the camp are exhausted. As is customary, women are excluded from the tent where the food is served and Abraham himself does not recline with the guests; he acts as the server of food. Still, people are people; this is a camp with many people. There are girls calculating the cuteness of the strangers, there is curiosity, and among the curious there is Sarah, who listens just outside, who wonders just outside.

A Child?

Just as custom defines the host’s responsibility for serving, it commands certain behaviors for guests. When the stranger suddenly asks about Abraham’s wife, it is a shocking violation of manners. “Where is your wife, Sarah?”, the guest asks and Abraham tries to cover it by saying she’s off in the tent. The storyteller reminds us in delicate language that Sarah is well past menopause. And then the stranger announces, as if commenting on the unusual heat this year, in an offhand way, “I’ll be back this way one day and Sarah will have a son.”

It’s a birth announcement for a woman in her 90’s. I imagine all conversation stopping; I imagine a deadly silence, a conversational period occurring. In a moment this stranger has brought up the most painful, difficult, dark, private reality of life here. Long ago, this family, this couple, set out on a life journey pushed by the promise of God that there would be children. No children have come; no babies have been born. Year after year, they waited; season after season they hoped. Time after time they must have prayed—and cried; raged, even sometimes at each other. Yet there was no child.

Finally, there was no escaping the reality: the promise was broken, the time had run out. “It had ceased to be with Sarah after the way of women,” the text says. No child: no child ever. They must have grieved until their grief became one of those sadness scars one puts away; too painful to visit often, too important not to visit sometimes. So here they are, two people who have finally relaxed with the failure of the promise. And here is this stranger throwing their hope in their face, opening their most painful wound. For the scar of hope turning into hopelessness always leaves a scar.

Is Anything Too Hard for the Lord?

Hope is a scary thing. Hope makes us laugh and the laughter makes us vulnerable. Sarah and Abraham have stopped laughing about their hope. When the stranger makes his announcement, Sarah laughs, but it’s not the laughter of hope, it’s the laughter of derision; the deep belly laugh of all women in all times at the silliness of men who simply don’t understand things, don’t understand about women and babies. Sarah laughs, laughs so hard that in the stillness of that moment, her laughter must have echoed in the tent. “Oh my God,” I hear her saying, “Me, pregnant!” The stranger hears her and asks this simple question: Is anything too hard for the Lord?

It’s a good question: what do you think? Is anything too hard for the Lord? The truth is most of the time we are a lot like Sarah. We think lots of things are too hard for the Lord, so we do them ourselves, best we can. But our best isn’t always enough and our best comes with the certain knowledge that there’s only so much we can do. When Sarah gets too old for children, she knows it, she admits it, and she gets a young maidservant to have a child by Abraham so at least there will be an heir. We reel from a setback and try to make a new plan, we pound on the closed-door of a dream until our knuckles hurt and then we give up. Sarah laughs, not in laughter, but in the silliness of believing.

Here is another plan: here is another hope. The hope is that there are more possibilities than we know. It’s never practical to announce this; practical people, people like you and I, always say to such hope, “Well, what do you have in mind?” and there is no answer because it is the point of such hope that it is not in the mind, it is not rational at all. It is the simple, deep, conviction that nothing indeed is too hard for the Lord; it is the willingness to stop knocking and wait for God to fulfill the promise. An Peter, Paul and Mary song asks, “Can you believe in something you’ve never seen before?”; often the answer is, “Well, quite honestly, I can’t.”

Yet we have that possibility; we have that capability: to believe there is more than we know, more than we have seen. The core of this, the path to it, is to understand that God does indeed deal in fulfillment. God promises and always makes good on the promise; our problem is that we assume God will do it the way we want and the way we expect and on our time-table. But a look at the Bible show is that God’s fulfillment is always more exuberant, bigger, wilder, than anything we had imagined. It doesn’t happen when we expect: it comes as a surprise.
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Believing in God’s Fulfillment

It’s not easy to believe in such fulfillment. We are much more comfortable with limits. I used to have a three-year old friend named Leah Miller whose mother owned a café. Leah liked to play cook and she had a little plastic kitchen. A standard meal at Leah’s kitchen consisted of pancakes, french fries and ketchup. Usually the pancakes had sprinkles on them; in fact, it was usual in ordering food at Leah’s kitchen to have the pancakes served and then to say, “May I have sprinkles please?”. If you didn’t ask, she would prompt: “You forgot to ask for sprinkles.” But the one day, when Leah was imagining cooking pancakes and french fries for her grandmother, and I was watching, something strange happened. Leah held out her hands—”there you go”—and served the pancakes. But when her nana asked for sprinkles, Leah looked at her sadly and said, “We don’t have any sprinkles, we’re out.” No imaginary sprinkles today.

We need to imagine more sprinkles. We need a bigger imagination; we need more laughter. We need the laughter of hope. We need to imagine more and more than imagining, we need to simply believe this: that nothing is too hard for the Lord. We need to get up each day not full of what we are going to do but prepared, alert, ready to see, to really see, off in the distance, God approaching, ready to announce what we had not even begun to imagine. Then indeed, living as faithful people, laughing people, will be as natural as a child’s laugh at an unexpected rainbow.

Amen.