Hard Texts:  Father Abraham Had LOTS of Kids!

Genesis 12:1-6

September 17, 2006         (Click the date to see the bulletin)

 

1.  Last Spring I was trying to get from the back of the Borders Book Store to the check-out counter, which takes me a long time.  As I rounded the last corner, I ran smack dab into a SALE table.  Buy 1 – get 3 for $1 each or some such big bargain.  One of the books I bought was Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler,^[i] which I promptly put in the stack of books I’ll get around to some day.  Then, the first of August, Doug Rucker, our custodian, left the very same book on my desk.  Inside he wrote, “Pastor Ann.  A gift from Lisa and me.  Doug”   He had no way of knowing exactly how much of a gift this book would be, because it wasn’t long before I asked you to “Name That Sermon.”  One of you requested a topic: “There is only one God!” and added a question: “How do we understand the Muslim faith?”  It was then that I realized this book was the answer to my own question: “How am I going to answer that question?”   Gratefully, this book contains the answer.

2.  Have you ever wondered how to understand the Muslim faith?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  When I was growing up, first in Wyoming and then Bartlesville, I’m pretty sure there were no Muslims living there, so there wasn’t any reason for me to even want to understand Islam.  (Islam, by the way, is the name of the religion; Muslims are the people who practice that faith.)   It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Tulsa Council of Churches (which until then had been a completely Christian organization) began to realize we Christians had company – there were Jews among us!  And they discovered that the Jews weren’t just company – they were members of our own family!  You see, Christians and Jews in the religious family are like brothers and sisters in a biological family – siblings who had a falling out many years ago, and only began speaking to each other in the last 50 years.  In 1971, Tulsa Council of Churches open its doors to its Jewish siblings, and became Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry.  As time went on, our extended “family of faith” learned that we had cousins through a half-uncle, so to speak, and began slow steps to get acquainted with them – the Muslims.   In 1983, Muslims officially joined Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry.  That organization works very hard to increase understanding between members of all three related faiths.

3.  Bruce Feiler, who wrote this book, is himself a Jew who grew up in Savannah, Georgia.  He had developed a great curiosity about his own identity as a Jew, and decided the best way to ‘scratch his curious itch’ was to re-enter the landscape of the Bible.  It had been a peaceful place then, and the result was Walking the Bible, the predecessor of his book about Abraham.  But this time things were different.  It was no longer easy to move from one place in Israel to another.   Now headlines in the Jerusalem news shouted words like apocalypse, clash of civilizations, crusade,  and jihad.  And in every conversation, at some point, the name of Abraham would surface.  Abraham seemed to hold the key to the past, and perhaps even the key to the future.  He summarized this key by saying that Abraham is “the great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible, the spiritual forefather for Christians in the New Testament, and the grand holy architect of the Islamic Koran.”  

4.  Feiler wanted to discover how Abraham managed to serve as the “father” for the descendants whom God promised would number as many as the stars, but who where now busy shoving one another aside and claiming him as their own personal “father.”  (His name literally means “father of many nations.”)  Half of the people alive today claim him as their “father.”  He is, however, largely unknown.  If he existed at all, he left no evidence – no sacred writings or fancy buildings can be traced back to him.  So Feiler designed an unconventional journey to find Abraham, a journey through place and time – over four thousand years, through three religions, up to and including one never-ending war.

5.  As he journeyed through Israel, Bruce Feiler discovered that God needed Abraham.  “Humans are clearly central to God’s world.  God wants them to be his representatives on earth.  But humans disappoint.”  And he lists three examples: “Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.  Ten generations pass.  God is sorry he created humanity and decides to start over.  So he chooses Noah, a righteous man.  But Noah, by getting drunk after sailing the ark, indicates that he prefers the bottle to God.  Ten more generations pass, during which humans show they want to be like God.”   So they unite to built a tower to the heavens.  “But God does not want to be imitated.  God wants to be loved.  God needs someone faithful, someone who won’t disobey him and who will appreciate the blessings that he has to offer.  Above all, God needs someone who will needs him in return, and who will rise to his lofty standards.  God needs Abraham.”

6.  Abraham is a shadowy figure at best.  He’s not exactly a nomad, but he doesn’t have a home, either.  From the beginning he is different from Adam and Noah and the Tower Builders.  He is not special, like Adam; he is not righteous, like Noah; and he does not aspire to be godly, like those who built the Tower of Bable.  And to make matters worse, at the age of 75 he has no heir.  Yet today Jews, Christians and Muslims trace their birth story to Abraham’s story, even though they do not all agree on the details, including, interestingly enough, exactly which son God asked him to sacrifice: Isaac, or Ishmael.

7.  It is this disagreement, I believe, which provides some of the ammunition that perpetuates “the war” between us.  Jews, and subsequently we Christians, revere Abraham’s son Isaac as one of the fathers of our faith.  Isaac is the one identified in Genesis 22 as the son whom God asked Abraham to sacrifice.  Isaac, you’ll remember, is not Abraham’s only son.  He’s not even Abraham’s first son.  First sons in that part of the world during those days were the only important sons.  First-born sons received a double inheritance and succeeded their father as head of the family.   Isaac was not the first-born; Ishmael was.  Sarah, Abraham’s wife, had not been able to conceive, so she gave her maid Hagar to be a kind of surrogate mother.  And it worked!   Hagar delivered Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael.   At this point, the story begins to rival today’s soap operas.  Great rivalry develops between Sarah and Hagar.  It’s right here in the Bible!  Genesis 21:11 – “The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.  But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you.  As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him, also, because he is your offspring.”   So, while Jews and Christians trace their heritage back to Abraham through Isaac, Muslims trace their heritage back to Abraham through Ishmael.

8.  And there’s the rub.  What happens next requires more time to describe than I have right now, so I won’t.  You can borrow my book if you want to read it yourself.  Abraham is mentioned in 25 of the Islamic Koran’s 114 suras; in 12 of the Christian “New Testament” books; and in 16 of the Jewish “Old Testament” books.  For Muslims, the predominant message about Abraham is that he was “completely devoted to God,”  For Christians, the foundation is that “he believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”  (Romans 4:3).  For Jews, he is one who was close to God, but not wedded to the land, someone who could move about when need be.  All three religions officially come to believe that God wants them to include everyone.  Yet extremists in all three want to claim superiority.  Feiler quotes Hanan Eschel.  “If you ask me, it’s a question of modesty.  Why do religious people act the way they act?   It’s because of a lack of modesty. . . Some people read the text and believed that had all the answers.”

9.  It’s the extremists, those “immodest” ones in every religion who create the most strife.  They are the ones we read about in the news, the ones who cause people to cringe at the mere mention of Jews, or Christians, or Muslims.  Yet Feiler writes that “this perpetual stream of Abrahamic ideals has existed just under the surface of the world for as long as humans have told themselves stories.”  God needed Abraham, he says, and so do we.  “We can be like Abraham,” he writes.  “We can leave behind our native places – our comfortable, even doctrinaire traditions – and set out for an unknown location, whose dimensions may be known only to God but whose mandate is to be a place where God’s blessing is promised to all.” (Page 216) 

10.  Feiler begins his book about Abraham by relating an encounter with another Jew on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  The Temple Mount.  God’s Holy Hill is that one point on the face of the earth where these three faiths intersect.^[ii]  His friend David says this is the place where the estranged family will realize that they need each other.  “This is not only the spot where it is possible to connect with God, it’s the spot where you can connect with God only if you understand what it means to connect with one another.  The relationship between one person and another human being is what creates and allows for a relationship with God.  If you’re not capable of living with each other and getting along with each other, then you’re not capable of having a relationship with God. . . So the question is not whether God can bring peace into the world.  The question is: Can we?” (Page 14)

11.  “How do we understand or deal with the Muslim faith?”  We have to begin with conversations.  Many of them.  Feiler has started a movement toward that very end.  He calls it Abraham Salons, gatherings of people at the grass-roots level, discussing what they have in common, and what they don’t have in common.  Maybe it’ll make a difference.  Until then, tho, we will have to find ways to make our own difference.  We will need to work on connecting with one another, right here, right now.  We connect by listening carefully to each other in love, stating what we believe after careful study, and then having the courage to say, “I may be wrong. “  Father Abraham had LOTS of kids, and we are only some of them.