SERMON STRUCTURE: The Children of Abraham
Genesis 21:1-21
CIT (Central Idea of the Text): God took care of Abraham’s first son Ishmael when Sarah had Abraham sent him and his mother Hagar away. (19 words).
SERMON FOCUS: God always accomplishes God’s purposes, sometimes in spite of well-meaning but misdirected human efforts that threaten to undo God’s plans.
MO: Consecrative
SO: Wait for God’s direction before rushing out headlong on a course of your own!
TITLE: The Children of Abraham
Then … the completed sermon should be evaluated in terms of how well it adheres to the CIT and SF, and accomplishes its SO.
INVOCATION
OUTLINE OF Genesis 21:1-21
Sarah’s son Isaac is born (21:1-7).
Sarah demands that Abraham send away Ishmael and his mother Hagar (21:8-11).
God promises Abraham that He will take care of Ishmael (21:12-13).
Abraham sends Ishmael and his mother Hagar away (21:14).
Hagar anticipates the death of Ishmael due to lack of water (21:15-16).
God hears the cry of Ishmael and provides water for him and Hagar (21:17-19).
God protects Ishmael as he becomes an adult (21:20-21).
SERMON DEVELOPMENT
The Children of Abraham
Genesis 21:1-21
Do you like to watch the soap operas on TV?
Do you keep up with all the comings and goings of folks on these shows?
Do you know the latest twists and turns in the plots?
Or, if you are of a more classical bent, do you like “real” opera?
Most of us probably know the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet, but do we know who wrote that story? [William Shakespeare]
And what about another fairly well-know opera: La Boheme?
Do you know who wrote that opera? [Giacomo Puccini]
Do you know what popular Broadway musical was based on that story? [Rent]
Or, what about your own family life, or your work situation?
Are those parts of you life sometimes like a soap opera to you, full of twists and turns that no one can expect?
Do you sometimes think you’d just like to change the channel in your own life and find something more peaceful and serene?
Life is like that sometimes.
And the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is full of stories that could easily come from a real opera, or a television soap opera.
Today we begin a series of three sermons on the life of Abraham — three stories that portray real-life people coping with real-life situations.
And like the most of us, in coping with these situations, sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.
So let’s tune in and see what’s going on!
Our Scripture is Genesis 21:1-21. I am reading from the New Revised Standard Version.
[Read here Genesis 21:1-21 (NRSV).]
These verses describe how God took care of Abraham’s first son Ishmael when Sarah had Abraham send him and his mother Hagar away.
We discover in this passage how God always accomplishes God’s purposes, sometimes in spite of well-meaning but misdirected human efforts that threaten to undo God’s plans.
But we will have to be careful that we don’t take God’s ability to undo our misdirected initiatives as an excuse to do whatever may seem good in our own eyes!
Our story highlights the tensions between Abraham’s first son Ishmael, and his mother Hagar, and Abraham’s second son, Isaac, and his mother Sarah.
You remember the background of this long story.
God’s first call to Abram, as he was then known, came to him while he lived in his homeland of Haran.
The account of God’s calling appears in Genesis 12:1-9.
God said to Abram, “1Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing … 3and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3).
Later on, God spoke again to Abram, saying, “1Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield, and your reward will be very great. … 5[God] brought [Abram] outside [his tent] and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ 6And he [Abram] believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:1,5,6).
But then something very human, and very common, happened to Abram and his wife Sarai.
They were both getting very old — Genesis 16:15 tells us that Abram was now 86. And Sarai was still childless.
And Sarai came up with a very practical solution to her problem: she gave her slave girl Hagar to her husband as a wife, and from that union a son was born. (Genesis 16:1-7).
And right away, there was trouble between Sarai and her former slave-girl, now the mother of Abram’s first son, whom Hagar named Ishmael.
And the angel of God promised to Hagar that her son Ishmael would be “…a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” (Genesis 16:12).
Abram and Sarai took the initiative to “fix” what God seemingly had left undone — they took it upon themselves to do for themselves what God had promised to do for them.
And that’s a pattern every one of us has followed at some time in our lives.
But thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, God renewed the covenant with Abram.
And this time, God was more explicit: God said to Abram, “16I will bless her [Sarah], and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” (Genesis 17:16).
And in about a year, as our passage for today begins, “1The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. 2Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age.” (Genesis 21:1).
But as you might imagine, the birth of Abraham’s second son, Isaac, only added to the family troubles.
Sarai had been jealous of how easily Hagar gave Abram his first son, Ishmael, and that jealousy nearly ended in the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael from the family right away.
And now that a “true” or legitimate son had been born to Abraham by way of his real wife Sarah, the conflict was renewed.
Sarah had a legitimate concern in this matter: Ishmael was indeed Abram’s first son, and entitled to a share in Abram’s inheritance, and Sarah was of course very protective of her own son’s “rights.”
And so Sarah demanded that Abraham send his oldest son, now age 14 to 16, away, along with his mother Hagar.
We need to remember here that Ishmael was now not just a teenager by our standards, but fully an adult, and that as Abraham’s first, and until now, only child, Abraham was very fond of him.
In fact, when God confirmed to Abraham that his wife Sarah would bear him a son, Abraham’s first thought was for his son Ishmael.
The Scripture tells us that “18Abraham said to God, ‘O, that Ishmael might live in your sight!” (Genesis 17:18).
And that too is a common experience with us all: having taken matters into our own hands, we fervently pray — and expect — and perhaps even anticipate — that God will bless what we have done!
How much better would it have been for Abram and Sarai to wait for God’s action in the first place!
And how much better is it for us to wait for God’s direction before rushing out headlong on a course of our own!
And we have an advantage in this matter that Abraham and Sarah did not have: with the coming of Pentecost, God has given the Holy Spirit to every believer — for Jesus said, “13But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.” (John 16:13).
But there is yet one more aspect of this story that we need to notice briefly:
It is in part a point to which we seem to keep returning, not so much at my initiative, but because it is a theme that seems to run through the Scriptures that are suggested to us by the Revised Common Lectionary.
We know of course that Abraham is considered the father of the Jews or the Israelites.
The Jews reckon their descent from Abraham by way of Abraham’s second son, Isaac.
And we proudly claim our heritage as Christians as the spiritual descendants of the Jewish people. We too are the descendants of Abraham through Isaac.
But we must take careful notice here about what God says about the descendants of Abraham’s first son Ishmael:
“13As for the son of the slave woman [God says] , I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” (Genesis 21:13).
The descendants of Ishmael are the Arabs of today.
And we must not lose sight of the fact that the Arabs are likewise the children of Abraham, and likewise our spiritual kinfolk.
From both the Jews and the Arabs we claim our spiritual heritage and our monotheistic faith.
With the Jews we proclaim, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord Alone!”
And with the Arabs we can likewise claim, “There is no God but The God!”
With the Jews we proclaim our devotion to God by the keeping of God’s commandments.
And with the Arabs we can likewise enter into that personal struggle, that personal jihad, for personal righteousness and holiness before God.
And yet, as we claim our religious kinship with both the Jews and the Arabs, let us never lose sight of the central truth of our own faith — the defining truth that no other faith shares — that “19God was in Christ Jesus, reconciling the world unto Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the Word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19)..
Let us therefore claim our heritage as the descendants of Abraham, both by Abraham’s second son Isaac, and by his first son Ishmael!
But let us claim chiefly our spiritual heritage by way of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ.
And unlike the physical sons of Abraham, let us cease the bickering among us about who has primacy in God’s inheritance, for I believe that it is in God’s providence to bring us all into relationship with Himself.
And let us be careful in our eagerness to serve God, and to excel in our service to God, not to run before God in God’s own purposes and God’s own ways of reconciling this world unto Himself.