Shane Hughes 6-21-26

Good morning, Highland. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. If this is your first time here, a delight to have you with us. My friend Brad texted me in the middle of service that it's fitting for Highland on Father's Day to turn off some of these lights that we really don't need on all the time.

Except for this one. That's, like, trying really hard. It's just doing the best it can. And we see you, light. We see you.

Today we're going to be talking about this story of Hagar and Ishmael. But to understand this story, you really have to understand some things about the Book of Genesis. And I'm going to try to tell you that really quickly. The best way to understand the book of Genesis is to look for a phrase that you almost always skip every time you start reading it. Now, if you're like me and you think it's January, I'm going to read the Bible in a year.

And I pick it up and I start to read and. And I will read through the book of Genesis. And it has so many amazing stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, all of these amazing stories. But the organizing principle in the Book of Genesis is this word. It's a Hebrew word called Toledoth.

And what it means is in the generations of. Now, when you read that line, I guarantee you almost every time, you. You just blow right past it. Because what follows is this, like, genealogy. So and so is the son of so and so is the son of so and so and nobody cares, Right?

This is the part you can skip and just kind of thank goodness that that was your chapter for the day. But actually, this is one of the most important parts of Genesis because it organizes the book into these separate vignettes, and each one matters.

At the beginning of Genesis, you see this cycle after creation, there's Adam and Eve, and they're placed in God's backyard, in the garden behind the palace of God and God. In the evening, when God is done with work, comes out and just hangs out to see what his children have been doing. But there's this cycle that happens because Adam and Eve, like all of humanity, rebel. And out of their rebellion comes a consequence. But out of that consequence, God provides the opportunity to birth new grace.

And you see this happen over and over and over. Adam and Eve eat the fruit that they should not eat. Because of that, they are no longer to live in God's backyard, in the garden, and they are sent away. They're Banished, exiled. But they are not exiled alone.

For God gives them clothing. God gives them clothes and then they have sons, Cain and Abel. And Cain becomes jealous of Abel. And so Cain rises up and kills Abel. And so he is also sent away.

But God gives him a mark. We don't know what Cain's mark was. Some people thought it was like a haircut or a dog or some sort of tattoo or a. A disfigurement on his face. We don't know what his mark was.

We know what our mark is. The mark that protects us from the dangers of the world. It's right there.

And then there's evil. And it's not brother against brother. It's about all of humanity just kind of inventing ways to do terrible things to one another. That God shaped image of creativity and imagination to, to create something that's never been before gets bent and twisted. So we're using that imagination to hurt one another.

And then God creates a terrible flood to just start over with Noah and his family. And so there is a consequence. But out of that consequence comes a rainbow. It's almost God's war bow that he sets in the sky to say, I will not make war on humanity again.

Sin, consequence, Grace. Sin, Consequence. Grace. Sin, consequence, grace. And the last story in this section of Scripture is the story of Babel.

And Lee is going to tell you she has an amazing sermon plan for you next week. But the people organized. Now, instead of people just inventing ways to be evil to one another, they organized in their rebellion against God. And God kind of has to stoop down to see what this tower is all about. It's so magnificent.

But God has to bend low even to notice it. And there's organized rebellion. So there's a consequence in this scattering and confusion. But what's fascinating about Genesis chapter 11, the story of Babel, is that the cycle kind of breaks. Sin, consequence.

But there's no clear grace. That is, until you read the next chapter in Genesis, chapter 12, where God calls Abraham now. And half of the time he's called Abram. And half the time she's Sarai. Half the time he's Abram.

Abraham and Sarah. So I'm just going to use Abraham and Sarah. But I know there's a name switch that happens in the middle. Doesn't really matter. You see what's happening is that God's response, God's grace to the organized rebellion of Babel is.

Is a tower, but it's a lighthouse where Babel creates a tower to show their magnificence God creates a lighthouse to show this is what it looks like when the people of God are living together in holiness and goodness. This is what it looks like to live in rightness with one another, but also with God. If you want to see what it looks like to live right with God, look at Abraham and his descendants. But there's a problem. The problem is Abraham has no descendants.

And every moment after this moment of God making this promise to Abraham is the question that follows the rest of his story. Can God keep his promise? Can God keep the promise? And the problem is pretty obvious. Abraham and Sarah are too old.

Now, I said this to a friend of mine who was older, and she took issue. She said, do not say that they are too old. Say that they are well equipped, but they are too old. Sarah laughs at the idea of becoming a mother because it's funny, but there's also a little bitterness in that cackle. And what follows is a very, very real, very close to reality, real world realities.

Because Abimelech and Pharaoh take Sarah into their houses. And if there is a child, it may not be Abraham's. Can God keep the promise? Abraham and Sarah try to solve the problem for God through Hagar, a maidservant. And that's the polite term, the actual servant.

Actual term might be better, slave. And this is the way that ancient Near Eastern people solved the problem of infertility. If we can't have a child, we're going to find somebody to help us, whether they want to or not.

And before we jump in in judgment about Abraham and Sarah's wisdom in this moment, or faith in this moment, I got to tell you that the apparent silence of God is completely unnerving. It's 25 years between God's promise to Abraham and God's fulfillment of Isaac. That's a long time to wait. And sometimes when it feels like God isn't moving and God isn't acting, and there's a pretty easy way to solve this problem, sometimes you just do. Makes people do all sorts of things.

And throughout the whole story, there's all of these other options. Lot could. Could Lot be the heir? Could Eliezer his servant, be the heir? And Ishmael, when Ishmael was born, that seems like great options.

And all those came. And the tension keeps building and building throughout the story. Can God keep God's promise? And then the child is born. And after around three or four years, where our story begins, Abraham throws a celebration.

Will you pray with me, Heavenly Father, we're delighted to be here. Together today, we celebrate life and goodness and all of the great things that we have received from you. We are grateful for the sun that came up this morning, the food that fills our bellies. God, we're thankful for this story that exists throughout time and space, who has endured through millennia that forms us and shapes us to a greater understanding of who you are and what you do in this world. And so God now admits of all of the distractions and the chaos, the complications of our life.

I pray that you bring us peace for a moment and pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak your truth and love to these, your people. It's together that Highland says amen. So there's a big party that's happening, right? Abraham has thrown a great feast, a great feast, the text says. And Isaac has been weaned.

And he's probably about three years old, maybe four. He's passed that time in the ancient near east where a child is most at risk of survival. And I imagine that Isaac is running around the edges of this celebration with. With all of the energy that only a four year old has. And everyone in the tent is laughing and there's so much joy.

And this family, finally, after all the years of waiting, after all the times that Sarah laughed the wrong kind of laugh, the bitter kind of laugh, the you've gotta be kidding me. Now there is a child. And at least at this feast, there is real laughter.

But then Sarah looks up and she sees Ishmael.

Now, in the Hebrew, the text for the word of what Ishmael is doing in this moment is the exact same root as the name of Isaac. He's. The text says that he is laughing with laughter. He's playing. And the Hebrew is not vague.

It literally says that Ishmael is laughing. And it's possible that Ishmael is just enjoying the party. And Sarah simply notices that he exists. And the reality is that his existence is a complication, because now there's going to be a question about inheritance, because Abraham has two sons, and this is not an accident. I think the author of the story is doing something very intentional.

There's two boys and there's two kinds of laughter. One whose laughter is the point, whose laughter is the promise, whose very name is the sound of joy, and one who is laughing at him, or another way to translate that is playing with him, playing with him the way a teenage brother might play with their toddler brother, or playing with him the way a cat might play with a mouse. We honestly don't know for certain the text is ambiguous and scholars have argued about this for centuries. Was Ishmael mocking Isaac? Was Ishmael throne threatening Isaac?

Or was he just being a teenager with his little brother at the birthday party, laughing too loud and taking up too much space, playing the role of the eldest son. The text leaves that open. But what the text does not leave open is Sarah's response. She goes to Abraham and says, without any hesitation and notice she can't even bring herself to say their names. And she says, cast out that slave woman.

And her son objects. Not people, not Hagar, not Ishmael, just that woman, that child, and Abraham.

Abraham is distressed. Abraham is greatly distressed, the text says, because Ishmael is his son. I think we forget that sometimes. I think we read this story as if Abraham only has one son, as if Isaac is the only child who matters. But Abraham loves Ishmael.

He watched the boy grow up. He taught Ishmael things. He held the boy. He has from the very beginning of chapter seven fallen on his face, laughing when God told him that his 99 year old wife was going to have baby because he said, what about Ishmael? Can't Ishmael be the one?

He loves both his sons and now he has to choose.

And God says. God says, send them away. Let them go. This isn't the path I'm building through, Isaac. But Hagar and Ishmael, I will take care of them.

I have not forgotten them. So send them away. And so Abraham wakes up up early in the morning. And I wonder why he wakes up early in the morning. You'll notice in the next chapter when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

It's the same time of the morning. Maybe it's early, before the sun is really up. Maybe it's before he can change his mind. He gives Hagar food and a skin of water and he sends her and Ishmael into the wilderness.

This isn't the first time that Hagar has left. We have to remember that this story has happened before. The first time she was in the desert. The first time she fled because of the way Sarah was teaching her. And an angel found her and said, God sees you.

And she gave God a name. Right then, Elroy, I see the God who sees me. And she named her son Ishmael. God hears this isn't the first time that Hagar has been in the desert.

But the water runs out and the food runs out and Ishmael starts to die.

And Hagar cannot watch.

And so she leaves her son under a bush and she walks about a bow shot away. A bow shot, the text says. And she sits down and she weeps.

And she's been there before.

She's now sitting in the desert watching her son die, wondering if her audacity to name what God, what she saw God to do in her life before, wondering if the names of God were. Were true.

And in that moment, God hears the boy crying. The text is very specific about that. God heard the boy. God heard Ishmael, the one whose name is God hears. God hears him.

And an angel calls out to Hagar, what's wrong? Don't be afraid. Get up. Lift up your son. Hold his hand.

And then she opens her eyes.

And there's a well right there, right in the middle of the wilderness. There was water. And she hadn't seen it because she'd been too consumed, perhaps, by grief to look. But the well was already there. It was there the whole time.

At some point in the history of the world, God had said to someone, build a well, because I'm going to need it later.

And here's the one thing I keep coming back to in this story. Hagar is not in the covenant. Ishmael is not the child of the promise. In fact, we're reminded of this in the New Testament. And this causes a little bit of, I think, tension in the story that Paul uses this story to demonstrate how some people are in the covenant and some people are out of.

Of the covenant. Hagar is not in. Ishmael is not in. And by every theological framework of the ancient world, they are the ones that don't matter. They're the ones that get displaced.

They're the ones that the story is going to leave behind.

And you don't have to have an ancient theological framework to see that happening all over the place.

People who the world has decided don't matter, who are inconvenient, who don't quite belong, and they kind of get given a thing of water and a little bit of food and best wishes.

But in this text, in the story of God's people, even the ones that are outside of the covenant, even the ones that don't belong, God cannot leave them behind. God hears them in the wilderness, which means this. The God of Abraham is not just the God of people who are in the right bloodline. The God of Abraham is the God who hears slaves crying, who sees women abandoned in deserts, who opens the eyes of the grieving so that they can find the water that was there all along. And here's the beauty of this thing ishmael becomes a great nation.

He becomes an archer. He spends the rest of his life pushing exactly how far a bow shot can go. And in that time he thrives. And his mother finds him a wife and he builds a life. And it's not the life that Abraham might have planned.

It's not the life that Ishmael might have planned. It's not the life he would have had if things had gone differently. But it's a real life, a life in which God was present.

And I think there's a version of this story where Hagar and Ishmael are just a footnote. They're casualties. It's collateral damage to a larger story of God's covenant people. And you could definitely tell the Abraham story with, without them. And that inconvenient fact just kind of put it in the white out and make it go away.

But the writer of Genesis refuses to do that. They get their own chapter, they get their own crisis, they get their own angel, they get their own well, they get their own God who hears them.

Which maybe means wherever you're at right now, when, whether you feel like you're in the main line of the story or you feel like you've been pushed to the margins, whether you feel like you're at the feast or if you feel like you're the one that got sent away, the God who heard the boy crying under a bush in the desert can hear you too.

And the promise of this story is that the well is already there to open your eyes. The story refuses to let us forget. Hagar didn't choose any of this. She was given, she was handed over. She was used to solve a problem that wasn't hers.

And when she became inconvenient, when the real heir finally arrived and the rival son was suddenly in the way, she was sent out into the desert with bread and a skin of water. And that's it. That's all she gets for years of service for the son she bore at some other woman's demand. And Ishmael, this boy, Abraham's firstborn, the son he loved, the son he woke up early to say goodbye to. Ishmael is just a problem now that needs to get solved.

And he is in the way of the inheritance, in the way of the promise, in the way of the future. And so he is removed quietly, before the sun comes up.

I think the world has a category for people like this. The one who ends up on the outside of the feast, looking in, wondering how they got there, wondering if anyone else even noticed. They were gone. This literally happened to me when I was growing up in my own family. We were at Thanksgiving, and it was one of those few Thanksgivings where there was a lot of folks there and somebody's boyfriend showed up, looks like one of my cousin's boyfriends.

And all of a sudden the whole urn shifted and turned because this was the boyfriend. And my brother and I, who were already seated at the Thanksgiving table, ready with our plates to eat Thanksgiving feast, were told to go into the kitchen so that we could make space for cousin's boyfriend. And at the kitchen table in high school, the two of us looking at one another, we realized, like, I guess we know how we fit into this family, right? The world has a category, but God doesn't. God never has.

God doesn't have a category for people who are no longer useful. God doesn't have a file marked outside the covenant. Not my concern. God doesn't look at Hagar and Ishmael dying in the desert and say, you know, the real story is happening somewhere else with. With someone else.

And these two are just on the edge of the frame. God hears the boy crying. God sees the woman weeping. And here's the word I want you to hear as we get to the close of this sermon. I think it's the word that holds this whole story together.

It's audacious. It's audacious the love that goes into the wilderness after the one the story left behind. It's audacious love that. That sends an angel not to the tent of the covenant, not to Abraham the patriarch, not to Sarah, who is nursing the child of promise. It sends an angel to a slave woman sitting alone in the desert, a bow shot away from her dying son.

At the absolute bottom of everything, it's audacious to ask the question that God asked that says, what's wrong, Hagar? Don't be afraid. Get up. Lift your son. Hold his hand.

Hold his hand. Not survive this, not push through it, not figure it out on your own. Hold his hand.

Have you ever been in the emergency department? You came in with someone you love, someone that's at risk and in trouble. And finally, when you get in to see the nurses and doctors and the experts, there's this kind of fury flurry that happens. And everyone has their purpose. There's someone there to take blood pressure and stats.

There's someone there to take blood. There's someone there to make diagnosis. There's someone to run tests. And everybody in that space has a purpose except for you. Everybody's Doing something that's very important to save the life of that person you love.

And you can do nothing. Medically, you are kind of useless and often in the way. But for healing, for comfort, you are the most important person in that room.

And so God tells Hagar to be present, hold his hand, because I've got the rest covered.

That is not the instruction of a God who is managing the situation from a distance. That is the voice of a God who is near, who is right there in the desert, who sees this particular child under that particular bush and says, that one. I hear that one. I am going to that one. It is El Roy.

It is the God who sees. And Ishmael, whose very name means God hears, God heard him. And that's who God is. Not just the God of the feast, not just the God of the promise and the covenant and the ones who are clearly in the story, not just the God who sees more stars than you could possibly count, more grains of sand than you could possibly see. This is the God who walks into the wilderness after the one who got.

Who got sent away, the God whose love is not rationed by status or usefulness, whose name is on the inheritance, the God who sees you, sees you, and the God who hears, hears you.

The God who sees and the God who hears is the God who loves.

Not carefully, not conditionally, not only when we're useful or the only one inside the right story. The God who sees and the God who hears is the God who loves. And that love is audacious. It's wild all the way out in the desert, all the way to the bottom of the waterskin, all the way to a bow shot from when everything falls apart and God is already there, the well is already there, and the only thing left for you to do, in fact, the only thing this text calls you to do is open your eyes to the God who hears your cry. Would you please stand for our benediction?