SERMON FOR JUNE 20, 1999
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
HEBREW TESTAMENT: “Another Great Nation” ~ Genesis 21:8-21
Excerpted from “Our Fathers’ Wells: A Personal Encounter with the Myths of Genesis
by Peter Pitzele
The best that can be said about their damnable Bible is that they had the temerity to include us, or at least a few of us, in it. Most of us were written out, excised, edited away, forgotten; whole tribes and nations, families, mothers and daughters and women (particularly women, of whom my own mother is an instance) slaughtered by oblivion. Only his lineage and his line remain, Great Abraham’s. His line and Sarah’s---mustn’t forget her---now stands in their book as the dominant strain. Dominant to be sure, dominant by guile, dominant by repression, dominant by betrayal, by the expulsion of the unchosen, by the murder of the uncircumcised. What a deluded lot, and that’s putting it kindly. Some would say demonic. Yes, the best that can be said is that my mother’s name is listed, Hagar, and my name with hers, Ishmael, first son and only son of Abram. Abram! He retired that name, disowned himself, his deed, and me.
What they did to my mother is unspeakable. Sarah used her, became furiously jealous of her, threw her out, took her back, stole her child, me, and then sent both of us away again. This time she sent us to what would surely have been our deaths had not I found water and killed some game, while my poor mother, in her thirst and terror, heard voices and went mad. Sarah did this. I curse her name. And she and my mother had been close once, almost sisters. Hagar had been a gift to Sarai---when that was her name---from Pharaoh; she had nursed Sarai back to health after they left Egypt, when Sarai’s heart was broken and bitter. They understood each other, even when they fought.
But Abram! He was my father. I loved him. I thought he loved me, but in the end he was a weak pathetic man. Let me tell you how it was, how it really was.
In my earliest years I knew only Sarai as my mother, for this was the agreement she had forced my mother to make. By no sign was Hagar to know me, nor was she ever to approach me. She lived among the foreign-born slaves, close to the livestock. But you cannot keep secrets in a clan. There were always whispers, and by the time I was a boy of seven I knew that Sarai was not my mother, and I drew away from her. When I could, I spent time with the serving boys, I went into the fields with the flocks. I saw my mother, Hagar, when no one observed me.
So I grew up divided in a divided house. I belonged nowhere. My father loved me with a starved possessive love. He drew me to him with stories. He filled my mind with the tales of his people and the lore of his God. I doubt he could see my hesitations, for I held something back from him, mistrustful of his zeal and enthusiasms. Besides, I was not an apt student. Always I wanted to be off hunting, or in the wild grazing places with the other boys. Sarai was always stiff with me, and after I learned she was not my mother, I came to hate her with a silent coldness.
But of all the things I went through with that father-man and his Father-God, the strangest was being mutilated with the knife. I was thirteen when he took me up to a high place and told me that his God had commanded him to cut off our foreskins, his first, then mine, then those of all the men in the tribe, slaves and servants, foreign and blood born.
It is a terrifying thing when a man comes at you with a knife, comes at you there. Can you understand a God who asks for this kind of act as a way of sealing his bargain with you? I never could. Abraham assured us all this was not meant to humiliate us; this was to be a sign, he said, of our special relationship with God. It was a sign on our flesh like the rainbow was a sign in the sky. I only know it hurt.
Then I learned that forever afterward infant boys were to be cut like this on the eighth day of their life. I was there when Abraham cut Isaac. No one laughed that day, I’ll tell you that. I don’t know what it was like for others, but when I came to be with women, I always felt my difference from other men. It was like a part of my body had been taken from me, or it had been make to mean something I hadn’t chosen it to mean. I had been mutilated for the sake of a future that was never going to be my future and for the sake of a pact with a God who was never going to be my God.
Abram had always tried to get me to understand his God. He told me the stories, but Mother would tell me stories, too, when I could sneak away and spend time with her. I always wanted to be a great hunter like the Egyptian God Osiris, not a shepherd like Abram. So there we were; he was chanting and praying and sharpening a knife. For him I suppose it was all part of some attempt to bond us in some strange communion with his God. But for me it was the last straw. Now I knew him for what he was, a fanatical, God-maddened man who would do anything this God commanded. From then on he loved me more; I loved him less. I feared him, not because he would ever willingly harm me---he never lifted a hand against me in all our years together, and I will tell you I provoked him more that once---but because he would do anything his God would ask, and his God would ask anything. I believe if his God had said to him to take me up there and cut off my head, he would have done it.
We were sojourning in Gerar when things came to a head at last. Sarai had become increasing bitter and alone, for she had lost a sister in my mother, and she had no son in me. Abram was all father now and no longer a husband to her. So in Gerar they separated. She moved out of his tent and into a tent of her own. He let it be known that they were not husband and wife, but brother and sister, and when the local king, Abimelech, had her brought to his tent, she did not refuse, and Abram said nothing. After all, he had his son, and she, sick of it all, was glad, I suppose, to be free of a wandering life. I know I was glad to see her go, and I thought my own mother would soon share Abram’s tent. As it should have been.
The night Sarai left, my mother came to me. “It’s Egypt all over again,” she told me, and for the fist time I learned how she had come to serve Sarai and what her fate in Egypt had been. My mother wept for Sarai then, even after all she had put her through, and she went to Abram. “Bring her back,” she said. “No good can come of this.” But he did nothing.
That very night Abimelech had a dream in which the Lord appeared to him warning him that, for taking Sarai from her husband, he was sure to die. At least this was the story Sarai brought back with her, saying that Abimelech had not laid a hand on her. Apparently Abimelech was angry that Abram had lied to him, and Sarai, too, putting him and his household in such peril. Who could blame him?
I was there when they were reunited. And had my heart not been hard against them both for my mother’s sake, I believe I might have forgiven them everything then. At supper that night they sat under the candlelight in a strange silence. How old they seemed, and when they spoke to one another, it was as if I were not there. Each asked forgiveness of the other and when they both began to weep remembering all the sorrows and the trials they had been through, I left the tent and went outside. I belonged nowhere. I went out to the shepherds and slept with them under the stars. I believe it was that night that Sarai at last conceived. I was fourteen when she bore a son (though there were some who maintained to the end the boy was Abimelech’s seed).
Abraham named him Isaac. What kind of a name is that for a man? It was a joke among all the young men. I had been displaced, but I was not forgotten. Abraham assured me I was an equal in his heart, though I wondered when I saw him raise his Isaac in the air and laugh. Sarah laughed, too.
Those laughing days lengthened into months. I was a man now, princeling and bastard both. I was followed and I was feared. I had little to do with the infant boy. Then the day arrived that marked to change.
Isaac was two years old, a special birthday for the boy child of the clan king. We called it a weaning feast. I could dimly remember my own. For the women it was a time of mourning and consolation. Sarah and the baby’s nurse covered their breasts with ashes and drew black shawls over their heads. Abraham took his boy out into the fields and there pitched a tent among the herds. All the men came then to dine and celebrate the birthday. Goat’s milk and cheeses were prepared and served him as if he were a little king. For the first time his hair was shorn. He sat upon his own small throne, hung with garlands and soft sheepskins. He toddled now into the world of men. He had his first taste of red wine, saw for the first time the slaughter of a ram, and heard the sound of the trumpet blown through its severed horn. That night he was lulled to sleep by Abraham’s singing in his deep, melodious voice the story of the beginning of the world. I’d heard it all before. I slipped off to the field, where I met one of the serving girls.
In time Isaac became my charge; my task to teach him the crafts and skills that Abraham had taught me. But Sarah could not stand the sight. I believe she feared I would harm her darling little boy. It’s true, I was rough with him, but no roughness, no tough hide. She said to Abraham---I heard her---“Cast out that slave woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac.”
This was the kind of woman she was.
You can read the rest of the story in their book, but much of it is lies. This much, though, is true. They say Abraham was “displeased” when Sarah commanded him to cast us out. He wept. I saw him when he rose early that morning and gave my mother and me some bread and the waterskin. I had never seen him weep. He covered his head with dust and sat in the road until we could see him no more. I was his son, and he was the only father I would ever have. He knew he was sending us off to our deaths, for in the wilderness of that country only misfortune can occur to an unprotected woman an a boy. This God of theirs breaks hearts.
They write in their book that this God saved me, and saved my mother; that is not true. I found the water for her. I found the well, and with my bow I shot the game we needed to survive in the wilderness of Paran. Now my mother and I are all but passed over in their stories. The wealth of Abraham was bestowed upon Isaac; we received nothing.
You have heard me speak in anger. It is their book that angers me. It prophesied that I was to be “a wild ass of a man,” who would set himself against his brothers and because of that sentence I am an outcast and an enemy to my brother’s people through a hundred generations. I have become the father of the Bedouin, the grandsire of Mohammed, and now my issue is perpetually at war with the sons of Abraham. Yet it need not be so. For I came to Machpelah and met with Isaac; we were reconciled.
Machpelah was the place Abraham was buried, the place where first he buried Sarah and later came to rest himself. Many years had passed, but the news reached me that Abraham and died and been laid in the cave of Machpelah. So I came as a king to pay my respects to a king, for he was my father, and I loved him. There I met fair Isaac, who was as different from his father as the dove from the owl. Yet, in his own way, no less a man. In his eyes I was a flame.
We met in the cave. We spoke. We wept. We reviewed our brotherhood, and we knew there was no need for the tangled enmity of our parents---our mothers---to persist. The land, after all, was wide; there was enough. There is always enough for brothers. So we parted in peace, and felt the spring of my heart sweeten for my little brother. I wished him well, for I had heard what he had endured. I knew he had been to the heart of light---or was it madness?--which I had been spared. I feared for him.