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| "The Expulsion of Hagar" by Gustav Dore, French print ca. 1866. |
“I will establish my covenant between me
and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an
everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your offspring after you.” (Genesis 17:7)
The above is the promise God made to
Abraham, the “Big Daddy” of three of the world’s great religions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. God made a deal with this old boy: Get up and leave
your secure and settled home in Ur of the Chaldeans (Iraq, we call it) and head
west to land I’ll show you. Just keep going, keep believing in me, and I will
bless you so that you will be a blessing to the whole earth (see Genesis
12:1-3).
In Abraham’s time, that was a pretty tall
order. It was a big and gutsy decision to leave settled land and venture into
God-knows-what kind of territory with no proof that things will turn out well
at all. But, then again, that’s what we call faith.
When I think of Abraham and his journey—which
is a heck of a story, and if you haven’t read it in a while you should look at
it again (Genesis 12-25)—I think of my own dad. My illustrious patriarch did
what a lot of guys his age did when they returned from military service in the
Second World War. He took his wife and journeyed west, leaving his home and
family on the East Coast and ventured in search of the Promised Land in Southern
California. My parents settled in San Diego where they produced my two sisters
and my dad went to work in the aerospace industry.
As Abraham was forced to journey from
Canaan into Egypt in search of food, my Old Man was forced to uproot his young
family and head to Kansas where he could put his engineering skills to work
keeping Khrushchev’s murderous hordes at bay by the installation of
intercontinental ballistic missiles. I
was born during this leg of his odyssey.
Alas, famine struck again when the last
missile silo was filled with its deadly inhabitant, and Dad headed out on his
own to find work in Colorado, sending for the family once he was settled.
Eventually the work took him back to California, the land of Milk and Honey,
where jobs for veteran engineers were falling off the trees.
That is, until the early 1970’s. As the
Vietnam war wound down and we had beaten the Russians to the moon, the
government tap for aerospace work was twisting shut and the milk and honey ceased
to flow. My dad lost his job and spent a torturous fourteen months on the
unemployment line. Now, anyone who’s ever been laid off knows you only have to
be out a short time to get a long way behind in the bills. For years
afterwards work was sporadic, and there were many frustrating periods of
unemployment for this middle-aged engineer.
My dad tried a lot of career changes
during this period—real estate, manufacturing dune buggy bodies, selling
household products—all of which proved unsuccessful. Yet he never lost faith
that somehow everything would turn around and he and his family would be safe
and financially secure again. He never skipped church, never stopped reading his
Bible, and his offering envelope went in the collection plate (sometimes with
rather meagre contents) every Sunday. It always seemed that, just as he was
down to his last buck, something would turn up to keep us going.
Eventually, my father was hired back by the
same firm which had laid him off years before, and was able to retire
comfortably with full benefits. His legacy supported my mother for the rest of
her days, and even stretched far enough to pay off my student loan from
seminary. I feel, like Abraham, my dad had been blessed to be a blessing. A
faithful and active Christian himself, he was also the father of a Lutheran
clergyman and a Disciples of Christ teaching missionary (my sister Lorraine who
has served in South Africa and Myanmar).
I never really gave thought to my dad’s
faithfulness until years later when, as a graduate teaching assistant, I
attended the funeral of the father of one of my students. This man, frustrated by
his unemployment, had killed himself in the family garage by poisoning himself
with carbon monoxide.
My dad wasn’t perfect, but nobody’s family
is. The Hebrew Scripture text in the Revised Common Lectionary for Lent 2, Year
B (Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16) finds God re-making his covenant with Abraham after
Abraham, frustrated by Sarah’s childlessness, doubted God and tried to take
matters into his own hands. Sarah gave Abraham her slave girl, Hagar, as a
concubine (Nobody asked Hagar what she
thought of this arrangement!), even though God had promised that Sarah would
eventually be the mother of Abraham’s offspring. Abraham impregnated Hagar, and
Hagar suddenly became a little smug and snooty at being the patriarch’s baby
momma. This resulted in Sarah beating the crap out of her and blaming it all on
Abraham. Two women in the household made for a pretty tense situation for old
Abe, and he was eventually forced to send Hagar and her son, Ishmael, packing.
God, on the other hand, was patient with Abraham and eventually gave him a son
by Sarah.
God doesn’t always see to our wants in the
way and on the timeline we want him to. In fact, God doesn’t even see to our
wants. He sees to our needs.
Religion isn’t about how we influence God,
because God will do what God will do. The rain will fall on the righteous and
the unrighteous alike. Religion is about how God influences us. Faith means
that we will sometimes be called upon to carry the cross and simply believe, trusting that such belief will
make us a living witnesses and blessings to others.
Share the blessing, my friend. Thanks for
stopping by.
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