Lent II: Que será, Sarah? – Michele Rizoli – March 8/09

What do the biblical character Sarah and Nadya Suleman have in common? Nadya (as you may know if you stand in line at supermarkets or drugstores) is a mother of 6 in California who this past January had 8 more children all at once using in-vitro fertilization. Sarah, as you may know from our Scripture story, is a mother of one, Isaac, whom she had when she was really, really old.

One might say they’re similar in their desire to have children – they both, for their own reasons, really wanted kids. They’re alike in the unusual character of their pregnancies within their contexts: Nadya because of how and how many kids, Sarah that she had kids at all as an older woman. And they likely both thought that having children would fulfill them in some way. What’s of interest this morning, though, is that they also have in common the fact that they tried to take the future into their own hands, in this case, their reproductive future.

For the purposes of my sermon, Nadya represents the distortions of modern technological solutions. But worse than that, she’s typical of what I call the “American idol” mentality – and I do mean idol. (I’ll admit I know this, because I sometimes watch and enjoy American Idol!) It’s a common (and wrongheaded) contemporary belief that “you can be (or have) anything you dream of – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” It’s a way of living that is – to put it even more harshly than American Idol judge Simon Cowell would – narcissistic, delusional, unaccountable and shortsighted.

Sarah, on the other hand, represents a faith perspective. Of course it’s not really that simple. Both stories are more complicated than that and tied up with a lot of cultural and ethical factors we can’t get into. Nadya’s story is still unfolding and since the tabloids won’t leave her alone, we will. But Sarah’s (and Abraham’s) is enshrined in the biblical mythological narrative, so I’m assuming it has something to tell us about God. It tells us about how God acts in people’s lives and about how those people are to regard the future. God lifts up the afflicted, God aims for healing, God does not to this on our schedule, sometimes it takes generations to recognize. As we consider Abraham and Sarah’s story together, I invite you to think in these terms. How do you regard the future in light of God’s way of doing things?

First, a necessary aside about having children.  I want to touch on this topic with great sensitivity and respect. I used to work in reproductive research. In my own life and through family and friends I have directly experienced unwanted pregnancy, desperately wanted pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, death of infants, decisions about abortion, decisions about sterilization, a woman who in one day lost all 5 of her children to malaria, failed in-vitro fertilizations, fruitful in-vitro fertilizations, adoptions, and waiting forever for adoptions, resignation to childlessness and decisions to remain without children. There are layers upon layers of emotions, cultural expectations even today and a lot of pain around this topic. I respect the complexity of that. I honour our community’s experiences of joy and pain about having or not having children. While I experience my own children as blessing (most of the time), I also reject the idea that families with no children are somehow less family or less blessed. So I want to be very clear that this morning I’m not talking about Sarah having babies per se, but about how her story unfolds within her cultural context as she faces an uncertain future.< /p>

Let’s recall Sarah’s story for a moment. If you want to read it again and shake off some of the cobwebs from Sunday School, you will find it in Genesis 12-17 (it is fascinating, and a lot more complex that what you might remember). Abram’s wife, Sarai, whose name means princess, found herself unable to bear children. Now, barrenness (i.e. the inability to produce offspring) was a big deal in Bible times. Descendants were hugely important in terms of keeping family lines and property, having enough people around to do the work of survival (fetching wood, fetching water, tending animals, hunting, etc) making sure that one was cared for in old age (especially women). Having children also gave value to a woman. (This is still the case in some cultures even today.) Given women’s already meager position in that society, if you didn’t have children, you were a nobody, a burden.  Bottom line: Women were supposed to have kids and Sarai didn’t have any.

To make matters a bit more complicated and a bit more literary, Abram had had a specific promise from God that his descendants would be like the stars in heaven – so many they could not even be counted. Notice how Abe was not promised a dozen kids in his lifetime, but rather a future of descendants who would remember God’s covenant to be their God.  Barrenness is a biblical theme, as are annunciations of male children to be born. Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah and Samson’s mom were all barren before having their famous sons. The narrative function of telling their stories in this way is to show that these children are truly sent from God through women who are (at least before their pregnancy) considered marginalized or afflicted.

Anyway, Sarai dreams of having a child. God will give them a son, she believes that – most of the time. If being childless is painful even in our days, I can’t imagine how hard it was for her to believe that it was worth trusting God with her future. She is getting frustrated and can’t figure out how God is going to pull this off, so she decides to help things along a bit.  As was perfectly acceptable at the time, she finds a surrogate, the slave Hagar, a substitute to get pregnant by Abram. The plan was that she would then take this child on as hers, and in this way make sure Abram had kids.

Well, Sarai didn’t count the cost of her interference, and once Hagar is pregnant with Ishmael, jealousy sets in and the household becomes even more dysfunctional (you’ll realize what I mean with this term when you read the story yourselves). There are a couple of versions of the story, but eventually Sarai manages to get Hagar sent away for a while. Hagar, incidentally, has her own experience of an angel coming to her and letting her know that her descendants would be blessed too – one of the few times in the Bible a woman is offered this promise directly.

Things didn’t turn out the way Sarai had envisioned when she took matters into her own hands. It didn’t look like God was going to come through on the promise to care for their future. Well, after a while, when Abe and Sarai were tired and worn out – when they were a gazillion years old, or something like that – and had basically given up, along comes another experience of God reminding them of this great future where their descendants will be numerous. [In the passage we read, God is called “El Shaddai” which one author points out can mean “God of the mountains” or “God of my breasts.” It is a name that often appears in the bible in contexts where fertility is an issue. I find that rather interesting.][1]

Anyway, Old Abe kinda sighs, “can’t you just bless Ishmael?”  And God answers, of course I’ll bless Ishmael, but as I always intended, Sarah will also have your child, she “shall become rations; rulers of people shall come from her.” Their names are changed to Abraham and Sarah, and their bodies are changed, Abraham’s by circumcision (conveniently left out of our lectionary readings for today) and Sarah’s by pregnancy. We know from the rest of the story that she does get rescued from her barrenness and from her shame. But she can now look forward to the pain of childbirth and of seeing her husband almost sacrifice her son. God’s blessing is a mixed blessing, it often involves holding on to hope through hopelessness.

Later, when the apostle Paul retells one version of this story in Romans 4, he goes on and on about how Abraham remained faithful, and indeed he did – eventually. Paul (in this case) doesn’t even mention Sarah nor anything she went through. Being faithful looks a lot smoother when seen in retrospect than when looking ahead. Psalm 22, says “our ancestors trusted in you and were not put to shame.” We can only see our own lifetimes, not even that. Being faithful (i.e. believing God’s purposes will come through) is complicated and takes long.  God is certainly better at being faithful than people are. We only see God’s workings across a larger span of time or sometimes not at all.  But we still try to stake our hope in God’s love; in God’s whacky plan of honouring the least in society, of expecting to get things done by faithful people living justly, kindly and humbly on this earth.

Our gospel reading is another example of a different perspective on the future. In Mark 8 Peter is frustrated that things aren’t turning out the way he thought when he decided to follow Jesus. Not only is Jesus inefficiently not organizing an armed revolution to change the state of affairs with the Romans, Jesus keeps on talking about how he is going to be crucified. Peter even reprimands Jesus, “Stop talking about how terrible things are going to be, you’re bringing us down.”

Jesus is rather harsh, he pokes his finger in Peter’s chest and says, “No, you’re the one that needs to adjust, buddy.  Stop setting your mind on human things, set your mind on God’s broader picture. And guess what? The immediate future looks bleak, from where I stand it looks like I’m headed to the cross. Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake… will save it.” In retrospect, we know that Jesus’ faithfulness to “the character of God’s divine love”[2] even unto death, ended up in resurrection. But he still had to go through death, and from Peter’s perspective, that’s all he could see. Peter, like Sarah, was being asked to hope against odds. Not that everything will turn out OK, but that they (or their descendants) will recognize God at work in the long run; that following Jesus’ way of peace and justice and healing and valuing of the poor and lowly is the only faithful way to move forward.

As John Howard Yoder put it: “The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience…The triumph of [what is] right is sure… because of the power of the resurrection and not because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.  The relationship between the obedience of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.”[3] We are called to be faithful, which in the end is a mix of hopelessness and hope.

Last week we had out “Outworking Sunday” here at TUMC, where we got to see all the ways in which people here are trying to be faithful to what God is calling them to do.  I was particularly struck again by two projects: MCC’s circles of support and accountability for sexual offenders, and the project to build a memorial to the Mennonites who perished so tragically in the former Soviet Union.  To me they both offer this same mix of hopelessness and hope that we find in Sarah and Jesus’ perspectives on the future.

The memorial represents the idea that God is faithful across generations and beyond what we can see now. The pain and suffering endured by all those people has been heard by their descendants who were yet unborn (like the psalm says), and who can honour them now. As for the circles of support and accountability I imagine that there are ups and downs, many frustrations and no guarantees of “success” with this kind of work.  To me they represent the idea that we remain faithful to Jesus’ call to love the least in society, regardless of results.

Where we stand now in time, when we look ahead, especially to our so-called economic future, things look bleak. As Aldred pointed out in last week’s sermon we are facing up to how we have been tempted to govern history. As a society, we are rather in the same position as Sarah after she had the bri
ght idea of using Hagar as surrogate. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to take matters into our own hands, to buy into progress at any cost, to work harder and harder, to make our single-minded individual dreams come true. But now the consequences of all that are bearing out in economic meltdown and planetary sickness, and it doesn’t look good in the short term.

Perhaps we are coming to where Abraham and Sarah were, old and tired, but still hopeful God’s purpose will unfold.  Perhaps we also need to realize with Peter that living faithfully to God’s love and justice in this world might involve going through significant loss. Despite errors in judgment, I pray that we find strength like Sarah; not thinking faithfulness is delegated to others, but being faithful ourselves, hoping against all odds and beyond our limited vision and living faithfully in the meantime.

Amen.