JACOB'S WIVES

Readings: Psalm 128, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33,44-52, Genesis 29:15-28
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, on July 24th 2011

A printable PDF file can be found here

Jacob had a dream about a ladder full of angels. We looked at that last time. But that wasn’t the only dream that Jacob had. He had another one. This one was the kind of dream that a lot of people have had. The kind that has consumed generations before and ever since. He’s in love. His dream girl is called Rachel. Leah, Rachel’s sister was OK, she had nice eyes, but when Jacob thought about Rachel, “Oh mamma, that lady was fine”. He promises himself; “She will be mine!”

In our lives we have dreams and passions. We have dreams for our lives, for our relationships, maybe even for our community or our church. The lesson we learn from Jacob is that seeing our dreams come to something can take a while and we might not always get exactly what we expected.

• Firstly, this passage reveals that we are broken vessels that have to live within the consequences of our own shortcomings.
• Secondly, that we are surrounded by those who do not share our values and are as equally broken as our selves.
• Thirdly, this passage has something overwhelmingly positive to tell us. That whenever love is real, it can change things. God has an unusual way of turning our dreams into His plans!

Firstly this passage reveals our broken lives

Let us remind ourselves of whom Jacob was. This is the mommy’s boy who deceived his visually handicapped father to get an inheritance that should have been his twin brothers. This is the Jacob who was doing all he could to avoid a confrontation with Esau, who had vowed, “If I ever see Jacob again, I’m gonna kill him!”

This is the Jacob who had become aware God was on his case after having a strange dream of a stairway to heaven. Far from comforting him, this dream terrifies him. It makes him rethink his relationship to God and gives him a sense that life may turn out better if he started trying to do things God’s way, instead of listening mostly to his mothers’ advice!

Jacob is no wide eyed innocent enduring his first teenage crush. Life was actually passing him by at speed and it seems relationships weren’t something he had a lot of time for. But then he sets eyes on Rachel and something goes ‘zzzinngg’.

Who can explain that? The mystery of human attraction! Crazy thing is that it doesn’t seem to matter if one is a sinner or a saint, once Cupid fires his arrow people are rendered helpless.

And it looks like things are going to work out. Rachel’s dad, Laban, seems to like Jacob. Because of family connections he takes pity on him and even offers him a job. When the subject of payment comes up Jacob says, “All I want is your daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage”. Laban smiles and it seems like it’s a done deal.

Seven years later it turns sour. Jacob is getting ready for his wedding night. No doubt there was much partying and probably a bit of drinking involved, but the upshot of it all is that when Jacob awakes in the morning, it is not Rachel laying at his side, but her sister, Leah.

Laban has turned out to be snake! He turns out to be as cruel and devious and sly and calculating and shifty and unreliable and untrustworthy and manipulative as … well … he turned out to be as much of a sneak as Jacob himself. They do say ‘what goes around comes around’ and Jacob encounters in Laban somebody who has ‘out-Jacobed Jacob’.

We sometimes think that in life we can escape our shortcomings and that we can gloss over our failures. The scary thing is they can actually confront us in the bad behavior of others who share our faults to such an extent that we finally see what fools we can be! How many times have we said, “There but for the grace of God, go I?” How often do we find that we recoil at others actions, because actually, we have a horrible fear we could have done that ourselves?

We never truly escape our upbringing or the mistakes of the past. They come back and haunt us in the most unlikely of ways. At events like school reunions, you go there recalling the good times, but sometimes memories of the bad times also resurface. ‘I can’t believe we used to call him that’ or “What were we thinking!”

Friends, we are all broken. Paul in the Book of Romans simply says ‘There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23 NIV). Life can, as it did with Jacob, bring along experiences that reveal our broken-ness. That’s not a bad thing. Because oftentimes it’s only when we see where we are going wrong, that we start wanting to put things right!

A second thing revealed in this passage is that we are not the only broken ones.

The actions of those who are broken around us can cause us great pain. Laban hurts not only Jacob, but also Rachel and Leah. Because of the tension he creates between them all, he also will hurt their children. We don’t get to hear the whole story of Jacobs’ interactions with Laban, but I can tell you, things did not improve further down the line.

What we did get to hear in our story was Laban’s lame excuse for marrying Jacob to his older daughter instead of his younger one. He tells Jacob that, ‘Well, it’s just the custom around here. We don’t allow the younger one to get the inheritance before we’ve taken care of the senior child’s needs.’

Was this God’s way of making Jacob understand just what a rotten thing he had done to his brother Esau. Esau, was after all the oldest child who had deserved to be taken care of first, even if he was only older by an arms length! One of the twins had to be born first, and that counted for something back in those days. Once again some kind of negative karma seems to be impacting Jacob and enabling him to see the error of his ways.

We have no control over what others do to us. If folk are mad at us or uncaring towards us or disrespectful of us, then whilst we don’t have to be a doormat and let them walk all over us, we also have to accept that there are some folks we just can’t change. They are, like us, broken. That is not to excuse bad actions or reprehensible behavior, just to say that whilst we don’t have a choice in the way other people act towards us, we always have a choice in the way we respond to them.

In the midst of this crazy story we see a little miracle. Love changes Jacob. When Jacob realized he has been tricked by Laban, the natural ‘Jacob’ reaction would have been for him to totally lose it. To storm off back home to mother, who would create a fuss, and other family would get involved and pretty soon it would be like the set of a Jerry Springer show. Family Feuds part 2!

But what happens in this story? Jacob asks Laban; “What’s going on?” Laban lays it out for him and says if you want Rachel, then you have to work another 7 years. The miracle here is Jacob’s silence. There is no argument. Laban says, fulfill your duties to Leah, then get back to work”. We read “And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week; and Laban (after 7 years) gave him Rachel his daughter as his wife” (Genesis 29:15-28)

And this moves us quickly to the positive point in this story.

When love is for real, it can change everything

There is, of course more going on here than the fact that Jacob is crazy in love with Rachel. That is a huge part of it, but the other side of it is that Jacob is beginning to realize that the love God has for him requires him to change.

Jacob already knew God was on his case. He had understood that when he experienced the dream of a ladder going up to heaven and was aware that God was covenanting with him to walk with him and lead him in his life. When he met Rachel, he must have thought, “Yes, this could work!”

But Jacob also had to come to a place where he could be confronted by his sins in such a powerful way that he would determine that this time around, things were going to be different. Through the love of a woman and the love of God, change was happening!

We can run from our sins and our failings for a long time. But there needs to come to all of us that day when we realize, we need help. And the only true hope of forgiveness and change is the love of God that we can discover in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Only His life-changing Holy Spirit can take what is broken and make something beautiful out of it!

We are victims of our own actions and we are victims of the actions of others. Jesus Christ went to the Cross, as a victim, to totally identify with our situation. The story did not end in death, but in new life. In the birth of the Church. In the blossoming of hope of in people who recognize their need and encounter God’s love.

We like Jacob, live our lives, may well fall in love and face many strange twists and turns. We will sin and be sinned against. So we can learn from Jacob.

We learn that we are all broken.
We learn that, through the love of God, broken lives can be remade.
We can learn to watch and wait and trust that in God’s time, all things are possible.
And to God’s name be all the glory. Amen.

Rev Adrian Pratt

JACOB”S LADDER

Reading: Psalm 139:1-12, Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13: 24-43, Genesis 28: 10-22
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, on July 17th 2011

A printable PDF can be found here

Jacob has a dream. A leader reaching down from the clouds towards him. On the ladder, traveling up and down are angels. At the top, God, who identifies himself as the God of Jacob’s father Isaac, and grandfather, Abraham.

In this dream God promises Jacob that the land upon which he was sleeping would be the dwelling place for the numerous descendants who would be Jacob’s heirs. In addition God promises that wherever Jacob goes, God would go with him, never leave him or forsake him and at the last bring him to the land of promise. Jacob is left in total awe. “How dread-full is this place” he declares. “This is the gate of heaven”. He marks the place as sacred and vows to be a servant of God for the rest of his days.

Must have been a vivid dream! I’ve had some strange dreams, even some challenging ones, but nothing quite like Jacob’s ladder. And what does it all mean? To Jacob it is a life-changing encounter with God. But what about us? What can this passage of scripture say to people like us, so far removed from Jacob’s experience?

One thing I believe that it reminds us of is that;

God is a God of Mystery

The satirical movie Dogma has an image of Jesus as sporting a cheesy grin and giving the ‘thumbs up’ to life. This updated icon, known as the “Buddy Christ” is a satirical reflection on the church’s attempt to introduce the deity to a fun loving world.

At times we do indeed portray Jesus as the ‘best buddy we could ever have’ or in such homely, earthly tones that we are in danger of obscuring the fact of His deity. We create a very safe God for ourselves. A God we can define, a God who can be fully known and is in full agreement with our earthly desires.

Such is not the God revealed to us by Jacob. Jacob’s God is one who transcends time and space, a God whom can only be known through what that God chooses to reveal. A God whose holiness is of such magnitude that this God can only be approached through visions and dreams for a face-to-face encounter would surely destroy us.

One author uses the Latin phrase “Mystereum Tremendum”. Another, Rudolf Otto in his book “The idea of the Holy” coins the word “Numinous”, to describe the nature of God. This numinous God of tremendous mystery is known only through revelation. This God drops a ladder down from heaven and sends angels scurrying back and forth to do His bidding.

This God is wholly other than what we are. Rather like a scene in a Sci-Fi movie, this God occasionally creates a portal, a ‘Stargate’ to the other world, the other dimension, where we catch just a glimpse of a greater reality behind the external world of our everyday workaday lives.

As Christians we believe we have a broader picture of God than Jacob, in the life and work of Jesus Christ. However, if we lose the sense that God is ultimately unknowable and the One who remains beyond us and above us, then we are no longer worshipping the God of Scripture, but a deity created within our own imaginations. A God that will be contained by our prejudices, misunderstandings and unbelief.

Those angels going up and down, God working in unseen and scarcely comprehendible ways, a God who remains unpredictable and whose purpose we never can fully fathom… such appears to be a more realistic portrayal of the God of the Bible than the rather lame ‘good buddy Jesus’. Jacob’s ladder reminds us that God is a God of mystery.

Whilst mysterious, that does not equate to unknowable. We can know God through what God chooses to reveal to us. One of the revelations that comes to Jacob is that;

God is a God of Promise

Jacob is given particular promises in relation to his life’s journey. Supreme of these is that promise that wherever he goes and wherever life leads him, God was going to be there for him. In words reminiscent of Jesus’ commission to the disciples on the mountaintop, Jacob receives the assurance; “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (verse 15)

That the unknowable, awesome, almighty God, should promise such a thing to any mortal man or woman took Jacob’s breath away. “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it” (verse 16). The promises of God that come to us are no less awe-inspiring! Think for a moment! Why should God even be bothered with the likes of you and I? What is there about us that is noteworthy to the Divine? Why should God care to be involved in our lives and interested in where we end up?

God has revealed Himself as a Father who cares for His children, as a redeemer who in Jesus Christ seeks to bring restoration and healing and renewal to our lives, and as the Holy Spirit who desires to be in us and around us and working through us the things of God’s Kingdom.

It makes no sense. In our lives we seem to be running from God as much as we run towards God. We know the commandments and seek to find ways around them. We know our inconsistencies and struggles and besetting sins. We know we are not all that we think we are, let alone all that others may be generous enough to think we are.

One of the glories of reformed theology is that it rests heavily upon the concept of the Grace of God. That we are saved, not by our acts of commitment to God, but by God’s promises and acts of commitment towards us. Supreme in those acts of commitment is the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary. There is nothing we can do to win the favor of God. We are entirely dependant upon God for our salvation.

Jacob was no saint. He was a smooth talking mothers’ boy who tricked his brother Esau out of a birthright that rightly belonged to the elder brother. In the process he had deceived his own Father, played a trick on that man of honor whilst he in his old age was suffering from the loss of mobility and sight.

If you follow Jacob’s story, his romances, his deals with different families and powers, the times he runs away rather than face consequences, there is a lot about his life that is decidedly unsavory. Were it not for the Grace of God that called him and carried him and forgave him, and refused to let him go, Jacob would have ended his days as a nobody.

The love of God is such that it embraces all of us no-bodies and makes us somebody. Somebody that Jesus cared enough to die for. Somebody whose life can make a difference. A child of God. Unique.

And it’s all because of God’s grace. Acts of commitment come as a response to the love that God is showing us. Praise God! Jesus has secured our salvation! But we must claim it as our own. It’s no good having won a prize if you never claim it! A third thing we see in Jacob’s story is that;

God is a God who inspires our commitment

In response to the promises of God, Jacob makes some promises of his own. Verse 20 :- “If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and will give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my fathers house in safety, then the Lord will be my God”.

Can we say something similar in our lives? “You know God, you just keep on loving me, in spite of the mess I make of things, You keep showering down blessings on me and promising to lead me, You sent Jesus to make things so much clearer and deal with the things that could keep us apart. I keep reading in the Bible that there’s even some out of the world positive stuff at the end of the road for those who trust in You… So, Lord, Be my God and help me to be Your sort of person”.

The God of Jacob is a God of mystery. Let us not lose sight of the awesome wonder of the God of Scripture.

The God of Jacob is a God of promise. Let us claim the promises of Jesus for own lives, promises that He will always be with us, will guide us and help us draw others to share in the blessings of His Kingdom.

The God of Jacob is one who inspires our commitment. We love because we are loved. We forgive because we are forgiven. We are recipients of amazing grace!

Rev Adrian Pratt

JACOB AND ESAU

Reading: Psalm 119:105-112, Romans 7:15-25, Matthew 13:1-23, Genesis 25:19-34
Preached at First Presbyterian Church Baldwin, NY, on July 10th 2011

A printable PDF file can be found here.

Jacob and Esau never could get along. Even before they were born they fought for position in Rebekah’s womb. After they were born, things just got worse. As different as chalk and cheese, one favored by mum, the other favored by dad, they were a disaster waiting to happen.

It wasn’t that one was the sinner whilst the other was the saint. They were both equally capable of irresponsible and devious acts, a fact made worse by the fact that in Jacob’s case his mother positively encouraged his wrongdoing. Yet…both were also recipients of God’s blessing, and destined to become the father’s of great nations.

There’s a lot of different ways of looking at this story. On one level it’s about the sort of troubles that can arise in any family. The hierarchy and chain of command amongst older and younger brothers and sisters can be a tremendous source of conflict. It often seems people born into the same families just can’t get along and the passing of years can harden their animosity.

I was reading one commentary on this story that focused on the changes that were to coming in the nation of Israel. It saw Esau as representing the old agricultural ways, his whole personality being associated with the red earth. Jacob on the other hand represented the new economic order that would come into being, a life based around cities and settlements and the opportunities trade would bring.

The central image is that of conflict. There is conflict between Isaac and Rebekah. There is conflict between the lifestyles of Jacob and Esau. There is conflict between the purposes of God and the cultural traditions that society held regarding inheritances.

Even the naming of Jacob is a source of conflict. In Hebrew his name means, “he who grabs by the heel‘ or ‘the one who supplants’. Hebrew names carried with them a sense of character and purpose. Maybe giving a second born twin such a name as ‘Jacob – “the one who is grasping after his brothers rightful dues” was inviting trouble!

Esau, on the other hand, simply had the meaning ‘Red’. That ‘red’ theme reappears a number of times. We’re told he is born ‘red all over, like a hairy garment”. At the end of the story Esau wants the ‘red soup’ so badly that he’s prepared to give up his birthright for it! The red hairy guy loses it all for the sake of a pot of red stuff! Eventually he becomes so red mad in rage that he would happily spill some of Jacobs red blood as an act of revenge, a fact that causes Jacob much to worry about further down the road of his life!

The picture of conflict is everywhere in this story. Conflicting loyalties. Conflicting ideas. Conflicting desires. Conflicting loves. The first signs of conflict appear in the womb of Rebekah. Jacob and Esau were in conflict before they were born!

Scripture suggests that we are all conflicted people. In Paul’s letter to the Roman church, chapter 7, verses 14-19 he speaks of a conflict that, like the fighting twins in Rebekah’s womb, took place deep in his own life.

“For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

Quite some conflict going on there with Paul! It’s a conflict that seems to be a fundamental part of his growth towards Christian maturity; that he recognizes that whilst he aspires to great things, his life didn’t always come up with the goods. This tension, between ‘how we feel should be’ and ‘how we actually are’ can be a frustrating inner conflict that, we never seem to master.

It is a conflict that is birthed in us from the moment we arrive on the planet. You see… I reckon that there’s a bit of the Jacob and a bit of the Esau in us all. Both their good points and their bad points!

We are told that Esau was the skillful hunter. He was the outdoor one, ‘the man of the field’. Yet he was also the one driven more by appetite than thought. His desire for ‘the red stuff’ led him to squander his birthrights. He lived only for the day and gave too little thought about the consequences of his actions.

Do we see a bit of Esau in our self? On the positive side, there’s a part of us that just wants to get the practical things done. You’ll work hard to get what you want. You are impatient with those who seem to be ‘all talk, but no action’. But on the negative side, a little voice now again whispers in your ear, “Just satisfy that immediate need you sense, and never mind the consequences!”

What about Jacob? Well he was the thoughtful one. Different translations use such words to describe him as ‘peaceful’, ‘plain’, quiet’ and ‘mild’, all of which are an attempt to translate the Hebrew word ‘tal’, which can mean ‘innocent and upright’. Later in the story he explains that his brother was a “an hairy man” whilst he was “a smooth one”. He’s a planner, which is good, but he’s also a schemer, a smooth talker, prepared to take advantage of others to get what he needs.

Is there something about Jacob in the way we are? We have those reflective moments when all is well with the world. But underneath the surface things are not always so pretty. There are motivations and desires that move us in the wrong direction. There is a devious side to Jacob. The Jacob voice whispers, “Just wait for the right time… and when it comes, forget about what’s right and what’s wrong, the end will justify the means.”

What to do about all this conflict? What happens in their story is this. Humanly speaking they are hopeless. It’s a wonder they never murdered each other. This is not though, simply a human story. It’s an account that speaks to us about the Grace of God. That God could take these two feuding brothers and, despite their animosity, still work towards the founding of Israel, is nothing short of a miracle.

It is in the grace of God that we also should place our hope as we travel through whatever conflicts touch our own lives, be they within us or around us. At the end of the day Jacob and Esau are what they are by the Grace of God. In our lives it can be no different. As I reflect on my own life, it’s fairly obvious to me who has been responsible when things have gone wrong. I take full responsibility for the mess ups!

But those times when things have gone well? I always feel that those times are the result of God’s grace working in my life. Like Paul I’ve often felt like “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Like the fighting twins in Rebekah’s womb, it sometimes seems that that’s the way things have to be. Maybe we should give up on ourselves and just live as we please. Not so!

In verse 24-25 of Romans 7, Paul speaks of his reason for not being frustrated by the conflict his life experienced. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

“Thanks be to God!” declares Paul. In the midst of this struggle Jesus Christ was working. In the midst of our conflicts, Christ can also do amazing things. The fact that we are in the struggle at all is testimony to the work of the Holy Spirit within and around our lives. If God were not on our case, we wouldn’t be concerned to even make the slightest effort to live in a Christian way.

Because God loves us, because Christ died that we might live, because the Holy Spirit is still the great creative force that enables order to emerge from out of chaos, we can, with Paul, say “Thanks be to God”.

God was at work in the conflicts of Jacob and Esau. So don’t give up on yourself. Don’t give up on others either. Conflict is an inevitable part of discipleship. When Jesus talked about taking up a cross and following Him, He wasn’t just playing with words or using imagery. There will be those times when, because we are human, our actions are more like those of Jacob and Esau, than what we would expect of a disciple of Jesus.

The great news is …God’s Grace is greater than our sin.
Such is a theme reflected time and time again in the bibles story.
It’s there in the conflict of Jacob and Esau. The grace of God brought them through!
There was conflict in the life of Paul. God bought him through.
That Grace is there for us. As we commit our lives to Christ.
In His strength … Through His grace…
Praise God…
We can live through the conflicts of our own lives!
AMEN.

Rev Adrian Pratt

HAGAR AND ISHMAEL

Reading: Psalm 45:10-17, Romans 7:15-25, Matthew 11:16-19, Genesis 21: 8-21
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, on July 3rd, 2011

A printable PDF file can be found here
Not that I’m an avid watcher of them myself, but there are those who find themselves faithful devotees of afternoon soap operas with titles such as “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “Bored and the Braindead”. There have been occasions when I’ve watched an episode, and I’ll be honest, it’s hard to figure out what exactly is going on.

All those relationships and so-and-so having something going on with somebody who is actually somebody elses half sister twice removed and then some dark figure from the past appears and upsets the whole thing… and all this in just the first five minutes.

Yet truth can be stranger than fiction, and our Bible reading this morning gave us a plot just as thick with twists and turns as your average afternoon soap. A tale of family betrayal, jealousy, separation and survival against the odds.

There is Abraham, the man of destiny, but a man who couldn’t always wait for his dreams to be fulfilled and tried to force the issue. There is Hagar, the mother of his firstborn son, Ishmael, a lady scorned by Abraham’s first wife, Sarah. Sarah has become increasingly jealous of Hagar and is fearful that her son, Isaac, will never inherit the promises she hoped would be all his.

And so, at a family celebration that should have been a time of great rejoicing, Abraham is convinced both by his wife and the intervention of God, to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Dispatched into the desert, Hagar struggles to survive, but all is well. Ishmael turns out to also be a child of promise. And in next weeks episode….

Of course it’s not the plot of a soap opera, it’s an account from the Word of God and therefore has a whole lot that it can reveal to us about our lives, as individuals and as a community of faith. It speaks to us and the situations that come our way.

1. Even with the best of intentions things can go terribly wrong.
2. Even with the highest aspirations we still mess up.
3. Although things go wrong and we mess up, God is the Redeemer.

Even with the best of intentions things can go terribly wrong.

As we go through our lives day by day we don’t set out with the intention of making everything go wrong. We don’t get out of bed and think, “Let’s see what we can make a total disaster of this morning”. Oftentimes the worse acts are done with, what seems to their perpetrators, the best intentions.

It was no different with Abraham. Abraham had entered into a covenant relationship with God in which God had promised that Abraham would be the father of a great nation. His wife Sarai was childless and the years were moving along. So, together, Abraham and Sarai agreed that Abraham should take Sarai’s maid, Hagar, as a wife and bear a child for them through her.

When Hagar proved fruitful and became pregnant, Sarai, far from being pleased becomes bitter and treats her unfairly, causing her to run away. After an angelic intervention Hagar decides to return and in due time a son, Ishmael is born. Abraham presumes that Ishmael is to be the child of promise through whom his line would be established.

Not so! The unthinkable happens. Sarai in her old age now becomes with child. This child is to be the one through whom Abraham’s line is established. After Isaac is born, Sarah’s enmity towards Hagar returns and Hagar is forced to separate from them and go her own way.

This wasn’t the first separation amongst Abraham and his kinfolk. He has been having a long running dispute with his nephew Lot. Such was the nature of their disagreement that they mutually agreed to go their separate ways, even though their paths were destined to cross again.

All of which I share with you to point out that in families, even families of faith, things don’t always run smoothly. If you’re looking around this morning at your family or somebody else’s family and you are thinking, “Good Lord, what a mess!” I encourage you to take heart and not to feel that your situation is unique or unforgivable. Families have always been complicated. Don’t beat yourself up over things that seem to be part of the way life is! Which brings us to our second observation.

Even with the highest aspirations we still mess up.

Sarai/Sarah was a woman of tremendous faith. She did indeed turn out to be the mother of all Israel. Yet her relationship with Hagar was disgraceful. She used her. She was abusive towards her. She was jealous of her and eventually got rid of her.

Abraham was without doubt a man of tremendous faith. But he also made some tremendous mistakes, because whilst he trusted God most of the time, there were those other times when he thought he could do a better job than God and tried to sort things out in his own way.

Back in Chapter 12 you can read of how, when Abraham journeyed to Eygpt, he was afraid that the Eygptian’s would find his wife Sarai so attractive that they’d kill him in order to take Sarai as their own. So he pretends Sarai is his sister, not his wife. It turns out that the Pharoah does indeed find her attractive and takes her to his house, rewarding Abraham with servants and material possessions.

Sounded like a good plan, but Abraham lost her in any case, so it backfired. Even worse, God is on the case and Pharoah’s household starts to be subject to all kinds of plagues, and they can’t understand why, until it is discovered that Pharoah’s latest wife wasn’t Abraham’s sister but actually Abraham’s wife. High aspirations, best intentions, but Abraham messed up.

He messed up when he fathered a child through Hagar. Again, that was him trying to take control of a situation God had all figured out. He shouldn’t have listened to Sarai’s idea, he should have kept trusting God, but, no, as we do so often in our lives, it was a case of, “I’m sure God’s Word is right… but I’ll do things my way, thank you very much”.

Was it not Frank Sinatra who had a hit with “I did it my way”? Very commendable, if by doing things ‘our way’ we mean taking responsibility for our own actions. Not so commendable if doing things ‘our way’ means neglecting to seek for our lives to be guided by God and nurtured by God’s Holy Spirit. ‘Our way’ can be the wrong way.

The bible plainly insists that we are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God. Even though we have the highest aspirations, we still mess up. The Bible story also insists that with God there is the hope of redemption.

Although things go wrong and we mess up, God is the Redeemer.

In spite of Abraham and Sarai’s mess ups and moral failings, Abraham did indeed become the father of a geographical nation and a spiritual father to many people of faith. God’s plans were not thwarted by their misunderstanding or disobedience. Maybe things may have taken a different course had their faith expressed itself in different ways, but that’s always going to be one of the “Well we just don’t knows” of history.

Nowhere clearer though in this account is God shown to be the Redeemer than in the situation of Hagar and Ishmael. They are not amongst the chosen people. They were not considered the inheritors of God’s promises by those who thought that God’s ways were something exclusive to them. A child seemingly born in circumstances that were not the will of God. A mother who is little more than a slave at the whim of Sarah’s manipulations. Their fate is uncertain and they languish in the desert, desperate for nourishment.

Hagar cries out to God. God answers. God tells her that she too is a child of promise. That her son Ishmael will also know God’s blessing. That there is room in God’s promises and within God’s covenant for all people of faith. Eventually things work out for Hagar and Ishmael in unexpected ways. Under God’s blessing they prosper.

Life may not have dealt us the best hand. We may well mess up and make wrong decisions that cause our selves and others harm. Our families, our relationships, our homes, may not be the places of refuge and picture of harmony that some would expect of people who know God.

So remember this. God remains the redeemer. God has sent Jesus Christ to be our Savior. Jesus Christ demonstrated through His life and works that every human life is of concern to God, even those lives whom others have little time or respect for. Know yourself loved by God, in spite of the fact that you make a mess of things and so often try and do things your way instead of living God’s way.

God is the Redeemer. Seek then for the Holy Spirit of God to redeem the times of your life. Ask Jesus Christ to help you through whatever the coming week may bring your way. The same God who heard the cry of Hagar and Ishmael knows the needs of our hearts and lives.

Do not then be afraid to commit your life to Him.
Seek the way of the Lord
and live for the service
of Jesus Christ,
to whose name be all
glory
honor
and
power
AMEN

Rev Adrian Pratt