March 12, 2006 Sermon

Trouble With a Capital T
Genesis 16

Last month the Palestinian people elected a new government dominated by Hamas, the radical Islamist political party. Its constitution calls for the elimination of Israel and Palestinian control of the land. Hamas emerged from the uprising of 1987, during which it organized riots and equipped suicide bombers. The recent Palestinian government had begun making progress in negotiating peace with Israel . This enraged the professional trouble-makers and the hard-core radical Muslims. Together, they worked the democratic process and won the election. They sold the people on their hate-filled vision of how the world ought to be.

Speaking of salesmen, it is musical season again over at West High School . This year’s production, The Mikado, does not have a salesman role, but a few years ago they presented The Music Man. Professor Harold Hill is the famous lead in that show. He can sell anything to anybody. He sells a small Iowa town on the idea that it must have a band for its youth. A marching band will protect them from getting into trouble with a capital T. The Music Man is funny, whimsical, romantic. The Middle East is anything but. There we see real trouble with a capital T. It’s been that way since Abraham’s day, some 4,000 years ago. We might even say this is all Abraham’s fault.

Last week we started following the historical narrative of Genesis. We met Abram (later Abraham) and saw him obeying God’s call to leave a cushy life to wander across desert and mountain to an unseen land. God promised Abram land and descendents, Abram believed God and did as he was told. God would reward his faith—but not yet. Since we last visited him, Abram and his clan have had to wait out a famine in Egypt . After their return home he and his nephew Lot have split their clan and settled in different areas. They have prospered. Their flocks have grown. They can no longer live together.

Next a war has broken out between local strongmen. Lot gets kidnapped by one of them. Abram and his men track the bad guys nearly a hundred miles and rescue Lot . Then God renews his covenant with Abram, his sacred promise that—though Abram and his wife, Sarai, have grown old—they will have children. All of which takes us Genesis 16, where we pick up the story. Sarai has lost patience with the Lord’s promises. She has left her child-bearing years. So she follows standard operating procedure and offers her maid to her husband.

We almost cannot imagine how critical having children was in ancient nomadic cultures. Children who survived to adulthood became assets. They helped do the back-breaking, endless work it took to survive. If they happened to be male, they could receive the property upon their fathers’ deaths, keeping it in the family. Sarai does nothing but what any woman in her position would do. She gives her maid, Hagar, to her husband, hoping they can have a son that she can then claim as her own. But when Hagar gets pregnant, Sarai does nothing but what any woman in her position would do. She despises her maid.

Sarai makes her maid’s life so horrid Hagar flees. Try to see how desperate her situation has become. She has left a rich man and the relatively plush life he gave her. She has no place to go. The area is harsh, hot and arid. She carries a child. Hagar stops at a water hole, paralyzed with fear. But the Lord speaks to her, telling her to go back to Abram—and to Sarai. The Lord adds a prophesy that Hagar’s child will be a boy, and that he will sire an entire nation. She would name him Ishmael (which means “God hears” in Hebrew). It all happened as the Lord predicted. And the people that Ishmael would sire? The Arabs, including the Palestinians who threaten Israel today.

The Trouble with a capital T between today’s Jews and Arabs is trouble between cousins. Both trace their ancestry back to Abram. The Koran, the holy book of Islam, agrees that Abram sired the Arabs through Ishmael. Genesis tells the Jews’ side of the story. The point of that story for us is that we must learn from the experiences of Abram, Sarai and Hagar. God keeps promises. And those promises make God’s plan come true in ways too vast for us to comprehend. Learn the promises of God and trust them. The plan remains in force. It led from Abram all the way to Jesus—and even to us. Praise God! Trust the plan.

The Bible overflows with examples of God using trouble to advance the plan. Moses and the Pharaoh facing off in Egypt , the Babylonians destroying the Jerusalem Temple and enslaving the Jews, the cross of Christ: all advance God’s plan. Today we approach the communion table. Nowhere else to we meet with such force the way God mixes pain with promise to work out the plan. Nowhere else do the promises of God come true with such power. Learn the promises. Trust the plan.

What are the promises? In Christ, God has promised salvation. All who believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior receive the forgiveness he earned for them on the cross. There he paid the price for our sin, which is death. There, he fulfilled God’s promise to save His people. When Jesus ate his Last Supper, he knew the cross awaited him in less than twelve hours. Has any man ever faced greater trouble for less reason? Yet he trusted the promises. He trusted the plan. How can we do any less?

For a time it looked like Israel and the Palestinians might make peace. Now it appears impossible. Again. But God’s plan comes true over the long haul. We cannot know when or how it will happen, but we can trust that it will. We can live our lives with faith that peace will come finally, perfectly and eternally. Until then, we can look to Abram, Sarai, Hagar, and above all to Jesus, to see that again and again, God keeps promises. Trust the plan. Receive communion in that faith.