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Welcome to the first Sunday after Easter – a day often referred to in ecclesiastical circles as ‘low Sunday’, for reasons that are surely too obvious to require explanation.

Today shares the title of ‘low Sunday’ with the first Sunday after Christmas – again for reasons too obvious to bear repeating.

And this year at this time we do as we do every year on this low Sunday – we hear the story of Doubting Thomas again.

Most stories in the Bible are read every three years in accordance with the cycle of readings spelt out in our lectionary.  This story though is scheduled to be read every year, and again for reasons that I presume are obvious.

We love this story. The church universal loves this story. The church throughout history has always loved this story, and we can understand why.  We identify with Thomas in his doubting.  We understand his scepticism, we stand with him in his struggle, we see ourselves in his tornness and in his confusion.

All this makes perfect sense to me, as the need to have a low Sunday makes perfect sense to me, and yet there is one aspect to this story that, to my mind, does not fit with all the obvious good sense of the first Sunday after Easter but which stands out like a sore thumb for me every year when I hear this story repeated, and it is this: why did the resurrected body of Jesus have holes it?!

I’m assuming that you know the story as well as I do.  Forgive me if you don’t.  The date was Easter Sunday evening.  The doors were locked where the disciples were out of fear that the authorities who had destroyed Jesus might come looking for them next, and yet somehow it was not the authorities that came crashing in on their private gathering but Jesus Himself – previously dead but now very much alive, and He showed them, we’re told, “his hands and his side”.

Thomas apparently wasn’t with them at that fateful meeting but only heard about Jesus’ bizarre appearance to them second hand.  He was understandably sceptical and wanted to see Jesus for himself – expressing a particular interest in seeing the wounded hands and side:  “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger into them, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe!”

A week passed, and it must have been a long and tense week between Thomas and the rest of the disciples, yet happily Thomas was with the others when Jesus repeated exactly the same stunt again – somehow appearing in the room despite all the doors and latches that should have kept Him out.  And the first thing He does after saying ‘G’day’ to the group was to show Thomas His hands and His side. “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Take your hand, and put it into my side. Stop doubting, but believe.”

And I don’t know if Thomas stuck his fingers into the nail marks in Jesus’ hands, and I don’t know whether Thomas thrust his hand in Jesus’ side as invited, but what I do know and what is quite clear at every step of the narrative is that Jesus was, in some sense or another, still carrying the wounds of Good Friday in His Easter Sunday body or at least the marks of those wounds, and that bothers me!

Jesus was in His resurrection body.  The body of Jesus had been changed through the experience of death and resurrection.  There is no doubt about that.  As this Gospel passage itself makes clear, the resurrection body of Jesus was not bound by the same earthly limitations as his previous body had been.  The resurrected body of Jesus seemed to be able to come in and out of locked rooms as Jesus appeared and disappeared, and that body evidently looked different, such that Jesus’ disciples sometimes at first failed to recognise Him.

That, in itself, is sort of what we might have expected – that the resurrection body would be something of an upgrade to the normal earthly version.

We look for the coming of a better world and Jesus, the Bible tells us, is the ‘first fruits’ (a sign) of what is to come (1 Corinthians 15).   As Christ has been raised, so shall we be raised.  As Christ was given a new body, so shall we be given new bodies.  And in that better world, where ‘the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ and where sorrow and pain give way to joy, our new resurrection bodies find an eternal home, which leads me to wonder though whether, if Jesus is truly our model here, all these resurrection bodies will still carry with them the disfigurements that came to them during their earthly lives?

Maybe that’s how we recognise each other in Heaven?  Maybe one day one of you will come up to me and say, “Dave, I’d recognise that broken nose anywhere!” It’s possible.

If you’re familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, you may remember how Ulysses, after he returned from the Trojan war, was unrecognisable even to his own family but how, as the story goes, he was given a bath by the aging nurse, Eurycleia, who recognised him through a scar that he had on his leg.

In truth, it is our scars that identity us to those who know and love us best and, conversely, I suspect that the most significant part of getting to know someone intimately is in getting to know their wounds.  Even so, it is remarkable how the woundedness of Jesus has divided people religiously across space and time.

One of the earliest Christian heresies was ‘Docetism’ (from the Latin ‘doceo’ meaning ‘to seem’).  Docestists believed that Jesus only seemed to be human and that He only appeared to be suffering on the cross.  Jesus, the Son of God, could not really suffer of course.  He could not experience real pain.

Islam, of course, followed in the path of the Docetists (in a sense) by denying that Jesus really suffered and died on the cross.  While Christians claimed that Jesus had suffered in their place, Mohammed claimed that someone else had suffered in Jesus’ place, for it just could not be that a prophet like Jesus could suffer and be wounded and die in such a terrible way!

St Paul reflected very similarly, that while the Greeks might have considered the concept of resurrection to be silly, for his fellow Jews the very idea that God’s Messiah could suffer and die in such a humiliating fashion was not so much foolish as downright offensive!

Evidently the religious mind struggles with the idea that any Son of God could suffer and be wounded and die such a terrible  death, for it just rails against our entire concept of justice, and yet we know that the Gospels entirely embrace this.

Rather than trying to skirt around the death of Jesus, the Gospel writers assert it boldly.  Rather than deny the brokenness of Jesus, the Apostle Peter goes as far as to say to his congregation “by His wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). And even in these sketchy post-resurrection stories where so much is mysterious – where we can’t be sure exactly what Jesus looked like or how His body behaved the way it did, one thing is abundantly clear, and that is that the scars of Jesus were still there, and that indeed they were a key point through which His friends were reconciled to Him!

In truth, I do not know why Jesus continued to carry His scars in His resurrection body and I do not know whether this means that all of us will somehow carry our scars into eternity, but what I do know is that there is no way of sanitizing the story of Jesus if we are going to remain true to the Gospels, any more than we can rationalise pain out of the Christian life. We cannot remove the scars of Jesus for there is no Jesus apart from the suffering Jesus, just as there is no resurrection without the cross!

When I was a younger believe I figured that if your life was touched by Jesus you would be instantly and completely healed from head to toe and that all your pains and ailments would be a thing of the past – whether they be physical complaints or addiction problems or a history of emotional abuse – all would be healed.  And I still believe in the healing power of Jesus, though we find, don’t we, that even when healing takes place, scars remain – old fears, struggles, memories that won‘t go away – they remain a part of who we are.

Can we be the people we are without those scars?  I don’t know. What I do know is that we are broken people.  And even when we have experienced the healing touch of Jesus in our lives we remain broken people.  And it is in our brokenness that we find ourselves reaching out to Jesus, knowing that He has been broken too.

And maybe that’s the biggest reason of all as to why we love this story of Thomas so much, even if it might not be so obvious at first.  Perhaps it’s not only that we identify with Thomas in his doubts, but even moreso that deep down we, like him, are wounded people yearning to make contact with the wounds of Jesus?

And so on this low Sunday when everything seems so straightforward, let us take a moment to reflect on what is perhaps the greatest miracle of Easter, even if it is not so obvious at first – that He who is risen is the one who was crucified, and (thanks be to God) that the one who was crucified is risen!

David B. Smith (the ‘Fighting Father’) Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of three www.fatherdave.org. Fighting Father Dave Get a free preview copy of Dave’s book, Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up for his free newsletterat www.fatherdave.org

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But Ruth said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. (Ruth 1:16-18)

Today is ‘All Saints Day’ (or ‘All Hallows Day’) and while I appreciate that this day is not as celebrated in our broader culture as is the day that precedes it -  ‘All Hallows Eve’ (or ‘Halloween’) it is nonetheless a significant day of celebration in the church – a day when we celebrate our connection with the great saints who have gone before us in the faith and when we get to sing my favourite hymn, “To all the saints, who from their labours rest …”.

And so I thought that today might be a good day to talk about some of the great heroes of the faith who have been a part of our faith community in Dulwich Hill, such as those who have served in far-flung areas of the world as missionaries, or most obviously, I suppose, my most famous predecessor here, the Reverend George Chambers, rector of this parish from 1911 to 1928.

The Reverend George built our church building,  started a mission to British immigrants, founded Trinity Grammar School, and went on to become the first Bishop of Tanganyika – a great saint indeed.

And yet I decided in the end to focus my sermon this morning on another great saint from the past – Ruth, whom we read about today in the first chapter of the book that takes her name.

And that might seem like an odd choice, as what level of connectedness can we be expected to have with Ruth as compared with more contemporary figures such as the Reverend George?  And what level of connection can I, in particular, expect to have with a person like Ruth.  At least the Reverend George was male, middle-class and white like me. Ruth is none of the above!

I’m not going to say any more, at this stage, about why I’ve chosen to speak on Ruth rather than on some of the more obvious choices, but I will say now that I’m not sure that my lack of connectedness with Ruth is really much greater than anybody else’s here, for this woman lived at such a different time in human history in such a different part of the world that I suspect that none of us can readily identify with her.

Ruth lived a long time ago, even by the Bible’s standards.  She lived in the time of the Judges – way before Jesus, way before King David, before all the kings and queens of Israel, in the days of great Biblical warriors such as Samson, Jephthah, Gideon and Deborah.

Ruth was born in an ancient time in an ancient land that no longer exists – Moab – whose ancient borders were roughly the same as modern-day Jordan, and which, like Jordan, had a very volatile agricultural economy, as the land was subject to prolonged periods of drought

Surprisingly though, as the book of Ruth begins, it is Israel that was experiencing drought, and so the family of Elimelech and Naomi, residents of the familiar town of Bethlehem in Judea, decide that the rolling plains of Moab look far more promising than their homeland, and so they up and leave – a move that was most probably perceived by their neighbours as something akin to rats deserting a sinking ship.

As I say, we are dealing with a very distant time and a very distant culture, and the future prospects for three single women in those days were not good.  I’m not suggesting that the plight of widows is ever going to be one that is envied, but in that time and in that place single women had no property rights (or if they did, they were rarely respected).  Rather, they were generally regarded as property themselves – part of the goods and chattels of their men-folk.

And there was no social security system to fall back on either, of course, meaning that a single woman would be entirely dependent on her family for support, and if she were an older woman without sons, she might well find herself with no way of sustaining herself at all.

Of course no civilised society simply discards its vulnerable members, and in Israeli law at the time (and in many of the surrounding countries) there was the institution of the ‘kinsman-redeemer’ who was responsible for saving bereaved women such as these from destitution.

The way the system worked was that when a man died his brother would become responsible for the dead man’s widow. He would take her on as an extra wife and, ideally, provide her with a son who would both carry on the name of his dead brother and provide for his mother.

Of course in this case there were no surviving brothers and, as Naomi points out to her daughter-in-laws, she was incapable of providing them with further husbands, for she herself was a widow, and even if she somehow were to fall pregnant that very day and give birth to twin boys, the girls would be beyond child-bearing age themselves by the time the boys were able to marry them.

This is a very different culture from a distant time, and yet we understand I think, why Naomi releases her daughters-in-law from their obligation to continue to look after her as she returns to Bethlehem to take her chances there – encouraging them instead to return to their family homes and seek husbands for themselves there.  One of the girls, Oprah, understandably accepts Naomi’s offer of release and leaves. The other, Ruth, refuses the offer and chooses instead to stick it out with her mother-in-law.

“Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!

Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge;

your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

Where you die, I will die- there will I be buried.

May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”

This is a story from a very alien culture, set in a distant land in a time long past and yet there is something wonderfully timeless about Ruth’s pledge of loyalty to Naomi.

Ruth knows that her prospects with the old woman are not good.  She knows indeed that her best chances for a future lie with her parental family in Moab. She must have known too that there was not likely to be a party held for Naomi when she returned to Bethlehem but that she would most likely be left to scrounge out an existence on the begrudging good will of the family that she had left behind there.  And she was most probably entirely aware of the fact that the Israeli communities at the time generally hated Moabites.

It was actually written in to their law!   Moses had said (In Deuteronomy 23:3):

“No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”

And a few verses later::

‘You shall never promote their welfare [ie that of the Moabites] or their prosperity as long as you live’ (Deuteronomy 23:6)

Ruth’s decision to stick it out with Naomi must be recognised to be something of a kamikaze mission.  Ruth was not likely to survive this commitment, which may be why there is so much talk of death in her pledge:

Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.

May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”

In choosing Naomi’s welfare over her own, Ruth chooses death over life in a sense, and so reflects very precisely the love which Jesus spoke of when he said, “No one has greater love than this, that a person lay down their life for a friend.” (John 15:13)

Why does Ruth do this? There is no other answer for this except that she loved her mother-in-law, Naomi.  She loved her!  She loved her enough to die for her (or at the very least, to die with her). She loved her so much that she refused to abandon her, and because of that we’ve ended up with this book named after her.

As I say, it’s a very ancient book from a very ancient time about an alien woman in a far-flung land, and it’s a story that takes place in a community we barely understand, with customs and a culture we find it almost impossible to identify with.  And yet we find in this story something that penetrates time and distance and custom and culture. We find here the love of Christ!

And it’s only a small act of love really.  On the great stage of life’s dramas it may seem surprising that this pledge of loyalty and self-sacrifice gets a mention.  And it’s not as if the Biblical writers had nothing else to write about at the time, for indeed this is not the only historical story to be recorded from this period.

On the contrary, as we said at the beginning, this story is placed in the time of the Judges – a time that is written about extensively in the book of Judges.  It was a time of great heroes – of larger than life figures such as Samson and Gideon, Jephthah and Deborah.  It was a 200-year period of violence, drama and bloodshed, where great battles were fought and great deeds performed.  And it was also the time when a young widow from Moab made a pledge of life-long loyalty to a much older widow from Israel, saying:

“Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge;

your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.”

And that’s why I chose to focus on the story of Ruth this morning, rather than on one of the more obvious greats from our own more recent history.

Because in the history of great deeds performed by the great mothers and fathers of the faith who have gone before us, yes, there have been any number of amazing battles won, great mission-fields conquered, wonderful schools founded and monumental buildings built, and yet we must also honour with equal pride the countless acts of loyalty and devotion performed by those who have gone before us – promises of love and faithfulness made from life-partners to each other (husband to wife and wife to husband), from parents to their children and children to their parents, from parents-in-law to their children-in-law and from children-in-law to their parents-in-law, from friends to each other, who have pledged to stand by each other come what may, from individuals to each other and from individual to their community – acts of devotion such as that performed by this great saint, Ruth, the widow of Moab.

Rev. David B. Smith
(The ‘Fighting Father’)
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of three www.fatherdave.org.
Fighting Father Dave
Get a free preview copy of Dave’s book, Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up for his free newsletter at www.fatherdave.org.

When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” (Mark 6:23-24)

We had a baptism this morning, and I think if you’d searched through the Bible for the most inappropriate Gospel story to feature today, you couldn’t have done better (or rather worse) that the one we had this morning – the story of the death of John the Baptist!

When you’re working with the lectionary, of course, it’s all the luck of he draw. We might have got Jesus saying, “let the little children come to me”, but we didn’t.  We got this story of lust and murder,  humiliation and death.

And perhaps it’s only right, if we are going to urge our newly baptised to “Fight bravely under His banner against sin, the world and the devil” that we warn them first where the fight might take them!  Or perhaps I should have just over-ridden the lectionary today and chosen a more family-friendly reading?

For it’s not just the fact that this Gospel reading focuses on the tragic death of John.  It’s all the grizzly detail that you get in the story. It’s as if we got the Hollywood, X-rated version of the story, for, I think you’ll agree that with most tragic stories you read about in the Bible, you get the ABC version.

Compare, for example, the Biblical account of Herod’s later murder of James (the brother of John) that we’re given in the book of Acts: “About that time, Herod arrested some people who belonged to the church and mistreated them. He even had James the brother of John killed with a sword.” (Acts 12:1-2) The end!  That’s it – short, succinct, tragic, but we get over it and we move on!

But not in this account of the death of the Baptist!  We get first the surly details of Herod’s personal life that give rise to the criticism he gets from John.  We get the imprisonment, the party, the dance of the young girl, and ultimately the grizzly details of how John’s head was served to the girl’s mother on a dinner-plate!

It would have been quite a scene, and it must have been quite a dance, and I did consider trying to recreate the atmosphere this morning by attempting a dance myself , but I decided that, even though I obviously do look good in a dress, my rendition of the dance of the seven army surplice blankets would never do it justice.

At any rate, the real question is ‘What is this story doing here?’ And I don’t just mean ‘what is it doing here, being read at a baptism?’, but ‘what is this passage doing in the Bible at all?’

It’s almost as if at some very early meeting of the Bible Society someone said, “we’re just not moving enough copies of this book! We need more sex and violence in here”, and so Mark piped up and said, “how about I include the death of John the Baptist?”

OK. I’m sure that wasn’t really it. Indeed, I assume that the reason this story is so drawn out is most probably for the sake of the followers of the Baptist, as John was a very popular guy, and his disciples no doubt wanted to know the details.

Even so, there’s not much that’s encouraging in this story for the followers of the Baptist. It’s not as if any of his last remaining words were recorded in this story. Indeed, we hear nothing from John in this story, as by the time he makes his personal appearance he is no longer able to speak!  And that is disappointing, as I think it would have been very helpful to know what were the last words and last thoughts of the Baptist.

We like to assume, of course, that when it comes to the death of a great man of the faith like the Baptist, that they go out full of courage and grace like Maximillian Kolbe.

Kolbe, you might remember, was the Catholic priest murdered by the Nazis who departed this earthly stage singing hymns from his starvation bunker until the guards got so sick of it that they finally finished him off with a lethal injection.

But not all martyrs die quite so gloriously.  If you read the last recorded words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, who was also murdered by the Nazis, you’ll find someone with far more self-doubt and questioning, and I suspect that John the Baptist was something more like this.

For the only words we hear from the Baptist while he was in prison are words of doubt.  He messages Jesus from prison, you may remember, asking Him, “Are you the one we were waiting for or should we wait for another?” (Matthew 11:3)

John had been so confident early on – both about Jesus and about his own work, proclaiming Jesus as the ‘lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ (John 1:29) while railing as openly about Herod’s personal indiscretions as he did about everything else that ticked him off.

Perhaps John had thought himself untouchable, or perhaps he didn’t care what happened to him at that stage? But things began to look different from the inside of his prison cell, and John had doubts.

Did John die still full of doubts, or did the response he received from Jesus satisfy him, such that he died in peace?  We do not know. We know nothing of the inner life of John at the end but only of the grizzly details of his martyrdom – of the way John ticked off Herodian, Herod’s wife, of Herod’s wild party, of the seductive dance that lured the drunken king to promise up to half his kingdom to the young seductress, and of the girl’s grizzly request.

And so we come back to our original question – what is this story doing here, this story of drunken debauchery and murder?  What is it doing in the Bible?

If it’s here for the benefit of the disciples of John the Baptist, it doesn’t really have anything encouraging to offer them, and I’m sure it’s not the final chapter of the life of their master that they were expecting.

Of course we don’t know exactly what John’s followers were expecting but we do know that John was regularly compared to Elijah, and I expect the disciples of the Baptist expected his career to follow a similar course

Elijah had been the mouthpiece of God to the political leaders of his day. He challenged king Ahab and queen Jezebel and had multiple death threats made against him.  Nonetheless, God kept Elijah safe, and eventually he saw the tables turned on those who tried to imprison him and kill him.  

I expect the disciples of the Baptist expected his career to follow a similar course.  And then they got the news that John’s head had been served on a dinner plate to the queen.  It must have been hard to make sense of it all.  And in truth, it really is a difficult story to make sense of, even at this distance.

You know how in our conventional Christian wisdom we say, “well, this tragedy might not make a lot of sense right now, but once we see the bigger picture, we’ll see how everything fits together.” Well … it’s 2000 years on from the death of John the Baptist and I still can’t see the point!

I find it hard to believe that, if John had died of old age something else wonderful that did happen somehow could not have happened (if you know what I mean). It is not obvious that the death of John actually accomplished anything – not then and not since – and maybe sometimes we just have to accept that tragedies happen and that they are not always miracles in disguise but just plain tragedies.  

Even so, I think the Gospel writer does intend for us to see this story as part of a greater, grander, story of hope, and the key to that, I think, is actually the way in which the story is introduced.  

For you may remember that our Gospel reading didn’t actually start off as being a story about John the Baptist or Herod, let alone about Herodian or Salome  It starts rather with people asking questions about Jesus – ‘who is this guy?’.  Some said Jesus was Elijah or one of the other prophets, but it’s Herod who identifies Jesus as John the Baptist having come back to haunt him, saying, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised!” (Mark 6:16)

And Herod is completely wrong of course, but in another sense he’s entirely right.  Jesus is Jesus and not John – we need have no doubt about that – but what Herod does realise is that killing off John did not put an end to John’s work, as John’s work was just part of a larger project that Jesus was continuing!

And of course it’s not really so much the ministry of John goes on, but rather the work of the Kingdom of God that goes on!  

John is dead, but the battle for the Kingdom continues.  Others before John and others after him have fallen in the battle, but still the work of God continues!  Jesus Himself will fall in this battle, but the work of God continues.  Indeed, not just despite His death, but through His death, the work of God continues.

For in the end, the work of God isn’t so much a boxing match where, when one fighter goes down, the show is over, the good guys have lost, and everybody goes home. No. It’s a relay race where, as one runner falls, he passes the baton on to the next guy in line and the race continues!

This is the battle for the Kingdom of God – a battle that is still raging and in which we are all involved!  And this is what baptism is about too – the welcoming of new soldiers into the fight – new runners into the relay.

For we recognise that as we welcome new competitors on to the field, others of us are falling from the track, and some of us are very weary and are failing. And so we give thanks for these new athletes on to the field, as we watch them begin to take up the baton and join the good fight.

It’s what my father taught me – that the work of God is like a flowing stream, and that when someone puts a rock in the stream, the water flows around the rock.  This is what the disciples of John had to discover. This is what the first century disciples of Jesus had to discover, and this is the discovery that we continue to make today – that despite the setbacks, the hardships, and despite those we lose along the way, the work of God continues, joy comes in the morning, or, in the words of Martin Luther, “The City of God remaineth”.

Many have gone before us in this battle and others will follow, and none of us is invulnerable. All of us, sooner or later, will fall, but the work of God continues.  I will fall, but the work of God will continue.  You will fall at some point but the work of God will continue!

And sometimes all we can do is pick up the remains of those who have fallen and give them a decent burial.  But we do so in the confidence that whatever happens, God will be God, God’s work will continue, love ultimately will triumph, His Kingdom will come. Amen

David B. Smith (the ‘Fighting Father’) Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of three www.fatherdave.org. Fighting Father Dave Get a free preview copy of Dave’s book, Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up for his free newsletterat www.fatherdave.org.

We’ve been working our way through the story of Abraham for some time now – stories about Abraham & Sarah, Abraham & his family, Abraham & his descendents, Abraham and the promises God made to him – Abraham the ‘father of faith’.

We started the story when this aging Bedouin figure had the word of God come to him and, at the age of 72, climbed up onto his camel and headed out into the unknown.

If you have a very good memory, you may remember that Abraham rode from his homeland in Ur up to Haran in the North, then down into Canaan in the South West – to a land that was one day to be named after his grandson, ‘Israel’. And Abraham pitched his tent in that land and he claimed that land by faith, as the rightful homeland of his descendants, even though he was 75 years old and had no descendents.

If you know the story, you will remember that a strange event then took place. Three mysterious men came to visit Abraham and Sarah and shared a prophecy – that these two would have a child of their own within a year.

Abraham at this stage was 99 years old, we are told, and Sarah was well past ‘the way of women’. So she laughed when she heard the prophecy – a laugh of cynical disbelief. But her cynical laugh became a laugh of surprised joy when the baby was born as predicted, and so she called him ‘Isaac’ – meaning ‘she laughed’ (though God knows how she could have been laughing after giving birth in her old age).

It was a great miracle nonetheless. It would be a great miracle if it happened today. Today we have girls as young as 12 in Sydney getting pregnant and giving birth, but not women as old as 70 or 80. That sort of thing only happens in church!

But just when you thought that the story of Abraham was looking like a religious version of The Waltons, we find that things start to turn nasty. Sarah decides to do away with Abraham’s other son Ishmael, along with Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, and Abraham goes along with the plan and more or less condemns the two to death.

It is a grizzly scene. Sarah tells Abraham to get rid of them because she does not want this son of a slave woman to be his heir. Abraham is upset with Sarah because she’s talking about his son. He doesn’t appear to be too worried about Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, who had been his lover. At any rate, he complies and sends them both away.

And you’d think that he’d give them a camel and enough money and supplies to set themselves up somewhere else. He could have done that.

Abraham was a wealthy man. He could have given them enough food and provisions to last them for the rest of their lives. He doesn’t do that. Instead he gives them a loaf of bread and a bottle of water – one bottle of water between the two of them – and sends them off into the desert.

Hagar and Ishmael are not given enough to survive. They are given enough to get far enough away from the camp so that Abraham won’t have to see or hear them die. Well, that’s how it must have been perceived by Hagar and Ishmael at any rate. From the perspective of the author of the book of Genesis it’s not quite that simple.

You see Hagar and Ishmael aren’t simply innocent victims of Sarah’s irrational rage. Hagar used to work for Sarah before she became the mother of Abraham’s heir. This meant that if Abraham died, that Ishmael would be in charge of everything, which would mean that Sarah, if she survived Abraham, would find herself subject to Ishmael and to Hagar. And it’s clear from the story that Hagar has already worked this out, and has started acting a bit too big for her boots.

And Ishmael is not just a happy smiling toddler at this stage. He’s a stroppy young teenager, about 14 years old. And the story suggests that he’s already starting to throw his weight around with young Isaac, as teenagers are apt to do. Isaac gets his revenge of course, more so than he probably expected (or even desired).

And Abraham carries out the grizzly task under protest. He prays about it and gets assurance from God that God will take care of Ishmael (if not Hagar).

Even so, Abraham appears to be almost too faithful in the way in which he leaves it all to God – making no realistic earthly provision for his son or his son’s mother whatsoever. Certainly Ishmael would remember the day when his dad kissed him on the head and said ‘best of luck’, and sent him off into the desert with his bottle of water and with no other means of survival.

Sarah of course comes across as about as endearing as the wicked queen in Snow White when she orders the expulsion of the child, even if her own place of authority in the family was at being placed at risk.

I suppose Isaac had reason to be pleased, though I suspect that he mourned the loss of his brother. I’m sure Abraham shed some tears. Perhaps Sarah laughed again as she saw her enemies leave camp. Perhaps she felt pangs of guilt. We don’t know.

It all has the makings of a good soap opera – one man, two women, multiple children, jealousy, greed and murder. If only we had got the whole crew on Jerry Springer before it reached its tragic climax, with Hagar leaving Ishmael to die under a tree.

Ishmael should have been a strapping young lad by that stage of course, full of energy and young muscularity, and yet he apparently faded even faster than did his mother. Perhaps the emotional shock of it all was more than he could take. At any rate, we’re told that she couldn’t stand to watch him die, so she goes off a distance to die alone. But God ‘hears the cry’ of the boy and He comes to save both mother and son from death.

This is the surely most beautiful verse in the story:

“God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is”. (Genesis 21:17)

It reminds me very much of another word from God that appears a little further down the track of the Biblical narrative, where the descendents of Isaac ‘cried out to God because of their slavery’ in Egypt. And we’re told,

“God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.” (Exodus 2:24)

God, it seems, tends to have his ears open to the cries of the vulnerable. As it happened in Exodus, so it happens here! God hears the cry of the boy and He remembers His promise, not to Israel this time, but to Ishmael!

God had plans for Ishmael! God had made promises to Ishmael. God was going to build out of Ishmael a mighty nation! The interesting thing of course is that this man and these promises and this mighty nation do NOT form any central part of the ongoing Biblical narrative as we have it. This all becomes a part of another story. Dare we say it – it becomes part of the story of Islam!

I think this is why I have never seen a stained-glass window depicting the life of Ishmael.

In our Bibles, the story of Ishmael more or less finishes here. In the Koran though we read of Ishmael going on to Mecca and building a Mosque there. He becomes the physical father of the Arab peoples, and spiritual father to the Islamic community!

Now it’s not my job to tell you whether the account you read of in the Koran is true or false. And it’s certainly not my job to tell you whether you should like or admire Ishmael. What I must tell you though, from Genesis chapter 21, is that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, – the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ – is clearly also the God of Ishmael!

What do we do with that?

Isn’t the Bible the story of God’s salvation of the world through His chosen people, the descendents of Abraham, the Jews, and through that special descendent of Abraham, Jesus? Yes, it is, surely, and through Jesus, we ourselves trace a spiritual link directly back to Abraham.

St Paul would say that Abraham is the father of all of us who have faith. He is the founding father of the people of God, as we count ourselves to be a part of the people of God. Abraham’s people were God’s ‘chosen people’. And now we have been called to be part of that ‘chosen people’ who live by the grace of God in the cross of Christ.

We share a spiritual identity with Abraham and his descendants. Abraham is the father of faith. His story is our story. His people are our people. His God is our God. And yet in Genesis 21, it appears that our God is also Ishmael’s God!

Hagar and Ishmael are persons with whom we do NOT naturally share any spiritual identity. Hagar and Ishmael are NOT the mother and father of faith. Hagar and Ishmael are NOT chosen by God in the same way that Isaac and Jacob are. Surely these people are NOT our people, their story is NOT our story, and yet … OUR God turns out to be THEIR God too!

I don’t know if you feel uncomfortable at the thought of your spiritual connection to Ishmael. If it doesn’t irk you particularly, try to see it from the perspective of the ancient Jews, who were the first intended recipients of this Biblical story. Think about it from the perspective of a modern Jew! For it is the Palestinian people who are the modern descendents of Ishmael.

Most Jews do not feel a great sense of natural kinship with their Palestinian brethren: “Your history is NOT my history. Your people are NOT my people. This land is NOT your land.” And yet … here in Genesis 21 we are straightforwardly reminded that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is their God too!

I don’t know if you’ve met many Ishmaels. I’ve met a few. You don’t meet many here in church on a Sunday morning. They’re not generally at church, any more than they’re at the synagogue. You’ll find Ishmael and his buddies down at the mosque. They are a different people, different history, different religion. And yet … they are children of the same God!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all religions are the same (that’s what you say when you don’t take anybody else’s religion seriously). And I’m not saying that it doesn’t’t make any difference how you think of God or how you speak of God or how you respond to God. Of course it does. What I am saying is just what Genesis says: that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their descendants is also the God of Hagar and Ishmael and their descendents.

God loved Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and He loved Ishmael and his children too. God had a special plan for the life of Abraham and his descendents, and that He had a special plan for the life of Ishmael and His descendents as well.

“Hear O Israel” Moses would later say “Hear O Israel that the Lord thy God, the Lord is one.” There is only one God. He is the God of both brothers – Isaac and Ishmael. He is the Lord of both nations – both Jews and Palestinians. Ultimately He is the Lord and heavenly father of us all!

God ‘heard the cry’ of young Ishmael as he lay dying under the tree, just as God later ‘heard the cry’ of the Israelites under bondage in Egypt, just as God hears our cries and our prayers, as He hears the cries and the prayers of those who have nothing to do with us – those who are not part of our church, and not part of our religion.

We may well understand more of God than many of our neighbours. It may well be true that many here have a deeper experience of the presence of God than would most of our neighbours. It is almost certainly true that most of us here are serving God more deliberately and faithfully than are many persons in our community. And yet, in the final analysis, our God is their God. Their God is my God. The God who loves me and bleeds for me is the same God who loves and bleeds for them. Because the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of Ishmael too!

Rev. David B. Smith
(the ‘Fighting Father’)
Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of threewww.fatherdave.org Get a free preview copy of Dave’s book,Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up
for his free newsletterat www.fatherdave.org

Generating sermon ideas every week can sometimes be a challenge. Some people think that creating a sermon is little more than finding a few Bible or inspirational quotes and then adding in some exposition between them to keep people listening. On the contrary!

Creating a sermon is far more complicated than writing a report for a class or a work assignment! We all know it is not that easy, and deciding what to say to your church can be a challenge for anyone.

Where do ministers, pastors and priests get their sermon ideas? The ideas can come from a million sources: personal experiences they had during the week, a problem in the community, a trend he/she sees developing in his/her own church family, something that is watched on television or heard on the radio or read in a book.

Sermon inspiration is as vague and intangible as the inspiration that writers and artists use for their creations. To be sure, a sermon is a work of art in and of itself. No wonder coming up with ideas for sermons every week can be such a challenge!

So what do you do when it is time to start working on next week’s talk and you don’t have any ideas? Some will pull out older sermons hoping to find inspiration or a new point of view on previously spoken words. Some will flip through the news. Others will go for a walk. Some will go online in search of outlines and tips and tricks. There are many websites and products available to help pastors and ministers develop a weekly sermon that feels fresh and new, without pulling their hair out in the process.

What inspires you? What do you want to hear about when you go to church or temple each week?

Next, go to this website on Sermon Ideas where you will find information and ideas on how you can be assured of always having a great sermon. http://www.SimpleSermons.net