My friend Janelle Koenig, who is a comedian and radio host here in Perth recently recounted a story of a childhood visit to her Grandma.
‘One school holidays when I was 9, I had read all my books and was pestering Grandma to give me one of hers to read. She grabbed the biggest, thickest book she had on hand at the time, never thinking I’d even attempt to read it.’
The story stood out for me, because I had read the same book at about the same age, except in my case I just plucked it off the shelf at home and started reading. It had a picture of children on the front, and a border of flowers, and I was an avid, obsessive reader.
Unfortunately, both Janelle and I discovered that Flowers in the Attic is NOT a story for children AT ALL, and we were both exposed to some terrifying and confusing content at a very young age.
The good people who compile the lectionary – the cycle of scripture readings in use in churches all over the world – have carefully selected the verses that we read today from the book of Genesis. We start in Chapter 17 with verses 1-7, the skip a bit, then read verses 15 and 16, then stop. This is, presumably, an exercise in duty of care. Perhaps people don’t want to come to church on Sunday morning and be confronted with a lengthy discourse on circumcision? And perhaps it would be easier for preachers if we didn’t have to address how Sarah becomes pregnant at ninety years old? And if we didn’t have to address God’s inconvenient declaration that God will bless Ishmael, make him fruitful and the father of a great nation?
The lectionary tried to give us a reprieve today, but I’m sorry I’m just not having it.
Throughout this Lent, we are jumping around the Hebrew scriptures to different texts related to the theme of covenant. On one level, a covenant is a straightforward thing. There are two parties, and they reach an agreement in which each party has responsibilities. In the case of the people we call Israelites or Hebrews or Jews, the agreement is that God will bless them and make them fruitful. The chosen people will maintain certain practices, sometimes called boundary markers – the boys will be circumcised, food laws will be obeyed, certain festivals and rituals will be celebrated, and, most importantly, God will be acknowledged as the only, true God, and the people will submit to God’s power and authority.
On another level, the covenant is a very complicated thing indeed. Obvious questions arise immediately, for Jews no less than the rest of us. Why did God choose that particular group of people? If they are the chosen people, why don’t Jews experience uniform prosperity and happiness? As Tevye says in Fiddler On The Roof ‘I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't you choose someone else’. What, exactly, are the Hebrews chosen for? Is it to establish a nation state in a particular location? Is it to sustain particular observances, like the sabbath, regardless of the circumstances or cost – and do these observances somehow satisfy or appease God? And what if you are born Jewish, but don’t really want to part of the covenant, can you leave?
And, of course, today’s text then begs another question about who is included in the covenant. Because God is quite explicit when it comes to the circumcising – it is not just Abraham and his flesh-and-blood son Ishmael (whose Mother is one of his servants), and it’s not just Isaac who is soon to be born to a geriatric Mother, it is also their slaves, both those who were born in their house and those who were purchased with cash money. To leave us in no doubt, verse 23 outlines how Abraham does a job-lot of circumcisions on himself, his teenage son, and all the slaves. It’s probably not a visual image you need before morning tea, but I’m just a simple bible-believing Christian who reads the text in front of me.
So, God has chosen Abraham and Sarah to be the parents of a great nation. Later, they will kick Ishmael to the curb, along with his mother Hagar, and Hagar and Ishmael will nearly die of dehydration in Be’er-shevah. Isaac will marry Rebekah, and she will give birth to Jacob and Esau, and Jacob will have twelve sons and at least one daughter by four different women, and they will be the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel. One of those sons will have a very fancy coat and a West-End musical about him starring Jason Donovan, but that’s a whole other story. But there’s a burning question here, for me at least. Ishmael was Abraham’s son. Ishmael was circumcised. God declared that Ishmael would be blessed, fruitful, numerous, and the father of twelve princes and a great nation. When Ishmael nearly dies, God sends an angel to show them to a well so they survive.
So are we to understand that Ishmael ends up outside the covenant, and Abraham’s slaves are inside the covenant? And if so, what kind of God is it who arranges things like this?
It’s at this point, I think, that we need to pause for a moment before we get too much further down the rabbit hole, and acknowledge that we are not reading a fully integrated, cross-referenced text, written by a single author. The text of Genesis, itself the product of several generations of editing, is a kind of time capsule. If we read it to get a neat, coherent, outline of the rules for God’s dealing with humanity – we will be gravely disappointed. But if we read it to get a grip on how a particular group of people began to understand their relationship to God, their obligations to God’s justice and mercy, and their uncertainty and confusion about it all, we might find something inspiring.
The book of Genesis went through multiple stages of redaction, or editing. Clever-clogs scholars can work out which parts come from which eras by analsying the language and contextual clues. At any point, the story could have been tidied up. Ishmael and Hagar, who are something of an inconvenience, could have been rewritten, or written out. Abraham’s slaves, could have been quietly dealt with. The whole thing could have made into a much tidier story. But that’s not what happened.
In fact, the tidying up and sanitising of this story and others like it was done in the twentieth century, by the people who compiled bible stories for children and Sunday School curricula. They didn’t want to expose children to the gritty and complex realities, so it was much easier to simplify the stories. Even today, the harsh and confusing realities of the biblical texts comes as a shock to people who have been raised to love and cherish the bible, and who perhaps had a picture book of bible stories at home, which left out all the gruesome and weird bits. I myself was formed by the Readers Digest Bible Stories for Children which had all the fun bits taken out.
But I think an untidy, confusing and somewhat unpleasant narrative in the scriptures is ultimately of more use to us as we lead untidy, confusing and sometimes unpleasant lives, in a complicated, organic world, which is unpredictable and rarely conforms to strict rules and expectations.
The covenant between God and the chosen people which we discover in the Hebrew scriptures, and the covenant between God and the whole of humanity which is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, is not a carefully nuanced legal contract, negotiated between two parties for mutual benefit. It is a dynamic interplay between a wildly compassionate God, unique and creative human beings, and the universe in which they live and work. It’s messy, but it’s a holy mess. Relationships are like this – they start strangely, assumptions change, boundaries shift, challenges change things and people learn and grow.
As this season of Lent unfolds, perhaps it is a good time for all of us to reflect on our covenant relationship with God. How’s it going? Is it messy and confusing? Are there bits of it that make no sense? Do you struggle with who you are and who God is in the middle of it all?
If so, good.
The Lord Be With You