My, my... Genesis 21:8-21, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39. Whichever text you choose, you will find yourself a very long way from the simplistic, formulaic spirituality people are so fond of, and maybe yearn for you to dispense. If you believe that going to church, believing in God, saying a few prayers and doing your best to be good will make you and your family happy, you will be mortified by any one of, much less all three passages in Sunday’s lectionary.

Genesis 21 begins so happily, with little Isaac (yitzhaq meaning “laughter”) bringing giggles of joy to his parents who had laughingly scoffed at the possibility a child might happen. But then (and the Bible always, like life, has a “but then” lurking), Hagar and Ishmael are still hanging around, of course. Sarah’s jealousy rages and she presses Abraham to get rid of them. The Lord seems to concur (raising again our constant question of whether the Bible writers heard God accurately or not…).

The poignant pace of the story is haunting: he rose early, took bread (a loaf?) and a skin of water (again, not a lot) and placed them on her shoulder, and sent her and the lad away. “And she went wandering through the wilderness of Beersheba,” a dry, parched zone. She hid her boy under a tree, hoping to predecease him. “She raised her voice and wept.” But notice what verse 17 then says: “God heard the voice of the lad.” She wasn’t the only one wailing. The cries of all children, everywhere, who are thirsty, who are abandoned — all their cries are heard by God, and must break our hearts (Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision: “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God”). They survive, a sign of God’s unconventional grace, albeit in the face of Abraham’s henpecked cruelty. He was willing to lose Ishmael; would he be willing (in chapter 22) to lose Isaac as well?

Preaching here is peculiar: we need not tie things up in a nice bow with a moral, a cute lesson. The Bible describes what life is really like. God is there, not as a fixer, and often misconstrued. People survive... or not. God’s world is darkness and light. Every time we claim some blessing (“I got the job!”) someone else was the loser (“Why can’t I get a job?”); celebrate the gift of health, and you do so within earshot of someone who was just diagnosed with something lethal.

I will try to look at broader social ills and how we regularly, even if unaware, banish today's Hagars and Ishmaels. Robert Caro, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker, tells the story of Robert Moses, the astonishingly powerful New Yorker. The story includes why the Long Island Parkway wound up where it did. It was supposed to go in a certain direction, until some wealthy barons bought off Moses and got him to relocate the highway. So instead of running through their huge acreage, it plowed through the property of small farmers, who lost everything. Every city and state has similar stories. Caro's haunting conclusion? "Regard for power implies a disregard for lack of power."

Who’s who in this Hagar story? Israel, in Egypt, looks a lot like Ishmael, outcast and thirsty. When Jesus is born, he plays the role of Ishmael more than Isaac in some ways: fleeing to the desert, harassed, endangered, not received by his own. The Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 feels like Hagar’s descendant. Who are the outcasts today? Not whom are we to help (an important question), but who are the bearers of God’s way in the world?

I would not distract people by trying to tie Ishmael and Isaac to modern day Islam and Judaism. The “families of Abraham” model isn’t ideal to bring interfaith understanding, as Abraham’s family, as this text attests, was dysfunctional and hardly in love with one another.