Life giving and soul healing fish and bread

Sermon prepared for Grace Lutheran Church, Scarsdale, N.Y., July 28, 2024.

Millions of sermons have been preached over thousands of years about the feeding of the five-thousand. Most of them stress how utterly miraculous it is to feed five-thousand hungry people.

Naturally we are in awe of the man who could instantly multiply a few crumbs into a banquet. For the rest of us, that requires strategic planning and a substantial fortune, as anyone who has planned a wedding reception or a bar mitzvah knows.

Few sermons ask why the crowd was hungry. Why did so many people leave home that day without adequate provisions for snacks? Was it an epidemic of poor planning?

And even fewer sermons ask why people are hungry in the first place. Of course, Jesus was concerned about the poor and hungry and he talked about them all the time. But when Jesus stuffed his sizable congregation with loaves and kefelta that day, was he also making a point about endemic poverty and systemic hunger?

That’s an interesting question. Some will say no. At the same time, when the sermon of the loaves and fish is preached in Christian churches this Sunday, worldwide hunger will be the specter at the feast. As we meditate about the careless five-thousand, 795 million persons live on the edge of starvation. 

Many of those persons live in South Sudan. According to World Vision as of today, more than 25.6 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. Both sides in the on going civil war in Sudan have restricted aid delivery, and both sides are accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Save the Children reports that 75 percent of children are now going hungry each day.

Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof painted a chilling picture of one woman dying of hunger. 

As I was driving into this city, a woman was lying inert on the road. She was Nyanjok Garang, and she said she hadn’t eaten for three days. She had set out to look for work, maybe washing clothes, in hopes of keeping her two children alive. After a day of fruitless walking she had collapsed. “My children are hungry,” she said. “I’m hungry. There’s not even a cent left to buy bread.” Her husband is a soldier in the government forces fighting in South Sudan’s civil war, but she doesn’t even know if he is still alive. So she left her children with a neighbor and set out in hopes of finding work — “and then I blacked out.” 

Multiply that woman by five-thousand, and are we closer to the point Jesus was making when he multiplied loaves and fish?

What should we be thinking about as we read these 21 verses in John 6? Many puzzling passages are included, beginning with the fabulous feeding and climaxing with Jesus’ flamboyant feat of walking on the rolling waters of Galilee.

Some theologians speculate that the walking-on-the-water scene appears out of chronological order, that it is more likely something that happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Their reasoning is that this feat of aqua-levitation matches the abilities of Jesus’ post-corporeal body, which walked through walls. 

Regardless of when the disciples witnessed this astounding event, it is certainly a tale they would have told and retold for the rest of their lives. Theologians speculate that evangelists writing about Jesus three centuries on, looking for ways to illustrate his godliness, may have dropped the story into their narratives without regard to its context.

Interesting. But the pleasant thing about theological speculation is that no one really knows for sure and everyone gets to do it.

That goes, too, for the miracle of the feeding of the five-thousand. Again, millions of sermons attempted to offer miraculous or logical explanations for the event.

One possible explanation, of course, is that Jesus caused the existing bread and fish to replicate miraculously. This is the theory my Sunday school teachers embraced, and it is heartwarming to imagine: mundane food stuffs replicating supernaturally as hungry people stuffed their mouths. One of my favorite writers, Father James Martin, is among the scholars who believe this was an out-and-out miracle.

Other theologians look for a more practical explanation. In their view, people in the crowd were so moved by the generosity of a little boy who offered his lunch that they followed his example. As Jesus blessed the food and offered the meager helping of bread and fish, a handful of people pulled out extra morsels from their own packs and offered them to their neighbors. Soon scores followed suit, then hundreds, then thousands were sharing their lunch, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

That explanation does make logical sense, but this level of impulsive generosity would require a miracle far greater than supernatural fish splitting. In the long history of the world, the miracle we humans have failed to accomplish is the miracle of sharing our wealth so no one will starve. 

Many have tried.

One of the stranger events at the outbreak of World War II was the formation of a Federal Council of Churches commission aimed at preventing war from happening again. The Federal Council’s Program for a Just and Durable Peace called for a democratic redistribution of power and wealth to guarantee future peace. The program called for a controlled international bank to make money available worldwide “without the predatory and imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private and governmental loans.” 

The Just and Durable Peace Program also called for worldwide freedom of immigration, the elimination of tariffs and quota restrictions on world trade, and a universal system of money controlled to prevent inflation and deflation.

Any one of these radical proposals could have prepared the framework for a program to eliminate world hunger.

But the proposals were too radical for most, and it’s tempting to wonder what kind of left-leaning socialists could offer such sweeping proposals in the dark opening days of global conflict. Surprisingly, the chair of the conference was an active ecumenist and Presbyterian layman named John Foster Dulles – the same who, a decade later, would be named Secretary of State by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Other members of the conference were Harvey Firestone the tire manufacturer and John R. Mott, Methodist layman and future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s no surprise is that the Just and Durable Peace Conference was a failure. The New York Times and TIME magazine excoriated the conference and suggested it was both unpatriotic and socialist. There was no impetus then or now to reorganize the world’s governments or its economies to provide greater safety, justice, and opportunity for all people. 

If the five-thousand of Jesus’ day were fed because every heart was opened to share with others, that was a greater miracle than the Justice and Durable Peace Conference could manage. No one will ever know if its ideas would have made future wars less likely.

But still the world asks: will the miracle ever happen?

Both the five-thousand persons on the hill and the dramatic walking-on-water scene point to Jesus’ readiness to use his moral authority and divine power to serve persons in need. 

I'm curious what we would learn if we could organize the five-thousand into demographic categories. Except for the boy with the basket of food, we don’t know the age or economic classes that were present that day, although we can deduce they were all male. Even the most open-minded gospel writer would not have seen the need of counting the women present. When both genders are factored in, it’s possible Jesus fed ten-thousand that day.

Whoever and how many they were, we know beyond doubt that Jesus never turned his back on any one in spiritual, mental, or financial need. 

And we can be certain that, because society in Jesus’ day was organized much like ours – that is, 1 percent of the people held most of the wealth – Jesus’ primary concern was for persons living in poverty.

In that sense, the five-thousand were a microcosm of the world we live in today. The difference is that today, when we ask ourselves how we are going to feed hungry crowds, we’re facing millions, not thousands.

We tend to put those millions of hungry persons out of our thoughts because we don’t see how we can help them. We take comfort in Jesus’ observation that the poor will always be with us because it almost makes poverty seem like an acceptable reality. We share Philip’s despair as we count all the mouths to be fed and wonder where the bread was coming from.

But God had a way then. And God has ways to feed the millions who are hungry today, assuming we don’t let the complications of domestic and international politics get in our way.

In 2000, for example, most of the nations of the world signed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations to among other things, eradicate extreme poverty and hunger worldwide. The eight MDG set specific targets on poverty alleviation, education, gender equality, child and maternal health, environmental stability, HIV/AIDS reduction, and a “Global Partnership for Development.”

The Millennium Development Goals, though tacitly supported by the U.S. Government, never made it to the mainstream of presidential and congressional campaigns. Candidates tended to champion the needs of the struggling middle class, where the votes are, and ignore those who dwell in extreme poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals did make some progress. The goal was to end extreme poverty in the world by 2015 but by then the goal was only partially achieved.

The target of reducing extreme poverty by half was reportedly reached by 2010, namely the target of halving the proportion of people who lack dependable access to improved sources of drinking water.  Conditions for more than 200 million people living in slums were ameliorated—double the 2020 target.

So we know it can be done, but so what? Sadly, no one seems to be talking about the MDG these days. Even the United Nations official website for the goals has been frozen at 2015.  The current surge of nationalistic tendencies in the U.S. and elsewhere have virtually eliminated any altruistic impulses of eliminating poverty. Only a miracle can revive them, and it will take the kind of miracle Jesus effected on that long gone Palestinian hillside.

The feeding of the five-thousand was the result of a management miracle by the God of Love and the Prince of Peace, working through the Holy Spirit to convince single persons in a crowd that they are intimately connected to the individuals who surround them. 

The feeding of the five-thousand illustrates the power of the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our might as we love our neighbors the way we need to be loved.

The feeding of the five-thousand is a timely reminder that though the poor will always be with us, God doesn’t expect us to ignore them.

And the feeding of the five-thousand is the scriptural impetus to keep pushing ourselves and our politicians to end the poverty that kills throughout the world.

It’s tempting, always, to share the despair of Philip and Andrew, to look at the enormous needs of the world and the small basket in our hands, and ask, “But what good is this for so many hungry people?”

Jesus’ plan is as workable now as it was then.

The end of killing poverty throughout the world is an achievable goal.

God grant us the faith and the will and the political courage to make it happen.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Sermon prepared for July 14, 2024, at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back and she became a pillar of salt. – Genesis 19:24-26.

Last week I advocated the Ignatian approach to bible study, which involves using our imaginations to immerse ourselves in the biblical story, to imagine ourselves in the very midst of the action.

Well, here’s a passage I’d rather stand back from.

Sulfur and fire are raining on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. People are running and screaming and being reduced to ash heaps. Buildings and city walls collapse on the crowds as the cities are incinerated. The sulfurous rotten egg smell is right out of hell. Only the virtuous Lot and his family are allowed to escape so long as they turn they turn their backs on the cataclysm. But Lot’s wife, for obscure reasons, looks back and is turned into a salt lick.

I don’t wish to let these horrific images into my head.

But, as I think about it, the images are already there.

Perhaps you saw the sizzling carnage so graphically displayed last week on House of the Dragon, a prequel on MAX to the popular Game of Thrones. This is science fiction but the climactic scene last Sunday may even have equaled the pyrotechnics of Sodom and Gomorrah. The exceptional computer-generated images and roaring Surround Sound make you want to cover your ears and eyes. Instead of angels, fire-spouting dragons descend from above, immolating the screaming humans below. In one scene that will live long in my head, a survivor touches the armor of a knight and the armor collapses and spills the ash that was once a man.

Watching this, I began to wonder why Hollywood had never made a movie about Sodom and Gomorrah. Violence and destruction are always popular themes and you’d think such a film would be a box office hit.

And indeed as I scanned through IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that this movie had actually been made in 1962, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Stewart Granger as Lot. If you never saw the movie you haven’t missed anything. The response of critics was  universally negative and the New York Times said it was an “obvious but feeble imitation” of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. But the film did have acceptable special effects of buildings collapsing and violent infernos.

And raining sulfur and fire are among the reasons we find the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah so compelling – and so horrifying.

But does it make sense that a loving God would periodically destroy God’s own creation, and with such violence?

We must ask. Did it really happen? Or is it a metaphor? 

In his book, Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus, Professor John Dominic Crossan writes, “My point, once again, is not that these ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

So did it really happen? Or are the ancients writing symbolically about God’s attitude toward sin? And if it did happen, is that why are no traces of Sodom and Gomorrah today?

We are free, of course, to form our own conclusions as God lays the question on our hearts.

But there are some historical suggestions that the cities were really destroyed. But by an earthquake, not angels.

Wikipedia summarizes the views of Jean-Pierre Isbouts, author of The Biblical World: An Illustrated Atlas (National Geographic Press), as follows:

“One such idea is that (the cities were) devastated by an earthquake between 2100 and 1900 B.C.E … (unleashing) showers of steaming tar.”

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. But what is the point of the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The story has, of course, been used by biblical literalists as evidence that – as the deluded minions of Westboro Baptist Church have proclaimed –  “God hates gays.”

This kind of bizarre inductive reasoning provides one of what Father Jim Martin calls “gotcha passages,” a biblical “proof text” that LGBTQ persons are condemned by God. It’s the same kind of biblical myopia that enables bigots to conclude that the bible denounces it when a man sleeps with a man, but blesses it when a man is owned as a slave. 

Those of us who have been blessed with God’s grace know that God is love, God loves everyone, and God has made each of us the way we are. As Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told homophobic Mike Pence, “If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me – your quarrel, is with my creator.”

So what was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The prophet Ezekiel writes (16:49-51):

“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the. Poor and the needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”

Grant Hartley, a freelance writer in St. Louis, notes that our view of Sodom and Gomorrah must be seen through the lens of love as expressed by Jesus: 

“Jesus makes it clear that what is done for ‘the least of these (his) siblings,’ is in a real sense done for him. (Mt 25:40) Our faith demands hospitality, especially toward the poor, the needy, and the stranger.”

Hartley suggests that “if one were trying to relieve oneself of this passage’s radical demands of hospitality, twisting the story to focus on gay people would be a convenient strategy.

“Using the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to suggest God’s wrath against gay people makes it rather easy to avoid its actual demands to open up our wallets, homes, and hearts to people in need. How many times,” Hartley continues, “has misunderstanding, empowered by hatred of the other, led some to use the passage to sanction everything that made Sodom guilty: kicking children out of their homes, refusing to serve certain people, discriminating in housing and jobs, breaking families apart, fighting against civil rights?”

I think it’s tempting to remove ourselves from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather than immerse ourselves in the passages, we try to look at it objectively. Those nasty people were selfish and inhospitable haters who squandered their resources and got what they deserved.

But a lot of those failings sound uncomfortably familiar. Our media, whether FOX News or MSNBC, are showing us very disturbing images of ourselves. Contrary to God’s command to love and welcome the stranger, so many of our citizens would restrict immigration or even endorse deporting 11 million unregistered immigrants to God knows where. So many of our citizens would be happier living in white-only enclaves. So many of our citizens ignore the poor while the vast gulf between haves and have-nots gets larger and larger.

Are we in the same boat as Sodom and Gomorrah. Are we systematically destroying ourselves without benefit of sulfur and fire?

Rev. Kelty Van Binsbergen, a pastor from Comax, British Columbia puts it starkly:

Our present lifestyle in North America and Europe is not sustainable from an economic justice point of view. We have most of the resources, most of the money. Eventually that's going to crash, one way or another. The planet is running out of resources, we can only grow so much food, poorer countries will rebel. Poorer people within our own rich countries will rebel, are starting to rebel, at the injustice and inequities. We're a lot like Sodom & Gomorrah, bringing about our own destruction. Like Lot's wife, it's hard not to look back, reluctant to embrace a new way of living that will be harder, and when we look back instead of forward, we end up frozen, like a pillar of salt, unable to do much.”

Van Binsbergen would make us feel a little awkward if we disparaged the selfish, bigoted, opulent people of Sodom and Gomorrah because they didn’t have the moral strength to change their ways and avoid destruction.

For us, the only way to reanimate this frozen pillar of salt is to remind ourselves of the grace of our calling. 

To recommit to our ministries: Our motto: God's work. Our hands. Our mission: Together in Jesus Christ we are freed by grace to live faithfully, witness boldly and serve joyfully.

And to do what the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah would not or could not do for themselves:

Revel in the grace of the great commandment every hour of our waking lives:

To love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and souls; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

For it is in God’s love that we may come together in peace, and it is in God’s love that we may do what Sodom and Gomorrah could not: save ourselves from destruction.

Oldth

Sermon prepared for St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

This week the news has a lot to say about old people. Usually transfixed by youth, now the media are obsessed with oldth. 

The question is, how old is too old to manage complex and multifarious entities, such as a major city or a country?

As anyone who follows the news knows, there are no clear answers.

Konrad Adenauer was 75 years old when he became chancellor of Germany in 1951, and he served until 1963 when he was 87. Throughout that time it did not seem he was too old to run a country, even if his fellow citizens called him “Der Alte,” the old one.

As we look around at other men and women who are chronologically gifted, we find no clear answers to the age-old question, when is old too old?

Pope John Paul II fought off Parkinson’s disease for years until he was unable to walk and struggled to keep going until he died in April 2005 at the young-for-popes age of 84.

Pope Benedict XVI was 85 when he decided he was too old to keep going and resigned the papacy in 2013. He lived nine more years in seclusion in the Vatican.

Pope Francis is 87 and, despite resorting to a wheelchair because of bad knees, continues to be robust and says he has no intention of stepping down until God calls him.

Personally, as a 77-year-old man who feels I am too old to be president, I take great heart in watching my contemporaries and seniors continue to dazzle.

In the last couple of years Martha and I watched octogenarians Paul McCartney and Ringo star show their tireless vigor in two separate concerts that were three hours long. Last week we watched 76-year-old James Taylor command the stage at New Bethel, singing and occasionally hopping to the beat for three hours.

When it comes to who is old and who is not, I remember the words of Mark Twain, who said, “You’re only as old as you feel.” And then he put a cigar in his mouth and said, “Run along, son.”

Today’s reading of Genesis 21 complicates the question of age even further.

Sarah was childless until she was 90. That’s not too old for matriarching, but nine out of ten gynecologists agree, it’s too old for birthing. The very idea moved Sarah to laugh out loud.

But God was not kidding.

“Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age … Abraham was a hundred years old … Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.’” (Genesis 21:1-7)

One almost wants to pause now to feel Sarah’s joy. But there were complications.

Sarah, Abraham, and Isaac are not a one-tent family.

Remember Hagar and Ishmael?

Let’s take a quick look back at Genesis 16:

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abraham, “Behold, the LORD has prevented me from having children; go in to my maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai … And he went into Hagar and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.” Genesis 16:1-2, 4.

So this stunning departure from Biblical Family Values was Sarah’s idea in the first place. Not that it matters. In today’s reading, Sarah has a different point of view.

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

What is really bugging Sarah?

Some scholars point to the “play” that is happening between the newborn Isaac and the teen-age Ishmael. Is Ishmael playing too rough for the baby? Does the difference in ages make Sarah question whether he might usurp God’s promise to Abraham? After all, both Ishmael and Isaac are Abraham’s sons.

But for some time now, life around Abraham’s tent has not been entirely happy. Sister wives Sarah and Hagar have been at each other’s throats for years and their discord has wearied the old man. Sarah hates Hagar. Hagar despises Sarah. Sarah beats Hagar and bans her from the tent whenever she can. This is not the domestic paradise envisioned by Joseph Smith when he posited that polygamy was Heavenly Father’s will.

As today’s bible story opens, the years of discord have come to an explosive climax and Sarah uses her authority as senior wife to demand the  expulsion of Hagar and her child from Abraham’s luxurious tent. What follows is one of those heart-wrenching scenes that dominate the saga of Genesis: 

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. Genesis 21:14-16.

Happily, God intervened - and not a mere deus ex machina either.

Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation out of him. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. Genesis 21:18-19.

And thus begins the story of the great Arab nation, the Ishmaelites.

But how could Abraham and Sarah be so cruel? 

The back story offers some clues. 

Abraham was 75 when God ordered him to move to Canaan where, God assured him, he would be the primogenitor of a vast nation. God said “jump” and Abraham jumped, pruriently winking his pretty wife, Sarah, to tell her they’d better get started. 

But years went by and the nation-starting business was going nowhere. There’s reason to suspect Sarah was tiring of her husband’s sweaty efforts to make God happy. Looking around, she saw her beautiful Egyptian servant, Hagar, and presented her to him as a gift. “She’s all yours, dear.” Abraham dutifully accepted and continued his feverish endeavors to please God. 

Looking back, Sarah must have wondered what on earth she had been thinking. Naturally, Abraham continued his feverish endeavors to please God by sowing his patriarchal seed. And because it was (and continues to be) the practice of men, he cared little which woman was the holy receptacle. 

Hagar is one of the biblical models for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which details both the dangers of a literal interpretation of scripture as well as the natural enmity between the barren and the nubile.

Sarah, initially relieved that her vigorous husband was occupied elsewhere, soon became exasperated by Abraham’s sacred enthusiasm and threw Hagar out of the tent. Hagar, heavy with child, was filled with contempt for her mistress. 

Years passed and God – still working on an early draft of a commandment forbidding adultery – decided Abraham’s nation-building tasks needed to continue with Sarah only. Sarah thought she had retired from that job because she was far past the normal age of child bearing. But after years of watching her husband embrace her hated rival and her rival’s son, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. 

Finally with a son of her own, Sarah knew her position as senior wife had been re-established. When she saw Hagar’s son playing innocently with her baby, she snapped.

“Cast out this slave woman with her son,” she ordered her husband. “For the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

What a mess. What a great soap opera. As our neighbor Rabbi Goldberg has pointed out during one of our joint summer bible studies, the story of Abraham and Sarah is told with raw honesty. No effort is made to spin the story to make the founding fathers and mothers look better. 

Genesis is a library of allegories, metaphors, and myths. The stories are fun, and they are a lot more fun when you believe the events are literally true.

Most scholars believe Abraham was a historical figure. But if he was a myth who evolved to explain the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, he was a captivating myth. His story is a soap opera of betrayal, greed, lust, jealousy, and mass murder. And unlike other protagonists of most sagas, he had 175 years of life to get it done.

Typical of soap operas, it was Abraham’s sex drive that kept getting him into trouble. The teller of his story seeks to make the point that God has decided to build a great nation through Abraham’s seed and Abraham was faithful to God no matter how many obstacles God put in his way. The main obstacle was Abraham’s little Abraham, which was not getting any younger. And, as the bronze-age macho storyteller tells it, God and Abraham pursued their goals by compelling women to graciously submit to their male will.  

This part of the myth is true. Bronze-age men used women as means to their own ends and they never doubted that was God’s eternal plan. We know that is true because it’s still true. Gender equality is a relatively nascent phenomenon and men still hold most of the power in business and the church.

That is changing because only the most insulated and closed-minded persons still believe the genders are intellectually, spiritually, and physically unequal. Unfortunately, insulated and closed-minded people, though dwindling, have been gerrymandered into our social structure. Hopefully our daughters – and sons – will live to see the time when they have passed from the scene.

In the meantime, our bible story should also be a cautionary tale.

Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar are familiar characters because they all believed a male God had ordained male patriarchs to use females as unwilling vessels of nation building. Such people did exist in 1800 B.C. and such people exist today. 

But we don’t need prophets like Margaret Atwood to see how such beliefs can be harmful. Such beliefs were an underlying cause of misery for Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.

This much we know to be true: great nations arose in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, and they bore common witness to the One God, sometimes called Yahweh, sometimes called Allah. These great nations have a common origin and proclaim themselves children of Abraham.

The Abraham of Genesis is a patriarch who believed God wanted him to sow the seeds of nationhood using his wife and her handmaid as inferior vessels for the task.

That part of the myth is true because that is what men have believed for thousands of years.

But the pain that accompanied that belief, meticulously detailed in the Genesis story, remind us that inequality breeds misery for all concerned.

The story also impels us to remember that God is not a God of misery. Our God is a God of love whose metaphorical arms embrace all persons, all races, all ages, all creeds, both genders, and all sexual orientations. 

And that is no myth. That is most certainly true.