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.