All Are Created Equal (Part 1)

A Reflection for 2^nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7)         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores 

June 22, 2014                                                                           Thomas Wilson, Rector

Genesis 21:8-21          Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17              Romans 6:1b-11          Matthew 10:24-39

“All People are Created Equal” (part one)

A Video of this sermon is found on You Tube : http://youtu.be/j4mPER86J44

This is the first of three reflections which will be spread out over the next Sunday and the Parson Tom’s Tomes for July. The plan is that they will be shorter than my usual sermons or homilies because I believe that a preacher should stop talking before the people begin to wish s/he would.

It starts with a dream.  When God created the entire universe, God gave a dream to all of creation, which became part of our collective unconscious. Over centuries the dream kept coming to people all over the world. The message of the dream from the Divine Dream-maker was "All people are created equal." The problem is that, when we wake up from that dream, we forget it.   We look around and see all the inequality. We see the rich getting richer, we see the powerful consolidating their own power, we see lines drawn more brazenly between race, color, language, gender, sexual orientation; you name it, and we devise a reason why some people are less equal than others. Our rational minds look at the evidence of what passes for normal and say, "I guess that is the way it is supposed to be." Our egos, which have the function of interpreting how to get along best in the world, take the message from the rational mind’s evaluation of reality and say, “Let’s find ways to use it for our advantage. After all, if equality is only a dream, therefore it is not really real, and we need to live in the real world.” We accept the inequality but the dream keeps coming back over the eons because, in God’s reality - and God is the ultimate reality - dreams are incredibly real, and our perceptions are only self-serving opinions.

Dreams are how God speaks to our personal, cultural, and collective unconscious free from the tyranny of the rational mind. Individuals gather together and share their dreams within the context of their culture and, out of those cultural dreams, we create stories, sort of like jazz riffs, off the themes of the dreams. What we notice is that myths from one culture seem to have similar themes with myths from other cultures, and we think that all of these different myths have their beginnings in the dreams that God planted in the collective unconscious of all humans.

In today’s lesson from the Genesis collection of stories is the mythic story of the struggle between Hagar and Sarah, who both have sons from the Patriarch Abraham. Hagar’s son is named Ishmael and Sarah’s son is named Isaac. Since this is a myth, the names provide some commentary about the outline of the story. The name “Sarah” means something like “Princess”. Hagar means something like “Stranger”. Ishmael means something like “God has listened”. Isaac means something like “the one who laughs”. So what do the names tell us? Sarah, the princess, the one who feels as if she is entitled, is in opposition to the Stranger, Hagar, who was from Egypt and was originally the slave of Sarah. Both the Princess and the Stranger want a son. The Stranger has the first born son and names the child as “God has listened”. God has been faithful to the Stranger and that irritates the Princess. However, the Princess has a son much later and that son is called “the one who laughs”.   I tend think of that in the context of Proverb 1:26, “I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you,” a variation of the more familiar proverb of “the one who laughs last, laughs best”, and all I can think of is that he probably had a nick name like “Na -Nya-Na- Nya –Nya”.

There is an earlier chapter in this myth when Sarah, who had agreed to this option of Abraham fathering a child through Hagar, got really resentful as Hagar sashayed around showing off her pregnancy. Sarah turns brutal and Hagar tries to run away, but an angel convinces her to return. If any one of us has been in a blended family – heck, even a family where everybody has the same parents - we can imagine the infighting that usually goes on for dominance. The Gospel also has Jesus remind the disciples that families can be snake pits as competing claims for dominance are played out. He tells the disciples that even a sparrow which is sold two for a penny is precious in the sight of God. 

There is also another clue in the Hebrew word that this chapter uses when Sarah sees Ishmael “playing” with Isaac. This word can be, and has been, translated several different ways. The word can mean playing with, or laughing (with or at), or mocking, or even fondling. Each choice of translation puts all sorts of different interpretations for Sarah’s reactions. I can imagine that Ishmael, who is 14 years older that Isaac, probably bullied the little pest during this great feast to celebrate the weaning of Isaac.

So the fight is set up over who has the most equal part of Abraham’s love and promise, of which son was the more equal. Sarah pushed the weak Abraham to acknowledge what she interpreted as the truth. Ishmael, the son of the slave Hagar, has to go; he had to die so that Sarah's son Isaac could have the bigger portion of the blessing. Now if this were an historical account, then there would be historians and theologians arguing over who was more equal than the other, who was the victor. This is what we see in the fight between Muslims and Jews, and by extension, Christians. The Jews see themselves as descendants of Isaac, while the Muslims see themselves as descendants from Ishmael. But this is not a history, it is a myth, and so listen to what God does in this story. God will bless both of them. God is with Hagar as she is afraid she and her son will die, and God is with her enemy Sarah and her son Isaac. The myth tells us that God’s dream is that both Ishmael and Isaac are equal in the eyes of the Divine Dream-Maker. In this myth no-one is cast out of the presence of God.

The Psalmist for today underlines that message when the Psalmist sings “For you God are good and forgiving, and great is your love to all who call upon you.” I look at this message and I think if the dream is “All are created equal”, then what does God think of my enemy? If God is the definer of all things, then how do I define my enemy? Do I believe that All Persons are created Equal?”