Friends of Friends
A Reflection by Rev. Dr. Kathryn Johnson Cameron
Matthew 10:24-39; Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86: 1-10, 16-17
When an angel of the Lord appears before you and begins with, “Do not be afraid,” that may be your second clue that fear would be appropriate. Your first clue would be, well, the angel of the Lord, because they don’t wear name badges to identify themselves, so how do you know the angel before you is a card carrying union worker in the Compassionate Angels Rescue Efforts, aka, “of the Lord”?
You’d be surprised how really difficult identifying angels can be, especially in those moments when that’s exactly who you need to see.
Hagar needed an appearance from an angel of the Lord. She is stuck out in the wilderness, a desert devoid of water and food, twice. The first time Hagar gets pushed to the margins, out into the desert, she is an unmarried pregnant woman,
The angel of the LORD appears and speaks to Hagar and says what angels always say, “Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid, though things seem hopeless.
The second time Hagar gets pushed out into the desert, she is a mother with her grown up son. They are hungry, thirsty. Hagar fears she will have to watch her son die.
The angel of the LORD appears and speaks to Hagar and says what angels always say, "Do not be afraid." Do not be afraid, though things seem hopeless.
Hagar sees that the angel is of God. She sees God. God sees her. Really sees her. and says, "Take your child in your arms. I have heard his cries. I will save him and will make of him a great nation.
God opens Hagar’s eyes to see a well of water nearby, and the seeing leads to new life for Hagar and her son, Ismael.
Poet Tyehimba Jess saw a marble statue carved by sculptor Edmonia Lewis of Hagar in the Wilderness (pictured above). He wrote these words to describe the marble carving and imagined the words of the artist and of Hagar:
My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
Jess saw something in Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907) an African/Native American expatriate sculptor. He saw in her an outcast, an “impertinent exile” someone God gifted with the power “to bear life from the lifeless” marble she carved, in homage to Hagar who saw God in her wilderness.
[1]
This 21st Century poet becomes a friend of a friend of Hagar and her child, Ismael, whom God sees and saves.
Ishmael grows up in the wilderness and becomes the father of a great nation. He also becomes the father-in-law of Esau, another overlooked son in the book of Genesis. Hagar and Abraham’s descendants through Ishmael appear a few other times in the Bible. And as many are aware, Muslim tradition, of course, claims Ishmael as the father of Islam.
But all of that will come later. For today, perhaps it is enough to note an easily overlooked phrase in the story: “and God was with the young man”. God’s presence with this outcast child gives us pause; and hope. God is with his mother, too, an Egyptian slave woman cast out by the father of her child. God sees Hagar and she sees God; not once, but twice, both times in the wilderness.
Hagar even names God “the Living One Who Sees Me”. To see God and name God is a privilege not many have, not many even of the chosen people.
God’s choosing one particular people, and one particular line of that people Isaac, not Ishmael; scandalizes us, as it should. The scandal of election is difficult for we who value fairness and egalitarianism. And yet, that seems to be how God works in Genesis. The chosen people are called to high standards and to difficult trials. They are blessed in order to be a blessing. God calls them to be a “priestly kingdom” and a “holy nation”.
And, according to the biblical witness, God’s calling a chosen people brings that people privilege and responsibility, neither an easy mantle to take on and to wear well.
But it must also be noted that election, according to this story, does not entitle one to exclusive claim on God’s care or on God’s presence. “God was with the young man and his mother.”
Jon Levenson, a Jewish scholar, puts it this way, “Ishmael is read out of the covenant but emphatically
included in
the promise that is larger than the covenant and preceded it.”
[2]
God cares about and provides for this child of promise, too. God was with the young man and his mother.
It is easy to overlook this story of Hagar and Ishmael. Yet, it is worth pausing and considering what their story tells us about God’s care and providence. As the old hymn reminds us, Great is the Lord’s faithfulness.
“Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
join with all nature in manifold witness
to thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love”
We cannot limit God’s mercy. God hears the cry of the abandoned. God hears the cry of the outcast, God sees those we may push to the margins and faithfully cares for them.
God’s love faithfully follows us through the seasons, in the wilderness and for the harvest.
This is good news for us this day, this summer solstice that marks the beginning of a new season.
This is good news for our church, as we conclude our ministry and ask the Presbytery of Western North Carolina to dissolve this congregation. Good news as we enter what may seem to many a wilderness; which we may fear as a time when we will not be seen, or the even greater fear that outside of our sanctuary, we might lose sight of God.
This is good news because we see before us, not only an angel of the Lord, but God’s only begotten child, Jesus, who tells us, according to Matthew:
Don’t be afraid; God knows you and loves you better than you know and love yourself, and will be with you.
This news is good, because we are living in days of great challenge and great possibility and
we are afraid
, even as Jesus comforts and encourages us.
For in the same breath, Jesus candidly spells out what this “encouragement” implies: the circumstances of our journey of discipleship, of even just being friends of the disciples, will require courage. Disciples and friends of Jesus will encounter opponents, hostility, threats, even persecution. The powers that be, the privileged who have much to lose, will not quietly step aside. This work Jesus calls us to do requires resolve and perseverance: the work of disciples and friends of disciples and friends of friends.
Following Jesus, in other words, calls for courage. It means giving things up, even precious things, even things we hold dear. The very fact that Jesus is passing the mantle here is a reference to his own wilderness and his travels into the valley of the shadow of death. Any who follow him, then, must be willing to do likewise, to “take up the cross and follow me”.
But what does “taking up the cross” mean for Matthew’s people? This is the first reference to “the cross” in Matthew, and Jesus speaks of the difficult work of embracing an unconventional life of intense, generous commitment to God’s mission - a willingness, as Jesus puts it, for disciples to “lose their life” in order to “find it”.
Following Jesus means making God’s mission of love and justice the first priority in our lives, even above family and livelihood.
God’s great faithfulness is good news for those of us who
thought
we could take up the mantle of discipleship and now wonder if we can really go “all in”. If discipleship means leaving behind a conventional life of family, career, social harmony it may not be for everyone, even though the good news of the Gospel is for all.
In a remarkable
sermon
on the demands of discipleship, preacher and friend Barbara Brown Taylor once argued that, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us are less like “disciples” and more like “friends of the disciples.” God does raise up genuine disciples in every generation - the well-known saints and the countless others whose names we may or may not ever know, people who actually did and do, in various ways, put God’s mission of love and justice above conventional priorities of kinship and livelihood.
The rest of us are something a good deal humbler than “disciples” in this sense. At our best, Taylor contends, we’re “friends of the disciples” - and like friends, we may extol and support disciples where we can; and like friends, we may be inspired (or haunted, or driven) to follow their examples here and there, in fragments or moments or chapters of our lives.
In these last months some of us have felt the pull toward the outer circles where we are friends of friends of disciples. Some seasons call for us to move away from the center, to de-center our own voices so we may listen to the words of others, words of both comfort and challenge.
And who knows? The Living One Who Sees Us may yet have another road for us to
travel. Jesus’ call to “all in” discipleship and stages and seasons of discipleship remains open for everyone. On any given day, even words as challenging as these in Matthew may become a word personally addressed to you, or to me, or to a particular season in the life of our community, in the history of our country. In ways large and
small, there’s no telling what kind of follower of Jesus we may yet become, of what ways we will see and name God with us. Amen.
[1]
Jess, born in Detroit in 1965, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York.
[2]
Noble, John Travis. 2013. "Let Ishmael Live Before You!" Finding a Place for Hagar's Son in the Priestly Tradition. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
