Today, our Genesis reading invites us to meet a woman named Hagar. We meet her in today's passage, in the 16th chapter which came before, and in a couple of verses later on. That will surely be all we ever know. Hagar lived in the Middle Bronze Age, perhaps 1500 - 2000 years before Christ, as much as 4000 years ago. The stories that tell of Hagar would have been told from father to son, from mother to daughter, for hundreds of years before they were actually written down.

Hagar is from Egypt. She is a slave in the household of Abram and Sarai. Abram and Sarai have come from the land that today we call Iraq, and settled near the ancient Palestinian town of Hebron.

God has made a promise to Abram that he will have many descendants, but Abram has become old with none. His wife Sarai is past childbearing age. In the ancient world, babies defined a woman. You either had babies, or you were nothing. So the promise excites them but tries their patience. Growing older and older and with the promise yet unfulfilled, Sarai finally tells her husband, "here, take my slave girl, Hagar. Make her pregnant instead."

Hagar becomes pregnant. Now, though she is a slave, she is a woman of worth and value. Hagar looks on Sarai, her owner, with contempt. In a rage, Sarai has Hagar thrown out into the desert.

In the desert, Hagar has a conversation with an angel of God. Hagar realizes the angel is really God. Not everybody in the Old Testament has conversations directly with God. Hagar is the first woman in the Bible to talk directly to God since Eve.

And now, there in the desert, Hagar gets a promise from God. God tells Hagar, "Go back to Sarai and be obedient to her, and I will make you the ancestor of a great nation." Hagar returns to Abram and Sarai, and her son is born. The baby is named Ishmael which means, "God hears".

Several year later, God finally delivers on his promises to Abram and Sarai. They receive not only a pregnancy, but new names. Abram becomes Abraham, and Sarai becomes Sarah. Because Sarah laughed at the idea she could become pregnant so long after menopause, her son is named Isaac, which means "He laughs".

Sarah sees Isaac and Ishmael playing and her old anger at her slave returns. Sarah tells Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. "Send them away. Cast them out. I don't care what you do, just get rid of them". What should Abraham do? Ishmael is his son. But God tells Abraham to go ahead and do what Sarah says.

Hagar and Ishmael are sent out into the wilderness with one water bag. If anyone is to take care of them, it has to be God. The water bag is soon empty. Hagar prepares to die, but God appears to her, reminds her of his promise and shows her a well. This is enough for her to survive, and Ishmael grows up to be the ancestor of a great race of people.

The children in these two great promises of God, Isaac and Ishmael, get together at least once as adults. When their father Abraham dies, both Isaac and Ishmael come together to take responsibility for their father's funeral and burial in a cave near Hebron (Genesis 25:9). Despite the claims their descendants would later have, Abraham was the father of both, and both felt an equal responsibility to do the funeral duties of full fledged sons.

What to make of a story like this? Its details and culture are so different from ours, and yet we sense the human nature it describes is so like our own. That makes this story powerful and attention-grabbing. Put us human beings in this situation and this is the way we behave. Our desire to have children to follow us. Our impatience when the things we want don't happen on our schedule. Our willingness as humans to turn other humans into slaves. Our ability, when slaves, to sometimes show amazing courage and stamina. Our willingness to produce children any way we can and then to abandon them. Our willingness to turn on people who have given us their all. This story is about human beings, about us.. Oh, and our turning to God, and away from God, and back to God, and away from God, and back to God, and God's faithfulness to us in the midst of it all. That too is about us. This is a story of oppression, hopelessness -- and promise.

Hagar's story is one of oppression and you must feel the story's oppression to appreciate its power. But that means getting behind the story, for this story presents oppression as normal, so normal that you can read the story and not even notice it.

In Hagar's time, slavery is normal; and Hagar is a slave. She is owned, body and soul, for others to do with as they please. As Sarai's personal servant she may have had more comfort than a field slave, but she was still a slave.

Hagar is a slave. Others make decisions of what use will be made of her body. She has no say in it. The decision is made, and her body is used. Her body belongs to Abram and he can do anything he wants with it. Abram owns any child that comes from it. That is the nature of slavery.

A couple of decades ago, now, I worked on a project in the West Indies. One of our trainers, a faculty member from the University of West Indies in Jamaica, grew up admiring the American Black Power movement. One of his heroes was Eldredge Cleaver. One day a new book of Cleaver's came to Jamaica which actually showed a picture of him. The trainer exclaimed in dismay, "why, he's not black, he's colored." In the West Indies, plantation owners claimed the children they had by their slaves and gave them special treatment, so a "colored" group grew up who were economically set apart from those who were black.

But in the American colonies the character of slavery was such that slave owners didn't even claim their children. If we are upset today with people who don't claim their children, or take responsibility for them, let alone love them and nurture them and help them thrive, the seeds were sown in the days of slavery here when an entire culture allowed white slave owners not only to not claim their children, but to raise their own children as slaves and sell them to the highest bidder.

Three hundred years ago many of my ancestors were farmers here in Maryland. Slaves were considered real estate, and I have seen in the real estate books the names of their slaves. Where there were Abrahams and Sarahs on American plantations, there were Hagars, too. How many African - American cousins will I never know because my ancestors didn't claim their children?

Give Abraham credit, he claimed Ishmael. Still, Isaac grew up in a family with two parents. Once Hagar was cast out into the wilderness, Ishmael grew up in a family with just one.

Hagar's story has been used not only to justify oppression, but also to justify hopelessness.

The stories of Genesis explain for the Israelites how their various neighbors originated. At the center of these stories, Isaac is ancestor of the Jews and Ishmael is ancestor of the Arabs. In today's West Bank town of Hebron, there is a Muslim mosque dedicated to Abraham. Several years ago an Israeli settler named Goldstein entered the mosque and gunned down 28 worshipers, men, women, and children. It's hopeless, these stories might seem to say; this has been going on for 4000 years, what could we possibly do to make things different? Leave them be, Arabs and Jews will be fighting into eternity.

Two weeks ago, on the floor of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference, a resolution was introduced calling for us to work for an even handed approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

A fundamentalist gentleman stood up in opposition to this resolution. Citing this morning's passage of scripture, he contrasted Isaac and Ishmael; Isaac was a child of promise and Ishmael was not. Therefore, he maintained, we are compelled, all these years after this story took place, to support the descendants of Isaac. He quoted the description of Ishmael in Genesis 16:12: "a wild ass of a man; with his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin." (NRSV) This prophecy determined the future, he said. If Ishmael was like this, so were his trouble making descendants, the Arabs. The gentleman seemed to suggest that the only appropriate thing to do with Palestinians, be they Muslim or Christian, was to send them away from Palestine, out into the desert. His harsh words echoed those of Sarah 4000 years before. For the descendants of Ishmael, this man in the name of the Bible offered only ethnic cleansing and hopelessness.

His remarks illustrate two problems with fundamentalism. First, it magnifies individual verses and forgets the overall concept of our scriptures, that God is a loving God who will go to the ultimate lengths for all of God's children. Second, it takes verses out of context to put our own human hatred and prejudices into the mouth of God. What it does is wrong. What it produces is hopelessness - and hopelessness is the absence of God.

What a concept the man put forth -- children of promise, and then the other children. Do you think we should bring our children forward for the children's sermon and divide them into children of promise and then the others? Do you think we should have separate schools for children of promise and then other schools for those who are not? Do you think we should have separate countries for children of promise and other countries where the children of no promise live? To believe in God is to believe that despite everything we read in the newspaper, and all the efforts to make us feel hopeless, God made promises about both Isaac and Ishmael, and these promises may still come to be.

This is, after all, a story of promises-- promises made and kept despite everything. When all the particular details are stripped away from the promises told in this story, the essence of the promise from God is, "You will have a future."

The story is promises for a future, kept, despite the cruelty of Sarah, the smugness of Hagar, and the weakness of Abraham. It is promises for a future, kept, despite the oppression of slavery. It is promises for a future, kept, despite the withering heat of the desert. It is promises for a future, kept, on God's schedule, not ours. And the power of this story is that it reminds us of God's promise despite the terrible ways this story has been misused to support self-righteousness, prejudice, oppression and hopelessness.

We see in the story terrible injustices which God did not create, yet God works within the story to provide and fulfill promises for a future despite the injustices.

Hagar emerges in the story as a strong woman. She is t heroes of the Old Testament: "Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?" (Genesis 16:13)

Hagar's story is a gift to us in these troubled days after September 11. Nine months after that tragedy, the polls show that 52% or more of Americans still experience fear. Perhaps once we felt like Isaac, with the world at our feet, but now we may find ourselves feeling more like Ishmael, cast out into the desert. In today's world we need the God that Hagar met, a God who can cast out fear. God tells Hagar, "you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction." (Genesis 16:11).

"You will have a future." The message of hope which this passage contains is that no matter who we are, God has a promise for us, and, like Hagar or Sarah or Abraham, we will find it where and when we don't expect it.