Bishop Nicholas Knisely's Sermon, June 25th 2023 St. Peter's by-the-Sea

May I speak to you in the name of the one, holy and Triune, God, the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Thank you for that, Hymn.

That's my favorite hymn at, I remember about 11 years ago

when I was elected Bishop.

And it, I was in Arizona and it was very early in the morning and Karen and I

were still finishing up breakfast and I was in my bathrobe and the electing

convention called me and they had me on speaker phone and they wanted to

surprise me by singing my favorite hymn.

So I told them what my favorite hymn was and they said, I don't know that one.

So thank you for learning it well enough that I had a treat on this almost

the 11th anniversary of my election.

Sometimes things are not what they seem to be.

Sometimes things are not what they seem to be.

We think we know what's going on, but what's actually happening is

something completely different.

I don't know.

I was thinking I was gonna have to rewrite this whole sermon yesterday afternoon.

As I was scrolling Twitter frantically trying to figure out what was going

on in Russia, it seemed like there was a coup, perhaps even a civil war.

And I was getting worried about what that would all mean.

And then all of a sudden it was like psych and it wasn't.

I looked on Twitter because on Twitter you can find someone who will explain

everything to you, and Twitter told me that this was all a CIA plot.

And another person on Twitter I thought was very interesting, said,

you stupid Americans, you think everything revolves around you.

Sometimes we think we know what's going on, and sometimes we think it's our story.

And we want to understand it through our lens and our experience.

And in fact, it has nothing to do with us.

It is somebody else's story, and we are just touched by it briefly.

When I was in graduate school and I should have been doing research,

I was instead reading a series of fantasy novels in my lab.

And I remember the novels, the Bulgaria series.

And a young boy in the series is the focus of a great cosmic prophecy,

and the story in the book is how at each sort of juncture in his

life, there is a fulfillment of the prophecy, and the prophecy

actually speaks to him in his head.

And so everything that happens is full of meaning and import in

the story, except this one thing.

The boy is standing in a field and a far off in the distance.

He sees a young colt trotting across the field to him, and the colt

walks right up to him and muzzles his hand with the colt's nose, and

he hears the sound of the prophecy.

Hm.

The whole of the atmosphere is filled with that quiet ringing bell, and he

wonders to himself, what does this mean?

And the prophecy speaks in his head and says, nothing to you at all.

This is not your story.

This is part of another story.

And I remember thinking about that because it reminds us that sometimes we really

do think that we are the main character of everything, and sometimes we are not.

And something much more important is happening to somebody else than to us.

In the Old Testament lesson today, the story of Ishmael and

Hagar, we hear the story of Hagar.

We hear of how Ishmael becomes the father of a great nation, and

we also only see them briefly.

They disappear from the story of the children of Abraham, at least for us.

You remember how this goes?

Abraham and Sarah are promised by God that they shall have a great

many children and they shall father a nation whose descendants will be

as many as the stars in the sky.

No, but they're pretty old.

They're in their eighties and they know how this works.

People don't usually have children in their eighties, and

they started to get nervous.

And so Sarah wanting to help God along, took one of her slaves, an Egyptian

princess who has somehow become a slave in Abraham's house, Hagar,

and said, go sleep with my husband.

And they did, and they had a child and they had Hagar deliver

the child on Sarah's lap, and they said, this is the new child.

This is the error to the promises, Ishmael.

Well, God was not pleased, and in fact, a few years later the angels

came and Sarah was given her own child and they named that child Isaac.

Well, here's a problem.

You've got Ishmael running around and you've got Isaac and Sarah's saying, well,

but, but my child is the one God likes.

And one day she sees Ishmael and Isaac playing together.

She gets upset with that.

She's worried that maybe this isn't going to work out the way she wants to.

And so she says to Abraham, get rid of her and get rid of the kid.

And Abraham is torn.

So he sends Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, gives him a skin

of wine, good luck, and sends them into the desert to die.

And Sarah feels better about things.

But what about Hagar?

And Ishmael turns out as the story goes, God heard the cries of Ishmael.

And God saved Hagar and Ishmael in the desert and through

Ishmael raised up a great people.

Ishmael was the father of the people of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Arabs recognized their dissent through him just as the Jewish P people

recognized their dissent through Isaac.

And this becomes a problem because you have a fight even today

between the Arab people and the Jewish people in the Holy Land.

And both are using this story to explain why they are more loved by God.

If you read in the Quran, they say, look, Ishmael was the firstborn.

Clearly, he is the one who inherits the promise of God.

And it is through Ishmael that Abraham's children have filled the earth.

And if you read in Torah, it says, no, it was through Isaac, because God

always works through the outsider.

He works through the second son.

He works through the, oh, I don't know what was, what was David?

He was like the eighth son, right?

He works through Jacob, the second born twin.

He works through, oh, I don't know Jesus, who didn't really even have

a father that people could tell.

There's always this thing that God does of working through the outsider, so you

recognize God, but the people who read the Quran have a completely different story.

The story of Hagar and the story of Ishmael are also part of

the story of God's family, but they're not part of our story.

They're part of a different story, and it's probably.

Just as important a story as our own story, even though it only happens

briefly within the Bible, and then they pass from the annals of our history.

They have their own story.

If you talk to Arabic people, if you talk to people who read the Quran, who follow

Islam, they will tell you that no, no, no.

Hera or Hagar was oppressed.

She was enslaved.

She was forced by the cruel mistress, Sarah to have this child, and then they

took the child from her, and when they no longer needed the child, they disposed

of them both in the desert to die.

It's actually pretty awful when you think through how the story is being told.

And the Jewish people have a different story.

If you read the midrash on this, they will say, well, no, actually it was

Sarah's saintliness that was willing to have Hagar take a child up for Abraham.

And she put aside her own rights and it's completely different

account of how this all works out.

And they both use it to justify their own position.

Look, God saves Hagar either way through Sarah's behavior,

whether it is saintly or selfish.

If you take it as the story tells it through her selfish behavior,

Hagar and Ishma are sent in the desert so that God can encounter

them in the desert and save them.

God is using the unexpected.

That happens again and again and again in the Bible sometimes.

That act of shunning and pushing out is the way that God actually saves us.

It was the pushing out of Hagar and Ishmael that God used to save them.

Sometimes we see this again and again in our own story.

God pushes us out to save us.

It's taught that it is said that in the Episcopal church, most adult members were

originally raised in a different faith.

I won't ask you to put your hands up, but it's something like 40 or 50%

of Episcopalians, maybe more these days were either Roman Catholic or

were another tradition and found their way into the Episcopal Church.

And when I talk to people who come out of those other traditions, it's hard because

you have to upset your grandparents.

You have to upset your family.

Sometimes you have to be honest about who you are.

To find a home in an Episcopal church, but it is through the shunning of

your family that you found this place, and it is here, that you are finding

the stories of God and being fed.

It is through the unexpected that God has saved you.

Your story is now different than your family's story, at least for a while.

In the gospel, Jesus says, look, I come into the world to bring truth,

and that truth will divide families.

He doesn't say it's gonna make one family member right, and the other family wrong.

He says it will divide families.

And I think that's an important piece for us to keep in mind that

the truth sometimes does cause us to be divided, but sometimes two

things can be true at the same time.

Two things can be true at the same time, if you have half an hour, I'll teach

you a brief class on quantum physics and show you how this is not just a metaphor.

This is actually true.

And in fact, all those cool things that your cell phones can do depend on the fact

that two things are true at the same time.

Well, the same is true in our faith life as well.

Frank Griswold once said that we have to learn to live into a world

that is filled with chloroform truth.

That means multiple truths, and that means we have to hold our truth and our

story lightly, that this is our story.

But it does not mean your story isn't true for you as well.

Your experience is valid.

Their experience is valid.

And if we can hold that and know that sometimes there are two stories being

told that the truth is dividing us but is not requiring us to turn on each

other, it is just requiring us to take different paths, at least for a while.

If you can do that, you actually find that we can rebuild community

much more effectively because we haven't burned any bridges.

We haven't turned away from each other, and we can undo maybe someday what

has happened in the Middle East, what is happening today in our society,

what is happening in our families, what is happening all around us?

Just recognizing that you can be right and your neighbor can be right,

but maybe right now you're both going to be right in different ways.

So, And being comfortable with that.

Like I said, it seems to be the way the universe works.

Look at this story.

How old was Ishmael in the story?

If you count on your fingers, he's 16, and yet it says that Hagar carries him.

As a 16 year old into the desert and leaves him under a

bush to cry himself to death.

How old is Hagar?

How old is Ishmael?

There are contradictory details even in this story of contradiction.

Truth is complicated and chloroform and multifaceted, and we celebrate that cuz

it reminds us that that is true about God.

And that is true about us.

Amen.