Trinity 3: Who counts?

 Trinity 3 2026

Gen 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39

Abraham, that great Old Testament hero of faith, who obeyed God’s call to go from his native land to a new home far away! Abraham who trusted God that he would have more descendants than there were stars in the sky despite he and his wife, Sarah, being old and childless. What a hero!

Except that in today’s first reading we discover that there is a very dark underbelly to the story. It was a hard thing for Abraham and Sarah to believe in God’s promise of descendants. Of course it was. According to the Bible Abraham was seventy years old when they set off and Sarah was well past the menopause and they had no children. Years passed, and no child arrived. So they decided to try to make this promise come true themselves. It was Sarah’s idea initially, but Abraham was more than happy to go along with it. She owned an Egyptian slave, Hagar, who she gave to Abraham. Have a child with her, she said, and it can count as ours. No one asked Hagar what she thought or wanted. She was enslaved. She had no choice. 

Hagar conceives, and gives birth to a son, Ishmael. Everyone assumes he will be the heir until Sarah, unbelievably, also conceives and gives birth to a son, Isaac. That’s where today’s reading picks up the story. You don’t have to be a trained family therapist to see how complicated this is all going to be, and how likely it will be that it will all end in tears. It could have come straight from an East Enders’ storyline. Two half-brothers, playing together now, but set to be rivals in the future. Two mothers, one with all the power and privilege, the other with none now that her son has been displaced.  And Abraham in the middle of it all, frankly coming across as weak and indecisive. “The matter was very distressing to Abraham” we’re told, “on account of his son…” Which son? We’re not told, and I think that’s deliberate, because the whole thing is a mess in Abraham’s mind. 

But this was only ever going to end one way. Of course, Sarah’s son is now going to inherit, not the son of an enslaved Egyptian. Notice the way Ishmael’s name isn’t used once in the story, as if he’s already being shuffled out of the narrative. He is redundant – the spare born before the heir who turns out not to be needed and whose existence has turned from a blessing into a problem. Abraham bows to Sarah’s demand that Hagar and Ishmael should be sent away into the desert. He gives them some bread and water, but that’s more of a sop to his conscience than a real help. It’s not going to last long. There’s no way they can survive, but at least their deaths will be out of sight and out of mind. Abraham and Sarah won’t be confronted with their responsibility. 

But that’s where the story takes a strange turn, because instead of staying with Abraham and Sarah, the storyteller takes us out into the desert with Hagar and Ishmael.  We see what Abraham and Sarah don’t – the water running out, Hagar laying her child down under a bush to die, weeping bitterly, knowing that there is nothing she can do. But we also see the moment when God intervenes.  “God heard the voice of the boy” – Ishmael’s name actually means “God hears”. God shows Hagar a well nearby, and we discover that their story isn’t ending; it is just beginning. “And God was with the boy, and he grew up” we’re told, out there in the wilderness. He has a future, a life that includes marriage and a family – a wife from Egypt, Hagar’s home.  Arab nations still trace their descent from Abraham through Ishmael, and Muslims regard him as a prophet. 

It’s a moving story, but the thing that strikes me most powerfully about it is that the Bible tells it at all.  As the saying goes, “History is written by the winners”, and it’s usually written to show those winners in a good light. Even if there are failures along the way, they are told as part of a narrative that puts the winners in the centre of the story, that focusses on them. This story doesn’t do that; it puts Hagar and Ishmael centre stage, despite the fact that they will play no further part in the story which the Old Testament tells.  

They matter anyway, we are told, just because they exist. God cares about them, hears them, sees them, makes them a priority. However disposable and irrelevant they seem to Abraham and Sarah, and to the whole thread of the story of the nation of Israel, they aren’t irrelevant or disposable to God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading this is the God who sees every sparrow that falls from the sky. The injustices that are committed in secrecy and darkness, like driving Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert to die, are seen by God, and can’t be concealed forever, even if you are the great patriarch, Abraham, or the matriarch, Sarah. 

It’s meant to surprise us, but perhaps it makes more sense when we understand when and why this story was written down. The first five books of what we call the Old Testament, the ones that tell the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, enslavement and rescue from Egypt, were shaped into the form we have them now when the Jewish people were in Exile in Babylon conquered by the mighty Babylonian empire. Israel had been a great nation under the rule of great and powerful kings like David and Solomon, but now it looked like they had no future. What had gone wrong? How had it come to this?  Did God no longer care for them? Was this the end for them? It certainly looked like it.  

The Scriptures that emerged from this time were written to answer those questions – particularly those first five books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. They were reassuring - Look at the way God rescued your ancestors from slavery in Egypt – he can rescue you too. For people who felt utterly defeated and hopeless that was important to hear.  God wouldn’t abandon them in Babylon because that wasn’t the kind of God he was. He was a God who cared about those who were powerless. 

But the message was also challenging. It said to them – the God who sees and hears you when you are on the receiving end of injustice also sees and hears those to whom you deal it out. “Do not deny justice to the foreigner or the fatherless,“ says the book of Deuteronomy” and do not take a widow’s cloak as security. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you from that place.” (24.17-18) That’s why those Biblical storytellers tell us about Hagar and Ishmael, focussing on them, when Abraham and Sarah would really rather they were forgotten. They seemed completely irrelevant to the future course of the story. But no one is irrelevant to God. No one’s life matters less, or more, than anyone else’s. 

The story of Hagar and Ishmael should still challenge us today. Who counts? Who matters, and why? Do people only matter because they are useful to me, part of my story, or do they matter in and of themselves? Who is heard and seen, and who is ignored? 

This week both the government and the Church of England have apologised publicly for what happened in mother and baby homes for women who had children outside marriage in the mid 20th century. They were put out of sight and out of mind, treated as if they didn’t matter, sometimes pressured into giving up their babies for adoption. Their stories have taken decades to come to light, because the society of the time didn’t think they deserved a hearing. Today also marks the last day of refugee week. We may feel as if we hear about refugees a lot, as if they are everywhere in the news, but it’s usually only in an impersonal way, as if they can all be lumped together. That’s not the same as hearing their stories, seeing them as individuals, knowing what drove them out of their homes, putting ourselves in their shoes.

Hagar and Ishmael’s story helps us to do that, if we are prepared to let it. It reminds us to ask whose stories we aren’t hearing, whose lives we are putting “out of sight and out of mind”, and to try to look at the world through their eyes, not just our own. If we can do that, we may even find that we are, for a moment, looking at the world through the eyes of God, who sees and hears and loves us all.  

Amen