Tension

Genesis 16:1-12, 15-16; Psalm 106 Give thanks to the Lord for he is good; Mt 7:21-29

We have a lot of tension in today's first reading.  We have been following the unfolding of Abram's call and his response and his journey.  Today with get to look into his household, we catch a glimpse of the going ons of his relationship with his wife and her relationship with his concubine. 

Abram and Sarai and Hagar and Ishmael are thrown together.  Their is a lot of tension. 

The primary tension is within Sarai.  She is barren and she has grown frustrated with God's plan.  God had promised Abram he would be a father of nations and yet she remained without child.  How could their descendants be as numerous as the stars or as countless as the grains of sands if they still had not even one.  

Sarai has a great deal of inner tension and frustration also because she is not a mother.  To be barren was looked upon as a curse.  children were considered God's favor.  Sarai was beginning to doubt herself, to doubt her role, and to lose faith in God, perhaps. 

Abram was also filled with tension.  He felt his wife's frustration.  Perhaps there was bitterness in the home.  He could do no right.  Perhaps he tried to console her and support her and ensure her his love, yet it wasn't enough.  Sarai felt inferior and wanted to do something about it.

So she took matters into her own hands.  She grew impatient with God and herself and her husband and life and she decided to grab at life.  So she sent her concubine to her husband to produce a child.  Wow!

This sounds a lot like modernity, today's society.  People grow impatient with God's plan.  So they rush ahead taking matters into their own hands: we are left with fertility pills and treatments that cause women to be pregnant with 6 and 7 or 8 babies at a time.  We have unwed women who run to fertility clinics to have themselves impregnated with someone's sperm they have never meant nor will ever meet.  Thus, we have children who will never know their father and is left abandoned and void of that great and necessary gift of fatherhood.  We have eggs being harvested and being fertilized outside the womb in petri dishes.   As a result we have countless fertilized embryos in frozen storage abandoned and forgotten. Or we have countless embryos who are destroyed because they lack the right genetic makeup, because they are considered weak. We have same sex couples who are seeking to adopt children or who become pregnant so they can produce a child because they feel entitled with no regard for God's plan.  And the child is left confused and his or her identity will be forever on shaky ground. Just to name a few. 

Or we have the opposite.  We have men and women who find themselves expecting a child and yet not wanting the child.  They were impatient with God's plan and jumped into bed without being responsible.  Sex becomes mere recreation or sport.  So countless women are hurried along to abortion mills where their children are being murdered and they themselves are being tortured with the memory of such events.   We have father's who abandon their children because they were looking for sex not love and they leave women alone and scared and confused and scarred for life. 

All of this because we have decided like Sarai to take matters into our own hands.  We have grown impatient with God and we are left with more tension, more worries, more confusion, more depression, and more innocent blood shed. We have pulled at the single thread and the fabric of society has unraveled.

Like Hagar our society is "running away" from the very one who can bring this chaos into order; who can take this vast formless reality and recreate it, if only we trust his plan and refuse to take matters in our own hands.  We do not need to grab at life we need to embrace the life God offers.  

God seeks to be continually active in our life and world.  He is continually seeking to bring good out of all this mess.  He sends His messengers into the world to get the attention of society.  The messengers are us who believe.  We are sent into the world to bring light in the darkness, to go out into the wilderness where people are groping at darkness to grab their hand to show them the alternative way, the true way.  We must speak the words of the messenger, "The Lord has heard you, God has answered."

We must never tire of reaching out, speaking forth, standing firm.  We must point out the obvious, what we are currently doing has not made the world a better place, impatience is never the answer.  We all must learn to wait on God's love and in waiting we experience true blessing and strength.  Here we learn to build on solid rock, a foundation that will not collapse. 

This is how we astonish the crowds and bring them back from the "wilderness" of destruction.

"The Lord has heard, God has answered."