“Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose”

Sermon

If you are of a certain age, you might remember Janis Joplin singing the line I’ve used as today’s sermon title: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” We are celebrating this nation’s 250^th birthday this 4th of July weekend, and while that sermon title might suggest patriotism, the story definitely does not. The song, “Me and Bobbie McGee,” from which the line comes, was written by Kris Kristofferson at a ferociously low point in his life. Nothing, for him in fact, left to lose. But it was Janis’ rendition we all knew as a song for our times. Political events in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early ’70s left a desperate corporate sense of “nothing left to lose.” It seemed like the end of American democracy, with confidence in the government at an all-time low. Perhaps this is how Hagar experienced abandonment in the desert with a small child, and not even a “Good luck, kiddo.” Her body has been cynically used to jump-start God’s promise of a child for Abraham and Sarah. And now she had no shelter, no food, no water, no supportive friends or family. It had been Sarah’s idea to use Hagar’s body, Sarah’s idea to eject Hagar once she startled everyone (including herself) by bearing her own child.

That sense of “nothing left to lose” is the sort of mindset that makes a person take risks they would not ordinarily take if they still had something to protect. It reminds me of a book I received for my birthday: The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly. The author, Margareta Magnuson’s, first book is The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. Magnuson’s motive is to spare one’s children the task of clearing out one’s stuff, once we’re past the point of “you can’t take it with you.” In her second book, Magnuson focuses on living with freedom from the stuff distractions. She calls it exuberance. St. Augustine declares it “rest in God,” the result of having “let go of all else that kept him bound.” That’s not what led Abraham and Sarah to clear out Hagar once they didn’t need her anymore to accomplish God’s promise.

Perhaps you’re familiar with Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale. The book and Hulu series, based on Atwood’s dystopian novel, is set in a totalitarian future U.S., in which fertile women are used in sexual servitude for breeding in response to a global fertility crisis. To accomplish this, fertile women are stripped of their rights, their names, identity, and freedom. It’s a warning about religious extremism and patriarchy, an institutionalized expression of what had been an accepted practice in ancient times and the slave era in the U.S. You remember Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, whose 12 sons are born to his four wives through a frenzy of competitive childbearing. It was a common practice, requiring only a certain level of power over vulnerable women.

This summer’s preaching theme at Westminster is, “The prophets speak from the Old Testament.” Hagar is not a conventional prophet, there being no Book of Hagar. The definition of a prophet is someone divinely inspired to call people back to God’s path. Sometimes a prophet uses words to convey their message; sometimes a prophet enacts the message. Setting aside that Hagar is the first person and the only woman to name God, her story brilliantly illustrates one of the overarching themes of Genesis, going back to the very first family. Adam and Eve, exiled from the Garden, have two sons, Cain and Abel, who quarrel (as brothers do). Their argument is over what they’re giving to God in worship. The quarrel becomes deadly, and God asks Cain where his brother is, knowing full well that Cain has killed him. Cain’s response is a snarky rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The rest of Genesis is the answer. “As a matter of fact, yes. Yes, you are your brother’s (sibling) keeper.”

To see how Hagar’s story is both a “yes” and a “no” in answer to that question, I think we need to look at the next story in Abraham’s saga. In it, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. For a guy who has waited nearly a century for God’s promise of a son to be fulfilled, who has done what he could to manipulate the divine time schedule, Abraham seems mighty willing to divest himself of both sons. We can agree that both Hagar’s story and the sacrifice of Isaac are what we might term a not story, as in, this is not what to do. To hear Hagar’s story as a prophetic “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” we need to set it within the covenant promise to Abraham. God stakes everything on Abraham, promising that, through him, all of creation will be blessed. So why kill or abandon part of that fulfillment? God asks for the sacrifice of Isaac; God consents to the abandonment of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness.

The freedom here is God’s as well as that of humans. Covenant love cannot be coerced, and God has implanted within humans the desire for intimacy with God. Holocaust survivor Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits reimagines Abraham’s prayer of acquiescence this way: In this situation I do not understand You. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust You because it is You, because it is You and me, because it is us. . . . Almighty God! What you are asking of me is terrible. . . . But I have known you, my God. You have loved me and I love You. My God, you are breaking Your word to me. . . . Yet I trust You. That is a prayer that wrestles with the bounds of relationship, with the identity of both God and Abraham. It is a prayer that says, “The Giver is more important than the promise.” Finally. Hagar, you recall, is not party to that covenant. She is casually enlisted as a child-bearer, turned out to the desert against her will. As she prepares to die, her prayer is not Abraham’s prayer. She hears the God who sees her, the God she has named El Roi. But having become no longer useful to Sarah and Abraham, with nothing left to lose, she has nothing to offer God except lament, cries of injustice, and terror at the prospect of watching her child die. As God makes use of everything she offers, God expands her freedom. This is no “blind obedience”; this is a faith that sees and hears and trusts because there’s nothing left but trust. She’s been given no promise, yet in her empty-handed freedom, she cries out to the God who sees her. She has nothing with which to bargain, nothing to offer God. Hagar’s witness is that there are times when the holiest, most profound sacrifice we can offer God is our grief and regret. Our freedom was gained through so much loss by others. We can only lament and cry out in regret at the injustice. And pray for the restoration of more noble aspirations.

We could read this story as a parable of the problem of human clannishness. Or the consequence of forcing God’s hand. Or as a commentary on current events. Ishmael grows up to be the ancestor of Mohammed. The PC(USA) General Assembly this week passed a resolution labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and formed plans to divest our financial holdings in Israel’s war machine. The mindset of fear and scarcity that sent Abraham into Hagar in the first place is the same mindset that sent Hagar out into the wilderness with minimal provisions. It is the same mindset that fuels the war between Israel and Lebanon/Hamas/Gaza. Abraham and Sarah counted so fiercely on the promise, that was all they could see. Everything but the promise fulfilled was scarcity to them. Get-a-kid-at-any-cost became get-rid-of-any-kid-but-mine. Now it’s 21,000 children killed in Gaza, 40,000 injured.

One of my friends is part of a Catholic Worker House whose ministry feeds people under the Morrison Bridge once a week. In writing about feeding and meeting real human need, my friend reflects on our nation’s birthday and the shadow side of our spirit of independence. “People who identify with one another,” he writes, “who empathize with one another’s needs and suffering, do not seek their own security and happiness at others’ expense. Contrary to the logic of American rugged individualism, we only truly flourish to the extent that all of us can flourish. A new spirit of interdependence, rather than a malignant independence that consumes without conscience or concern for the wellbeing of others, must become the declaration upon which we transform our lives, our nation, and our world.” In other words, the answer to the question of Genesis is, “Yes, as a matter of fact, you are your sibling’s keeper.” As we gather today around this table, may we see it as our family table, sign and symbol of mutual interdependence.