Seeking Authentic Voice

When I was five years old my mother decided to divorce my birth father, making her a single mom with three kids in 1962. A few years later my mom married again, and that man adopted my brothers and I, making us a legal family. After that my mom cut us off from my birth father and his family, and I did not see any of them for over 20 years. Even when we reconnected we were never able to rebuild a consistent stable relationship, perhaps that was part of the problem in the first case, and why my mom got divorced?  Family relationships can be complicated. The stories in the Book of Genesis of Abraham, Sarah and their son Isaac along with the Hagar and her son Ishmael remind me that all human relationships are complicated.  The reading this morning reveals just how complicated things were for Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham. First of all, who are these people? Sarah and Abraham were called by God, who led them into the wilderness with the promise that they would build a great na...

The slightly longer version for 8 and 10am   The book of Genesis is one of the most important books of the Bible. In it we hear the ancient stories of our Judeo-Christian ancestors. These stories resonate with human experience through the ages. Tales of how the world began, of God invested in all creation, of human beings growing in self-awareness and wisdom, struggling through suffering, pain, and joy. These are family stories of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and brothers. They are ripe with emotions of jealousy, greed, love, anger, hope, faithfulness, risk, and what it means to be a people of God. The stories in Genesis reflect the rich, mythic culture of Mesopotamia in the 6th Century BCE. An oral tradition of stories was shared and passed down through the centuries until they settled in written form about three thousand years ago. Ancient Israel emerged out of this culture of wise courtiers, wisdom traditions, collections of proverbs, and manuals for readin...