The Cry of Ishmael

Genesis 21: 11-21
This is not the first time Hagar has found herself weeping in the wilderness. The first time she had run away after being treated harshly by Sarai. The angel of the LORD comes and sends her home; she says of herself that she had seen God and lived – an astonishing event for anyone, but for a woman and a slave? Almost too incredible to fathom. Here in chapter 21, Hagar’s grief is even greater, for the child has been born, and her son has drunk the last of the water, and she has left him to die, trying to move away from the sound of her cries until she simply seems to drown them out with her heart-rendering wailing. This time she has been sent away by the father of her child. This time God has approved of the banishment. This time she must be utterly lost. Any parent reading this text and allowing it into our hearts, must ache, must try to pull away from the horror of the image of our dying child.
But in this text, this time, the action seems motivated more by Ishamael and his cries than by Hagar. God hears the voice of the boy (a familiar motif in the Hebrew Scriptures: people cry out, people wail, and God hears and God responds). God shows her a well, water to sustain her and her son, and God assures her that they will live, that Ishmael will father a people.
And so it happens. The descendents of Ishmael, relatives of the Hebrew people, flourish. Many, many centuries later, some four hundred years after Christ has come, these people will turn to God in a way that seems strange perhaps to their Jewish and Christian neighbors. The descendents of Ishmael cry out that there is indeed One God, the One to whom we are called to submit. Islam is born.
What are we to make of our family tree? The promise, God says, comes through Isaac. The covenant that God had in mind when calling Abraham, that covenant is through Isaac and his descendants. But now we see that God is God of all peoples, revealed through relationship particularly with Jews, but God of all. Paul says that Gentiles are grafted onto the family tree through Christ, that they, we, become adopted children.
Wouldn’t we do well to remember that the people born of Ishmael are on the tree too? God heard his cry. God answered.