Children of Abraham: Christianity and Islam

Genesis 21:8-21 NRSV
The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."

The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring."

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.

And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him." Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

The story begins, as many stories do, with the birth of a child. The story of the relationship between Christianity and Islam begins this way. Like many children, this child was born into a troubled family. Abraham’s family was a strange mixture of disappointments, great upheavals, and conflicts. But it was also a family of promises and blessings.

Abraham, or Abram as he was originally known, and his wife, Sarah, had been sent on a journey by God. God called them from their home in the land that is now Iraq and said, “I’m choosing you. Of all the people in all the earth, I am choosing you to make a nation. You will be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. By you shall they will be blessed.”

They seemed an unlikely choice. They were getting on in years. Abram was 75, Sarah only ten years younger. And they had no children. How do you make a nation with descendents as numerous as the grains of sand by the sea with geriatric parents? But God’s ways are not our ways nor are God’s thoughts our thoughts. So the good book says [Isa. 55:8]. And God led them to a new land and began something new with a traveling couple who thought their traveling days were done. That’s a warning for everyone who thinks retirement is the end of the road.

But there was still no child and Abraham and Sarah knew that for this promise of God to be fulfilled there had to be a child. In desperation Sarah gave her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham. This would not be an acceptable practice to us in our day, but evidently it was not so uncommon in Abraham’s day. And it worked…in a way. Hagar became pregnant, but even before her child was born conflicts arose between her and Sarah. Surrogate parenthood is always a difficult business. But a son was born and they named him Ishmael.

That’s not what God intended, though. And soon another child was on the way. The most unexpected one of all. Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to another son, Isaac. And when Isaac was born they sent Hagar and Ishmael away. Hagar thought that she had been forgotten and rejected. She thought she and the child Ishmael would die in the desert. But just as she had run out of water and laid the child beneath a bush and walked away so that she would not have to watch him die, an angel from God came and said to her, “Hagar, go back to your child. God has not forgotten you or forsaken you. This child, too, will be the head of a great nation. There is a promise for him, too.” Hagar looked up and there in front of her was a well of water she had not seen before. She filled up her skin and took it back to the child and kept on walking.

The story of the relationship between Christianity and Islam begins with a child and with that story because it is to Abraham that both of these faiths look. Ron May led a group of us through a course on a book called Abraham earlier this year and it was entitled that for a very good reason. Abraham may have died thousands of years ago now, but his legacy is still very much alive in the conflicts in the Middle East. Jews and Christians trace their heritage through Isaac and Islam believes that the lines of their faith go back through Ishmael.

The way the story of Abraham and Ishmael is told is different in Islam. Hagar is a wife to Abraham in their story, not a slave. It is Ishmael that Abraham binds to an altar to sacrifice, not Isaac. And it is Ishmael who accompanies Abraham to rebuild the mosque in Mecca, which became one of Islam’s holiest sites. Ishmael becomes the first prophet to write and preach of the one true God and the father of all the Arabs.

When we talk about how Christians ought to respond to Islam and to the people who are faithful followers of Islam, Muslims, we need to start here – with the awareness that we are talking about a troubled family. It is easy, when we look at radical Muslim fundamentalists, and terrorist acts inspired by Islamic beliefs, and societies across the Arab world that look so different from our own…it is easy to believe that Islam represents something totally foreign, totally different and totally divorced from what we believe as Christians. But there are things that we share, too.

When I was in campus ministry at the University of Virginia I had the opportunity to be associated with a program called the Children of Abraham Project. The idea of this group was simple. Rather than exploring Judaism, Christianity and Islam through lectures and theories about how they compare and contrast, the Children of Abraham group would get together and study texts in pairs. Practicing Jews, Christians, and Muslims would bring texts that were important to them and they would read them together, not to find the commonalities between us, but to hear how people of other faiths would hear them and to go back to our own faiths with some new insights into what God might be telling us.

Though it was started by academics, we didn’t meet in a classroom and there was no teacher. We met in each others homes and we ate together and we got to know one another as people who had deeply held religious beliefs. We didn’t try to downplay who we were. I was there as a Christian who believes that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. The whole universe and salvation for me turns on knowing Jesus as God’s revelation. But I was with Jews and Muslims who shared stories with me. They also knew Adam and Noah and David. We were all “people of the book,” as Muslims say. And we were all children of Abraham.

So when September 11 came five years ago, and we knew by nightfall that we were entering a new era of relationships between our faiths, we held a candlelight vigil on the Lawn of the University. I spoke as a Christian. Vanessa Ochs, a Jewish professor of English, spoke as a Jew. Professor Sachedina, in the Religious Studies Department, spoke as a Muslim. We knew each other from the Children of Abraham project. And the most powerful moment of the night was when Professor Ochs and Professor Sachedina saw each other on the platform. They didn’t say a word but they embraced, knowing that there would be many in weeks and months ahead who would try to pull them apart.

Now we talk about our nation as being a very diverse nation. It is true that people from all over the world come to the United States and they bring their faiths with them. But we are not nearly as challenged by religious diversity as other areas of the world are. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world – 20 % of the world’s population. But they constitute only one-half of one percent of the U.S. population. The numbers are growing, but the U.S. remains a country of Christians, at least in name. Almost 80% of Americans claim Christianity as their religion.

It is important for us to know something of Islam, though, because in other places in the world, Muslims are not a small minority that can be tolerated because they do not threaten the way of life of the majority. We pride ourselves as a nation on our tolerance and we should. People are free to worship in whatever way they please here. But how would we respond if we lived in Nigeria, where the population is split almost down the middle between Christians and Muslims and where the Muslim areas of the country are trying to establish Islamic law and customs? How would we respond if we lived in Europe where there could be a Muslim majority population by 2050 and where many of those Muslim immigrants are resisting the openness or Western culture and retaining their customs? How would we respond if we lived in Pakistan where only 2% of the population is Christians and where Christian worship is officially tolerated but where people go to church not knowing if this will be the Sunday when radicals will decide to bomb the church or shoot up the sanctuary?

The question of how Christians and Muslims should relate to one another is not just a nice theological question. There are real bodies facing real conflicts around the world because of what we say and do to each other. And in many areas, Christians are just as guilty as Muslims of intolerance and violence. We only need to look at the massacres in Bosnia in the last decade to see that playing out. Philip Jenkins, in his book, The Next Christendom, says, “It is conceivable that within a few decades the two faiths will have agreed on amicable terms of coexistence, but looking at matters as they stand at the start of the 21st century, that happy consummation seems highly unlikely” [p. 190]. Jenkins and others fear that unless we develop a new way of relating to each other, we could return to the 13th century when wars of religion were the norm.
Islam is a faith, like Christianity, that believes that fidelity to God is the highest obligation of a human being. There are many names for God but the greatest name is Allah. Muslims would say that this is the God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship. There is no different God for the Muslims. The first pillar of Islam is belief in this God. The confession a Muslim makes is, “I bear witness to this truth: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Mohammed, for Muslims, is not a Messiah figure, though he is revered as the greatest of God’s prophets. Mohammed lived from 570 to 632 A.D. in what is now Saudi Arabia. In his brief life he received a series of visions from the Angel Gabriel that he recited to believers he had gathered around himself. These visions were written down in Arabic in a holy book called the Koran. The Koran occupies a place in Islam even higher than Mohammed. It is considered the direct revelation from God and it is so holy as written that it cannot be translated from Arabic and still be holy. If there is something in Islam comparable to what we believe as Christians about Jesus, it is the Koran. The Koran is to Islam what Jesus is to Christianity – the direct revelation of God.

As I said, you will find some familiar names in the Koran, even Jesus appears as a great prophet. But it is not the Jesus we worship here. Jesus is only a man and not God for Muslims. The idea of God as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is foreign.

The other four pillars of Islam are all things that we, as Christians, can admire. 1) Prayer is required five times a day and observant Muslims will stop at these times and bow toward Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. 2) Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan. Each day during this month, from sunup to sundown, they will not take any food or drink, including water. 3) Charity to the poor is required. Typically a devout Muslim will devote 2.5% of his or her earnings to help others. 4) And finally all Muslims who are able will make the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. In all of these we can seen a reflection of what Jesus and the prophets asked of the people of God through the years – devotion to God, physical acts that work to prepare our souls to hear God, and service on behalf of the poor.

But these things are not what trouble us. We also have heard the word jihad bandied about over the last few decades and suspect that there is something sinister about it. Because of how it has been used by different groups we think that it only means a holy war against those who are not Muslim. The word itself means struggle or striving with all that you have. In that sense, Muslims are commanded to give their whole lives and all their strength to struggling on behalf of God. Didn’t Jesus tell us to do the same – to serve and love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength [Mk 12:30]?

In the same way the Koran says to “strive in God’s cause and you ought to strive” [22:78]. It also says “not to listen to the unbelievers, but to strive with them strenuously” with the Holy Book [22:52]. We can think of similar passages in the Bible that urge believers to do the same thing.

There are also passages in the Koran that allow for the possibility of war and armed struggle. “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not be aggressive” says another passage [2:190]. Throughout the centuries Muslim warriors have used passages like this to justify attacks of others. Mohammed himself led a band of followers to fight for Mecca and to set up a Muslim state. For centuries following there was conflict and bloodshed. Christians and Jews know we have our sacred texts that seem to justify holy war and Christians especially have been guilty of listening to these texts in some horrible ways through the centuries, from the Crusades to what is happening with the so-called Lord’s Army in Uganda right now.

But there does seem to be a greater tolerance for such language and interpretations in Arab countries today. We are told that Islam is a religion of peace and there are passages in the Koran that do talk about peace. The Koran, just as much as Jesus and the Bible, talks about the suffering violence and war do to us and the blessing those who work for peace bring. One passage of the Koran says, "[I]f anyone slew a person—unless it be for murder or spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people" [5:32]. But we don’t hear the words of peace and we see the suffering of violence and war and too little of the blessings of the peacemakers. The people of the Koran are struggling to reclaim a message from God that leads to life and not death.

That is why it is so important that we as Christians approach this question as Christians. We are not called to be hostile to people of other faiths, including Islam. We are also not called to be tolerant. Hostility and tolerance are not part of the language of our faith. Tolerance is a civic virtue that we have adopted as a nation and it allows us to live in proximity with one another without violence. As Americans we should celebrate that and respect that. But it is not a Christian virtue.

Christians are called to be faithful. We, too, are people who proclaim one God – the God of Abraham, Israel and Jesus Christ. We are not at our best and we are not who we are supposed to be when we are trying to water down our faith in an effort to make it palatable to others. We also don’t respect people of different beliefs by saying, “Oh, our differences don’t really matter. The main thing is that we are serving the same God.” Our differences DO matter! Either Jesus is the clear revelation of God in human form and his death and resurrection offer us salvation, either he is the one promised Israel from of old, or we have nothing left to offer the world. We don’t say this to disparage Mohammed or to deny our Jewish heritage or the Jewish people, but if we do not confess this, who are we? And what self-respecting Muslim wants to believe that the unique revelation they have from Muhammad is really not all that important?

So the first thing I would say, as we wonder what it is that we are called to do when confronted with the challenges of Islam, is that what we are called to do is to be better Christians – remembering who we are, grounding ourselves in the scriptures and the sacred stories of our faith, and attending to our own practices that draw us closer to God. Worship, prayer, fasting, reading the Bible, serving the poor, fellowshipping with other Christians, tithing – all of these are means of God’s grace that have been given to us.

As we become more fully the people God calls us to be we will also discover a second thing that I see as important in thinking about how we relate to Islam. We will discover the Christian practice of hospitality. Christians are known, in part, by who they eat with. Jesus was accosted by the religious leaders of his day because he would eat with those considered unworthy and outside the faith. But Jesus knew that one of the ways God shows love for us is by preparing a table and inviting others to a meal and sharing the story of how God’s love is faithful even when we are not. At this table we hear how God offers us salvation. At this table all are welcome and strangers become friends. Hostility and tolerance are not Christian words. Faithfulness and hospitality are and these are the things we are called to, even when we are facing religious messages that can seem demonic. Perhaps especially when we are facing the demons, whether they are plaguing the house of Mohammed or our own house. It’s what the children of Abraham are called to do. And perhaps, as others see that we are not shaken from our faithfulness to Jesus and that we are not shaken from a love that is open to all of humanity, the light of Christ will shine in new hearts and faces.

The story begins with a baby; I want to end this sermon with a baby, too. Four years ago I was asked to do a wedding for two UVA students, one a Christian who was very active in our Wesley Foundation group and her fiancé, a Muslim from Turkey. We talked a lot about what this wedding would mean, not only for them, but for their families and for their future children. I struggled with what to say at their wedding but it was a great celebration of two people who took their love seriously but who also took their faith seriously.

This week I got an e-mail from them. Molly had just gone to the doctor for her first sonogram and she sent me a picture of their new child on the way. They are so excited. And in that amazing, grainy picture of life growing inside a nurturing mother, there is the story of peoples from different worlds being drawn together. A Christian mother and a Muslim father. How will they raise this child? But God’s promises do not fail and I believe that this new baby will be better for having parents who, in their own ways, strive with all their strength, to be what God intends. Blessed be the one true God – the God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac. Thanks be to God.