I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 21, 2026, at Christ Presbyterian Church in Milford, Ohio.
The lectionary text is Genesis 21:8-21, Hagar and Her Son are Sent Away.
Have you ever felt like you were invisible?
Not necessarily alone, but overlooked. Maybe you were the person who didn’t get invited. The middle child in the family who feels like everyone else’s needs come first. The person whose name nobody seems to remember.
Most of us know what it feels like to be pushed aside while someone else stands in the spotlight.
Today’s story belongs to someone like that.
When people talk about Abraham’s family, we usually speak the names Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. But tucked away in the background is another son—one who is often forgotten, pushed aside.
His name is Ishmael.
In fact, in today’s passage, no one speaks it. He is simply “the boy” or “the son of the slave woman.” He is pushed aside, cast out, and sent into the wilderness.
From a human perspective, Ishmael looks forgotten. But not by God.
This morning, let’s walk with Ishmael into the wilderness and discover what happens when the God who hears meets those the world has overlooked.
My sermon today is titled “The Sacrifice of Ishmael.” You already know he doesn’t die. Yet perhaps death is not the only sacrifice that might be forced on a person. Perhaps the sacrifice is being overlooked, perhaps it is rejection. Perhaps it is being cast from the place you call home.
And sometimes the deepest sacrifice is to discover that the people who should have protected you are willing to let you go.
Two weeks ago, in chapter 12, we heard that God promised land to the offspring of Abraham. For that to happen, Abraham has to *have* offspring. He was 75 years old at the time. A decade later, still no offspring by Sarah. So they tried a loophole.
When it came to the particular issue of needing to produce an heir, if your wealth included enslaved people, as Abraham’s did, the law allowed for the master to conceive a child with an enslaved woman and have that child be the legitimate heir of the father what happened in Genesis 16.
Sarah offers Hagar to Abraham so he can have children, descendants for God’s covenant. But guess what? You can’t mix slavery, polygamy, and surrogacy without some collateral damage. Peel back the issues here and you’ll see infertility, age, probably forced surrogacy, and class differences. Emotions are going to run high. I’m not sure if this particular soap opera would run on Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer.
I read through this story several times, of course, and I started to get a picture of each of the characters involved. I tried to understand each of their motives, their reasoning, while taking their culture and their law into account.
Here are the questions we should be asking of this passage:
· What did you think was happening between the characters?
· What do you think Hagar wanted?
· Why did Sarah demand what she did?
· And what, pray tell, was Abraham thinking? He wasn’t going to win the Father-of-the-Year award!
· Ultimately, what is the lesson to be gleaned?
Here are the characters in this story.
Abraham
Abraham was hoping for a blended family, like the Brady Bunch. He wants to be Mike Brady, who is always willing and able to give a moral for whatever lesson is being taught in each TV episode.
Abraham’s morals are questionable in this scripture passage. He loved both his sons. Sarah wants both Hagar and Ishmael gone. Abraham is upset, as Ishmael is his first son, and he certainly had some relationship with Hagar. He prays about it and gets reassurances from God himself that Ishmael will be safe, if not Hagar as well.
Abraham was a rich man. He could have set them up with camels and food and supplies and silver and perhaps a couple servants. They could have made a home in another land. Instead, he gets up early the next day and sends them into the desert with only a bottle of water and a loaf of dry bread.
What a grizzly act on his part. Sarah didn’t say to kill them. God didn’t say torture them or even make them uncomfortable. Abraham gives them enough supplies to get them far enough away so he won’t see or hear them dying. They won’t survive on just that. There is more crying at college move-in day than from Abraham that morning. Methinks he’s being a little too faithful, purposefully leaving everything up to God.
Sarah
Instead of acting like Carol Brady, Sarah played the step-mother role like the evil queen in Snow White.
Sarah knows that if something were to happen to Abraham, then Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son of a slave woman, would inherit the larger share and that Hagar would be elevated in status. Sarah would be subject to Ishmael and probably Hagar as well. What a turn of events that would be!
So Sarah says to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son.” She doesn’t say, “Kill them.” Just get them out of the picture, cast them out. It’s up to Abraham to decide how to appease her.
Hagar
Hagar was no Alice, the maid in the Brady household who made lunches for the family with a snarky joke. She despised Sarah after being offered to Abraham by her. She may have been forced into surrogacy by Sarah and perhaps forced to be with Abraham. She had some valid reasons to be resentful towards everybody. She was a slave and was being treated as such.
Hagar saw that Isaac was getting a great feast to celebrate a milestone in his young life. Since Ishmael was the son of a servant, it’s doubtful that he received the same recognition. She wanted what was fair for her son, what was promised to him by God.
Ishmael
Did you notice anything striking catch in today’s reading? No one says Ishmael’s name.
· Sarah said, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son.”
· Abraham sent her off with the boy.
· God said, “I will make the son of the slave into a nation also.”
· Even Hagar and the angel of God get into the act, according to the narration.
Nobody spoke to Ishmael, nobody used his name, and even the narrator seems reluctant use his name. He was being treated like property, like chattel or livestock. The people around Ishmael forget his name. But God never did.
Genesis 17:25 will say that Ishmael would be about 17 years old. That stands in conflict with the episode in the desert that we just heard. There’s no way Hagar was going to lift him up as God instructed if he was a nearly-grown adolescent. There’s no reason Ishmael as a 17-year-old would have succumb to the heat before his mother and be cast under a bush for her grieving convenience.
However old he was, he wasn’t a toddler himself. And he wasn’t stupid. He saw that favoritism toward Isaac demonstrated by Abraham and certainly by Sarah. As Tommy Smothers would tell his brother, Dick, (paraphrased, replacing ‘Mother’ with) “Father always liked you best.” Some jealousy was in play, as Isaac was the miracle birth from Abraham and Sarah, while Ishmael was born from the flesh.
The Bible translations are at it again as well, with today’s NIV translation saying older Ishmael was mocking 3-year-old Isaac. The NRSV says “playing with.” Other translations say “laughing with.” Perhaps laughing at? Whatever it was, it seemingly enraged Sarah. Playing Dreidel with the toddler Isaac wouldn’t have incited Sarah that much, so mocking was probably accurate. But no matter his young age, can you really blame Ishmael for any of this?
Isaac
About age three at the time. He gets a pass from our analysis. He’s blameless.
Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away
With a pat on the head and a skin of water on her shoulder, Abraham banished Hagar and her son to the wilderness, to whatever fate awaits them. The bread ran out, the skin of water ran dry, there’s desert in every direction. Hagar can’t bear to watch her son suffer. She turns away and weeps.
Then, in that emptiness, where no one is listening, we hear one of the most beautiful sentences in Scripture:
“God heard the boy crying.” Not Abraham. Not Sarah. The wilderness didn’t listen, but that cry still reached Heaven. “God heard the boy crying.”
That simple sentence may be the heart of this passage.
· The God of Genesis is not only the God of Isaac, the promised son.
· He is also the God of Ishmael, the forgotten son.
· He is the God who sees the slave woman in the desert.
· He is the God who hears the outcast.
· He is the God who opens eyes to wells of water when all hope seems gone.
Many of us have experienced moments when we felt forgotten, pushed aside, or left in a wilderness – or a nursing home – not of our choosing. People may overlook us. We may even overlook one another. But God does not. And we, as a church, [look into the camera] can never forget our shut-in and homebound friends and members!
The sacrifice of Ishmael never happened. God would not allow Abraham’s first son to die in the desert. Instead, God saved him, blessed him, and gave him a nation.
This story is ultimately not about Abraham’s failure, Sarah’s jealousy, Hagar’s suffering, or Ishmael’s rejection. It is about the God who sees. The God who hears a boy crying.
So let us leave today with confidence in a God who keeps his promises, who hears the cries of the nameless, who sees the invisible, who blesses the oppressed.
For the God who was with Ishmael in the wilderness is the same God who is with us today.
To the Lord our God, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end,
be all glory and honor forever.
