Midsummer

Thursday, June 26, 2025

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Midsummer

Sarai said to Abram:

“The LORD has kept me from bearing children.

Have intercourse, then, with my maid;

perhaps I shall have sons through her.”

Abram heeded Sarai’s request.

Thus, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan,

his wife Sarai took her maid, Hagar the Egyptian,

and gave her to her husband Abram to be his concubine.

He had intercourse with her, and she became pregnant.

When she became aware of her pregnancy,

she looked on her mistress with disdain.

Watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival last night I thought that Brother Wil had been reading Genesis. His creatively chaotic plot of mixed affections sent one suitor after another on chases all over Puck’s magic forest.

So Sarai said to Abram:

“You are responsible for this outrage against me.

I myself gave my maid to your embrace;

but ever since she became aware of her pregnancy,

she has been looking on me with disdain.

May the LORD decide between you and me!”

Abram told Sarai:  “Your maid is in your power.

Do to her whatever you please.”

Sarai then abused her so much that Hagar ran away from her.

Hagar and Sarai, with Abram’s help, did populate the universe, as Yahweh had promised, even if it took ten years instead of just nine months. Hagar’s “disdain” continues in the Arabic attitude toward their Jewish brothers and sisters. And vice versa of course.

At the outdoor theater we sat beside the parents of an ISU theater major who played Mustardseed, among other roles. Puck’s players (the “mechanicals”) led by Peter Quince, present the forest visitors a play within the play, and the players arrange a courtship between Bottom the Donkey and Mustardseed, consummated in a very creative way through a wall.

Shakespeare contrives a happy ending to this confusion of angry courtships, both in Athens and in the woods, when the king calls a halt to the frantic competitions and pronounces peace fiat, coupling the lovers together with their desired mates. Only one father, bent on a different conclusion, stalks away unhappy. Of course, that disappointed father represents, at least to me, the beginning of another cycle of violence and revenge. Sound familiar?

On the contrary, today’s reflection from Richard Rohr invites me to believe that the “common good” is the only good there really is. We don’t get the pleasure of having what we want at others’ expense. God didn’t create a zero-sum universe where we have to fight each other for what we need. That we think he did points us immediately back to the Garden of Eden. There was always enough for all, but our “knowledge,” along with its introduction of the concepts of “good and evil,” told us differently. Let’s hang on to what we’ve got.

Often, it’s the best we can do. If there is any “common” good to be had, it settles in our group, clan, family, nation, something around which we can circle our wagons. But God’s plan goes far beyond our plan. Guest Jacqui Lewis adds to Rohr’s thoughts:

I know this to be true: The world doesn’t get great unless we all get better. If there is such a thing as salvation, then we are not saved until everyone is saved; our dignity and liberation are bound together. We must care for ourselves and the village around us.

If we don’t, the village’s problems become our problems, and together our children will continue to hide from bullets in their classrooms. Our elders’ safety nets will be threatened. Our young adults will face mounting debt and earn less than their parents.

Fear, xenophobia, racism, bigotry—these problems belong to all of us, and they will get better as we all get better! 

In the play, what Rohr calls a “beloved community” is decreed by the will of the king. Our God doesn’t work that way. As frustrating as it must be for God, we are encouraged to do our own work in the world created for us. Teilhard de Chardin among many others believed that human evolution is bending us toward justice, however difficult that may be to see. I believe it too, and this is why:

At the prison wedding ceremonies I officiate four days each year, what always stays the same is a reference to Jeremiah 29. “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and pray to me, and I will listen to you.”

For men and women whose lives have been very difficult, these verses point to something much different than their own hopefully hopeful dreams, and certainly far different than the way they have been broken or abused by others around them.

Jeremiah knew from experience that God leaves us alone to create whatever “beloved community” we can, though it’s always so very limited. But then he promises us his “plans.”

Midsummer is neither the beginning nor the end, it’s the “MID.” In our own “mid”, we don’t know when, but we KNOW.

(Genesis 16, Psalm 106, John 14, Matthew 7)

(posted at davesandel.net)

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