No Business as Usual - Bruce L. Taylor

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organize events for the wives who came to El Paso with their husbands—remember, there were not many female geologists in those days, and many wives did not work outside of the home—planning tours to Juárez and so forth, and employing her artistic skills to design the program cover and make posters to put up in the lobbies of the conference hotels. For several weeks before the convention, my father worked diligently on the speech, crafting it with just the right words and practicing his delivery, while the tables in our house were covered with poster boards and bottles of India ink and dozens of colored pencils.

      At the time, I was ten years old, just two months into fifth grade at Mesita Elementary School. Even at that age, though, I understood that this was a significant event for my parents, and a distinct honor for my father, and the speech was something very important to him personally and professionally. I don’t know whose idea it was—my mother’s or my father’s—that I should be taken out of school that day to hear my father deliver his address. It was always a big deal when one of my fellow students was excused from class for something—even a dental appointment. So there was a buzz of attention when my mother came into the classroom to fetch me that day. My teacher, Mrs. McCreary, had been encouraging of my being present when my father spoke, and may even have said something to the class about it—I don’t remember. I had occasionally been out of school for illness, but never for any reason other than going to the doctor or staying home sick. On those occasions, my experience of life outside of the classroom on a school day had been limited to sitting in a waiting room or being confined to bed.

      I remember much about my father’s speech. It focused on the dangers of reliance on foreign oil and gas exploration and production, comparing America’s growing dependence on such energy sources to ancient Rome’s increasing dependence on outlying provinces for its grain supplies (and we all know what happened to Rome). But one of my main impressions of the entire experience of driving down to the Plaza Theatre (which had been rented for the plenary meetings) and being surrounded by hundreds of adults was my astonishment that so much was going on in the city of El Paso on a school day. My world, Monday through Friday, nine months out of the year, was all within the schoolyard and buildings of Mesita Elementary School. There were rare occasions when I had some notion of the outside world during those hours—the cars whizzing by on Mesa Street during recess had to be going somewhere, after all, and I remember the times when my mother stopped by the school and hailed me through the chain-link fence at lunchtime recess to let me know that Alan Shepard and then John Glenn had landed safely from their space flights. But I was amazed to learn one day in November 1961 that the world was functioning, had a life totally separate and apart from and oblivious to what was going on at Mesita Elementary School.

      I know that that experience was not unique to me. Most children make such a startling discovery at some point or another. But there is something about our basic egocentricity, as human beings, that renders us slow to appreciate the truth that our concerns and our activities are not the only things happening in the universe. And our limited vision as children sometimes survives or reasserts itself into our youth and adulthood and becomes a shared characteristic that affects us not only as individuals, but as families, as clubs, as companies and agencies, as communities, as nations, often as churches. It can lead to cultural or even spiritual myopia, even arrogance. Because we’re here, we can’t imagine that anything important is happening there. In fifth grade, I sort of assumed that everything going on at my house pretty much stopped when I left for school in the morning and didn’t resume until I got home again. As far as I was consciously concerned, nothing much was happening in the whole city of El Paso between eight-thirty and three o’clock on weekdays except pencils writing on paper and chalk writing on chalkboards in the city’s schools. And so I was fascinated, and maybe a little embarrassed, to see the city bustling that day as it never did whenever I might be downtown on Saturdays and Sundays. It had a whole ’nother life of which I had not really been aware.

      As Christians, I think we are sometimes like I was as a schoolchild. We tend to assume that our experience of God is the full experience of God, the only experience of God. And that is natural, particularly given a certain interpretation of Jesus’ words about being the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him. We do affirm, with the New Testament, that Jesus is uniquely the Son of God, the fullest revelation of who God is and what God is like and what God desires and expects from us, and that salvation, wholeness, eternal life, can be had only by having faith in Christ.

      But that theological affirmation is quite different from the assumption that commonly accompanies it that God’s efforts toward salvation and wholeness and eternal life are confined to Christian history or even limited to the story told in the Bible. A little reflection on our part will confirm that God’s saving activity is not restricted to what we read on the Bible’s pages; it continued and expanded after the last word of the Bible was written, and continues today, among us, right here, for instance, not to mention historic events like the Protestant Reformation, and the opening of the church to women’s leadership, and the Civil Rights movement and the integration of churches. And if the history of the saving work of God is longer than the period covered by the Bible, it only makes sense that the scope of the saving work of God is even broader than the events chronicled in the Bible. The fact that God chose Abraham to be the ancestor of a great nation that would be blessed by God and be given a special role in the redemption of God’s creation does not mean that Israel is the only nation that God blesses, does not mean that God isn’t interested in other people or that God doesn’t love them, does not mean that God’s great work of salvation and wholeness and eternal life doesn’t encompass other cultures in God’s great recipe for bringing to fulfillment all of God’s hopes for the world that he formed and then clothed with vegetation and then created animals to benefit from it and then populated it with human beings of every race and custom and language, even religion.

      The world’s one-and-a-quarter billion Muslims point to the event reported in today’s reading from Genesis as the origin of their faith. Ishmael, the son of Sarah’s slave-girl Hagar, fathered by Abraham but not destined to be the bearer of the covenant, was sent out with his mother into the desert to die but was cared for by God and himself became the progenitor of a great people, the Muslims. Historically, that assertion requires a lot of qualification, since Islam did not begin until it was announced by Mohammed, who didn’t live until the sixth century after Christ. It is probably not even an ethnologically accurate explanation for the Bedouins among whom Islam spread so rapidly once it did get started. But the story is an important corrective to the misguided belief that God cares only for the biological and spiritual descendants of Abraham. “As for the son of the slave woman,” God said to Abraham, “I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring” (Gen 21:13, NRSV). And the Bible testifies that “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” (Gen 21:20–21, NRSV). When Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael buried him together. Genesis tells us that Ishmael had twelve sons, the same number as the sons of Jacob, who fathered the twelve tribes of Israel. Except for some genealogical references, that is the last that Israel’s Bible tells us about Ishmael. But if God was faithful to this promise he made to Abraham—and God’s faithfulness to his other promises to Abraham makes that a certainty—God cared for Ishmael and his descendants, and reckoned them, too, into God’s plan for redeeming creation.

      Actually, that very term, “plan,” is somewhat misleading. It is probably better to use the word “purpose,” for “plan” makes it sound as if it’s all drawn up in schematic form in some heavenly workroom, intolerant of deviations, impossible of surprise. Not everything that happens is necessarily according to a “plan,” although God is able to and does use it to fulfill his purpose. For instance, God certainly is not a God who wills violence, though violence is a part of the history that the Bible tells. God is not a God who approves of deception, though Abraham used deception to preserve his and Sarah’s life, as did his son Isaac, as did many other heroes of the Bible. And I don’t think that we should accuse God of promoting jealousy, although the fact that God’s directive to Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness happened to coincide with Sarah’s jealous ultimatum shows that God pursues the great divine purpose in, with, and under the twists and turns of human emotion. As

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