In our sermon series using texts from Genesis with the theme “Family Matters,” today’s story is, perhaps, “the other story,” of Hagar and Ishmael and a somewhat shameful aside to the more familiar story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. This is analogous to stories in our own histories, and in the present, where certain types of people are relegated to another place or another level of humanity. In the story of Hagar, though, in the end God claims Hagar and Ishmael, and that should say something significant to us in our own time.