Looking Down on Others
A Children’s Talk by the Rt. Rev. Peter M. Buss Sr.
A
Lesson: Genesis 16:1-9
re you perhaps really good at soccer? Are you sometimes tempted to look
down on other people who are not so good, even to make fun of them? A
boy is good at soccer, and he’s playing with his friends and his younger brother
wants to play, and he says, “You are no good. We don’t want you to play with
us.” He might even tell his friends how bad his younger brother is at soccer.
How does that make his younger brother feel?
Are there any of you who are good tennis players or good swimmers?
Maybe there is someone who is not nearly as good and you are tempted to
laugh at her when she tries to swim or hit a tennis ball. You see, when you
laugh at someone who is not as good as you are, it makes you feel you’re better
than he or she is at everything. Not just soccer or swimming or tennis, but
everything.
So let me tell you a story from the Word where someone laughed at and
looked down on someone else, and how it caused a lot of unhappiness. Abram
and Sarai were called by Jehovah to come into the land of Canaan, and told that
they would be the parents of a great nation. But Sarai did not have children.
Now in those days a man could have more than one wife. So Sarai took Hagar,
her handmaid, and gave her to Abram as a second wife. She thought that the
child would be like her child then and that way they would have a family.
Well, Hagar became pregnant. When she realized she was going to have a
baby and Sarai couldn’t have babies, she thought to herself: “I’m much better
than my mistress. I can have babies. She’s stupid, not being able to have babies.”
She looked down on Sarai, in fact she despised her. That means she thought
Sarai was useless compared to her.
Now this was a big problem. In those days if a woman couldn’t have a baby
it was a very sad thing. It was also a problem because Sarai was a very important
person, the woman who was in charge of the whole camp of Abram, with many
people in it. If her handmaid was laughing at her, maybe encouraging other
people to laugh at her, it would be very bad. So Sarai complained to Abram,
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