Sermon
2/23/18
Genesis
16:1-15
Hagar
in the Wilderness
Today,
as we journey through the wilderness in this season of Lent, we’re taking a
look at the story of Hagar in the book of Genesis. It’s really important to me
to include women’s voices from the Bible when I’m preaching or teaching. There
are so many fewer stories of women, even names of women included in the Bible,
and I want to make sure we know these stories, and know that women are created
in God’s image too, and that women are called by God, used as God’s messengers
too. So I wanted to make sure to include the story of a woman in our wilderness
series this Lent. But the choices are fairly limited, and Hagar’s wilderness
experience is the only real stand-alone kind of narrative of a woman that we
have in the Bible. I’ll be honest: I feel like we just talked about Hagar. We
looked at Hagar’s story this past summer, during our Women in the Bible series.
We heard about Hagar and Sarah, and how God was at work in each of their lives.
That was about six months ago, and since I know you all listen to and remember
everything I say and every sermon I preach(!), I was hesitant to return to
Hagar’s story again so soon.
But of
course, the Bible is the living word of God, a living document, a living story
that unfolds for us with new ways of understanding every time we come to it. So
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find new insights as I came to Hagar’s story
again today. I shouldn’t be surprised that I felt like I was reading or at
least hearing some of the verses for the very first time. So, I invite you to
listen with me, maybe again, or maybe for the first time, as we hear Hagar’s
story.
Our text
begins by telling us that Sarai and Abram have no children. This is significant
because chapters earlier, God had promised them that through Abram’s
descendants, they would become a great nation, with more descendants than
stars. And after the promise, a lot of nothing happened in the way of getting
started on that family. Sarai is impatient. She takes matters into her own
hands. One Bible I looked at online titled this whole section “Beware of
Shortcuts.” Sarai gives Abram her slave-girl Hagar and says to Abram, “I’ll get
my children from you using her.” Hagar doesn’t get an opinion in this. Abram
has sex with her, and Hagar conceives a child. What Sarai does was legal, part
of law code of the day, and the clear understanding was that any children born
this way would be children of the wife, not the slave. Hagar’s child would
really be Sarai’s child, legally. So when Hagar starts to “look with contempt
on her mistress” Sarai, as the text tells us, we’re given the impression that
Hagar has lost sight of the fact that child she’s carrying isn’t going to
change her status as slave at all. In response to her attitude, Sarai started
to “deal harshly” with her. We don’t know what this means specifically, but
Sarai has all the power in this situation, and apparently things are bad enough
that it drives Hagar to drastic action. She runs away, into the wilderness. Her
direction is right to be trying to head back to Egypt, but the distance is
daunting – a few hundred miles at least. Hagar is everything vulnerable: a
woman, a slave, pregnant, and in a region where everyone is of a different
race, religion, accent, and cultural tradition than she is. Going to the
wilderness is heading into an extremely dangerous place. But suddenly, for
Hagar, that’s the better choice than staying where she is.
Don
Schuessler and I were talking this week about this whole concept of wilderness
and what it means to our Lenten journey and how difficult it can be to get our
heads around. On Ash Wednesday, I mentioned how “wilderness” in the Bible
refers mostly to the desert – a barren, dry, rocky place, while I always grew
up with an image of a wild, overgrown forest in my head when I thought of
wilderness. Still both kinds of wilderness – desert and forest – can be
vulnerable, risky, dangerous places, especially when we find ourselves there
alone, maybe lost. Last week we talked about how Jesus is our best model for
wilderness time: he goes there intentionally, compelled by the Spirit to
confront anything that could distract him from God’s plan to change the world
through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. That’s what we are called to as
well: to enter the wilderness with open eyes and open hearts, ready to grow in
faith as we turn from anything that distances us from God.
But
rarely do Biblical figures end up in the wilderness in this way. More often
they arrive in the wilderness because the dangerous wilderness suddenly seems
like the lesser of two evils when
compared with some desperate situation the person is encountering in the
supposedly civilized world. A couple of examples from popular literature come
to mind. In the Lord of the Rings series, books and movies, hobbits Merry and
Pippin have heard stories about how dangerous Fangorn Forest is, a dark,
overgrown place where the trees themselves seem to wish people harm. But, Merry
and Pippin have been captured by Orcs, servants of the evil Saruman who will
likely put them to death. Suddenly, the dark forest looks like a refuge, a
place of safety, compared to the evil Merry and Pippin have encountered
elsewhere. They flee to the forest, where they encounter rescuers who keep them
safe and conquer their enemies. We find something similar in the Harry Potter
series. At the edge of the Hogwarts campus, the school where the children go to
hone their skills with magic, we find the Forbidden Forest. Teachers constantly
warn students of the dangers of the Forbidden Forest. But more than once in the
series Harry and his friends find that the Forbidden Forest is their best
alternative, and they find help in the forest when they’re on the run from
danger at Hogwarts.
Hagar
runs to a place that is extremely dangerous for her, but she only goes there
when it seems that her alternative is unbearable. She can’t stand it anymore,
where she is, how she’s been treated, the role that she seems to have. She
can’t do it anymore. And so she runs to a place that would otherwise seem like
anything but a place of refuge. Remember, last week we talked about how it is Jesus’s time in the wilderness that is
our model for Lent. He goes to the wilderness with intention, with purpose,
expecting transformation, boldly confronting Satan, not because he’s on the run
and has no other place to go.
I hope, in Lent, we can boldly go into
the wilderness too. But I suspect, sometimes we only get to that vulnerable
place when we feel like we have nowhere else left to go. We talked about one of
our tasks in Lent being confronting anything that is an obstacle in our
relationship with God and removing it from our lives. I believe that we usually
know what these obstacles are. We
know what keeps us from giving our whole selves to God because they’re often
things we’ve put there ourselves, things that we’re attached to, ways we spend
our times, habits we’ve formed over time, plans we have that are most
definitely our plans and not God’s plans, dreams we have of our own greatness
that have nothing to do with serving God and neighbor, or ways that we numb
ourselves from feeling the challenges of the world around us. We know all too
well what we’ll have to reckon with if we end up in the wilderness, and so we
avoid it like it’s the scary Forbidden Forest. What would it take for us to
realize that we’re better off facing the wilderness than not?
My favorite musician is folk singer
Tracy Chapman. One of her most compelling songs, I think, is called “Change.”
In it, she asks a series of questions, wondering what would push us to actually
change our lives. She asks: “If you
saw the face of God and love would you change? How many losses, how much
regret? What chain reaction, what cause
and effect makes you turn around, makes
you try to explain, makes you forgive and forget, makes you change?” And then, my favorite line, “If
everything you think you know makes your life unbearable, would you change?” What
will it take for us to go the wilderness where change is inevitable? If,
finally, things are unbearable, would that do it? Do we have to wait until our
lives are intolerable otherwise to confront what we find in the wilderness?
When Hagar gets to the wilderness, she
is found by a messenger from God. Hagar tells the angel she is running away,
but God, through the angel, tells her that for now, Hagar needs to go back to
Sarai and deal with her. She’s sent back to her life as a slave: hard words to
hear. But that’s not all the angel says. The angel says she Hagar, too, is part
of God’s promise. The same promise that God gave to Abram, God gives to Hagar.
Her offspring will be more than a multitude. The angel tells to name her son
Ishmael, which means “God listens.” Ishmael will be no ordinary man, the angel
says. Things won’t be easy for him. But in him, Hagar has a future. Freedom
seems imminent. Hagar, an Egyptian slave girl, has a place in God’s story. And
then finally comes the verse that knocked me off my feet as I read this text
again: Hagar names God. We read, “So
she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi”; for she said, “Have I
really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”” Wow. Naming is usually
the other way around in the Bible. God names
us. Or God tells us what name to call God. But Hagar can’t help but name
the one who has saved her: El-roi – the God who sees me. Hagar knows that God
has really seen her – in the wilderness, and back with Sarai and Abram – God
really sees her, even her. Knowing that makes all the difference. Her life is
changed.
Hagar’s story isn’t done. Spoilers
alert if you can’t remember from summer: She ends up in the wilderness again,
this time with her young child. And this time she won’t be going back to life
with Sarah and Abraham, but instead living into the very promise God describes
to her here, a future beyond what she had hoped for. What will it take,
friends, to get us into the wilderness? We serve the God who listens, the God
who sees, who sees what we’re facing now, who sees what we have to confront in
the wilderness too, and who has a vision of what might be for us once we
finally get there. Let’s not wait. We’ve seen enough stories. We know this
plot. And so we know that God will be with us in the wilderness, a place that
isn’t our ending, but a new beginning, a place of change. Let’s go see this God
who sees us so well already. Amen.
