God's Faithfulness: The Story of Hagar

 After two straight Sundays of Matthew 10, I decided I wanted to put my attention on another reading. And then I opened the First Reading text and saw it was the troubling story of Hagar. This is one that I imagine other priests using the Episcopal Church's Track One probably thought, "Ummm...let me talk about Paul's Letter to the Romans...or I'll stick with Matthew."

But not this preacher! I couldn't help it. I read the exile of Hagar and Ishmael, and I felt I couldn't ignore her, the Egyptian woman, who was used and then rejected. 

There is simply too much happening in the United States these days with the way women...and most especially black women...have had their bodies ruled by others. 

And the assault on the teaching of history...with concerted efforts to erase the experiences of different groups in the United States...made this story, which we share with our Islamic cousins, an important text to be lifted up on a Sunday morning. 

I wish I could say that I got rave reviews for this one. I did hear a few positive comments. But most said nothing. Oh, well. Perhaps reading the text on your own will make it better. 

Text: Genesis 21:8-21

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Humans love to tell the stories of our lives.

We like to tell the ones where we are the heroes of our stories.

And we try to forget the ones where we aren’t so heroic.

When it comes to the stories in the Scriptures…we get the proverbial good…the bad…and the “oh no, we didn’t do that, did we?”

That last category applies to our first reading from this morning…the account from Genesis of what happened to Hagar and her son…Ishmael.

Those of us who have been raised up in our Judeo-Christian culture and churches know the couple Abraham and Sarah as our biblical ancestors.

We probably remember that from this elderly couple comes Isaac….and then Jacob and Joseph…all the way down to King David.

The promise God made to Abraham that he would father many nations and kings all comes to pass.

We may know that there is a lot of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis…specifically struggles between brothers for who has the birth right?

Who is favored one of the family?

Who has God chosen?

Often, we learn there are binaries in these sibling relationships.

One brother is more plodding and pedestrian.

The other brother is the one who is “the gift” or the favored.

And it’s the gifted one whose story gets told and we learn about him.

But the Scriptures aren’t some carefully curated history book.

And they don’t let us get away without acknowledging that there’s more to our biblical story than what gets lifted up in Sunday School.

This morning’s reading…where we hear about Abraham’s older son Ishmael and his mother Hagar….is a prime example of the Bible pulling back the veil and showing us a darker side of Abraham and Sarah….and how they treated in the foreigner in their family.

In fact….how Abraham and Sarah used and abused Hagar was pretty rotten.

Our lectionary does a lot of skipping over large sections of the Genesis narrative. So in order to understand Hagar’s plight, we need to know more of the back story.

So here we go.

Hagar is an Egyptian…given as a slave-girl to Sarah.

We don’t know why…we just know that it is what it is.

Sarah and Abraham were both so old that they didn’t believe they could have children.

We heard last week that Sarah laughed at God’s suggestion she would have a child.

Because Sarah didn’t believe she would have a child….she told Abraham to go sleep with Hagar. From that surrogate relationship…Hagar had a son by Abraham and the child was named Ishmael.

After that…Sarah resented Hagar….treated her cruelly…to the point where Hagar ran away.

An angel of the Lord found Hagar hiding and told her to go back to Sarah….with a promise that there would be a way forward for Hagar.

And that brings us to this moment in today’s reading where Sarah spies Ishmael and Isaac playing.

Our matriarch gets enraged.

She demands that Abraham get rid of Hagar and her son.

Abraham complies.

He casts them out.

Sends them into the wilderness with just a skin of water and some bread.

Good luck!!

Hagar and Ishmael were two characters that stood in the way of the story we have come to follow…the one of Abraham…Sarah…and their son Isaac.

This is OUR story because God pledged to Abraham that it would be Sarah’s child who would carry forward the covenant God was making with God’s people (Gen. 17:19-21).

And it’s through Abraham and Sarah…and their creation of Isaac…that we trace the lineage that leads to a young girl named Mary and her carpenter husband Joseph who raided a child they called Emmanuel…..and we know the rest of that story.

Now the Genesis story could have stopped with sending Hagar and Ishmael away.

But that wasn’t the end….at least not for God.

In fact…Hagar gets to do something no other woman at this point in Genesis has been able to do: she converses with God’s messenger…and thus with the God who has kept watch over her and her son through this whole ordeal.

And just when all seems lost…God provides water in the desert for Hagar and Ishmael.

Hagar’s story isn’t limited to our Scriptures.

She and Ishmael are part of the creation story of Islam.

In Islam…she is Hajar.

The way the story is told in the Qur’an centers more on Abraham…or Ibrahim… and his relationship to Ishmael. Instead of wordlessly sending them off…Ibrahim offers a prayer of protection…seeking kindness for them. And instead of a well appearing in the wilderness…it’s Hajar who runs between two mountains in search of water for her son.

In THEIR telling of the story….God sees her desperation and meets her action with one of God’s own: a spring of water comes up when Ishmael strikes his foot on the ground.

Ishmael becomes an Islamic prophet…and the Hajj…the journey to Mecca with this run between two mountains…is one of the five pillars of Islam.

The same story of deliverance told by Muslims is the story told by Jews and Christians.

And in both…we hear that even though Abraham and Sarah are cruel and dismissive….God has not abandoned Hagar and Ishmael.

God sees and hears the cries of the disinherited.

God’s response to their pleas may seem delayed…but ultimately… God will come to the aid of the one who cries out for help.

God is faithful that way…even when God’s people are not.

God watches over all the nations.

God’s love for Israel…extends to the Egyptian.

Because God’s love is unconditional and all-encompassing.

I think it says something that this story of Hagar didn’t land on the cutting room floor.

It shows us that in our biblical ancestry…not all the stories are heroic.

And…especially in the Old Testament…the scribes didn’t feel the need to edit out the less-flattering tales of even the most highly favored.

That this story is part of the cultural heritage of our Abrahamic cousin…Islam…also shows that there are other stories.

We can have different views of the same event…all descending from that singular truth that God is the faithful one.

And in sharing a common story….we are interconnected…and bound together as part of the larger human family.

I think that can serve as a great reminder to us as we live in a time when there is such debate over who gets to tell the story of who we are as Americans and as people.

There’s been so much noise about how and what stories we get to tell about the way this nation came to be that we forget there are many stories…many understandings.

And we have nothing to fear in hearing those parts that are not as flattering.

On Monday…we marked Juneteenth…a new federal holiday which celebrates the delayed news delivered to slaves in Texas in 1865 that they ere now free. Texas hadn’t bothered to let the slaves know about the Emancipation Proclamation signed two years earlier.

Tuesday…we recognized World Refugee Day.

We have 110-million people displaced from their homelands…many of them due to wars in places like in Syria and Ukraine. We still wrestle with the best way to help resettle people who find themselves in peril.

And, of course, this is also LGBTQ+ Pride month… a time that celebrates the three days in 1969 when the gay community…led by Marsha P. Johnson and drag queens and kings…stood up to police violence in New York City and asserted their rights to live free from state harassment and intimidation. The intimidation is on-going…only now happening with school boards and state legislatures.

These stories are all part of the larger narrative about our country and the world.

They aren’t pretty…but they’re still part of the story…the larger story we tell about ourselves.

The biblical account of Hagar has been particularly important to African-American women as her experience speaks to the abuses and tensions between races and genders.

The author and theologian Wilda Gafney notes that Hagar’s story holds up a mirror to the dominate culture to consider how black women’s bodies have been used as commodities.

And ultimately…Hagar becomes the biblical ancestor for the likes of Harriet Tubman…who led men and women to freedom from the bondage of slavery.

The Hagar story…painful as it is…is still a story of hope.

Amidst the pain and division happening between the people of God…God keeps covenant with both…and ultimately from both Isaac and Ishmael comes many nations.

The task for us now and always is to trust in God’s faithfulness…and trust enough that we are willing to listen to each other’s pain…each other’s stories.

And in that listening…may we see that in the holiness of the Divine…we are truly one.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.