Rev. Sarah Buteux                                             June 19, 2005

The Story of Hagar

6th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 7

Genesis 21: 8-21

How many of you grew up going to Sunday School?  And how many of you had flannel boards in your classrooms? Me too.  For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, there were these black flannel boards, that came with huge collections of felt people. (Or maybe they were felt boards with flannel people.) I’m not quite sure how it worked, but all the main characters in the Bible were included, from Adam and Eve, through Noah and Abraham, on into the Gospels. Our teachers would pull out the relevant characters each Sunday and retell the Bible stories for us using these boards. And it was a great way to teach children, but I think in my case it created a sort of mistaken impression.

Something about the fact that these ancient people had been immortalized on felt led me to believe that they were actually not just people, but very holy people. I mean they were in the Bible right? They’d been enshrined on felt right? They came in multiple colors with cool ancient clothes right? So they must be good.

I don’t know how I missed this, but somehow the details of the stories, whether we were talking about Jonah and his reluctance to go to Ninevah or maybe David and that unfortunate incident with Bathsheeba, (ok maybe we didn’t talk about that one in Sunday School, but you get the idea) anyway, the details of their stories did little to deter my enthusiasm or faith in their holiness.

But as I grew older and continued to read the same stories, I soon came to realize that these heroes of the Bible, these great men and women of faith whose stories had been passed down for thousands of years, were really for the most part, not that holy at all.

In fact they were a lot more like us then I had realized. In some cases they were actually worse. And so I started to think that the Bible should come with a longer title, something like, “The Holy Bible: the story of people behaving badly and the God who loves them.” You know, something like that.

And today’s story is a perfect example.  The story of Hagar and Ishmael is tragic, it’s awful, it’s embarrassing. It shouldn’t have happened, it didn’t need to happen, but it did. And we have it in here still, staring us in the face, bearing witness to the failure of our ancestors to treat each other with the most basic level of human decency. 

Before we look at it in detail, though,  I want to review the larger story of Abraham so we can perhaps better understand how things could have gotten so bad that he would feel forced to send Hagar and his oldest son Ishmael into exile.

Today’s reading is from the 21st chapter of Genesis, but the story of Abraham actually begins back in the 12th chapter. God calls Abraham to leave his father’s house and go with his wife Sarah and the rest of his household into a new land, the land of Canaan.

And God promises Abraham that he will bless him and make of him a great nation.  At one point he even takes him outside and says, “Look at the stars, how numerous they are…so shall your descendants be.” 

And Abraham believed in the promise of the Lord. Perhaps this is why I have always thought of him in particular as a holy man, for in the 15th chapter it says that, “Abraham believed, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

Abraham believed in the promise of the Lord. And so he set out. He traveled to Canaan and experienced many great adventures along the way, and over that time I think we can assume that he and Sarah were doing their best to fulfill the rest of the promise...the great nation part.

For all we know they were probably having a good time trying to fulfill the promise, (you know because some challenges are more enjoyable than others) but there was a problem.  Nothing happened.  And time passed and still, for all their efforts- however enjoyable they might have been, nothing happened.

So Abraham took matters into his own hands and adopted his nephew Lot, but if you remember the story of Lot, you know that didn’t work out.  For one thing he chose to settle in Sodom near Gomorrah, and, well, let’s just say that it didn’t go so well. So the whole plan with Lot fell through.

And then Sarah thought she’d give it a try and so she told Abraham to take her servant- (and here I want to pause, because I think it is important for us to note that Sarah never calls Hagar by name. She refers to her first as my servant, when she needs her, and later as that slave woman, when she really wants to get rid of her.) -Sarah says to Abraham, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maid servant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”

And in those days such a plan was acceptable, because Sarah owned Hagar, (this is slavery… its not pretty)  and so she would also own Hagar’s child.  In her desperation this seemed to Sarah like the next best thing, a fitting consolation, and a human way to fulfill the divine promise.  But like any compromise, it left much to be desired. 

Abraham did as Sarah said and Hagar soon became pregnant, which made it clear to everyone that the couple’s inability to have children for all these years was Sarah’s fault, not Abraham’s, and so Hagar looked down on Sarah, and talked badly about Sarah, and angered and shamed Sarah to the point where she fought back and in turn mistreated Hagar so badly that the pregnant woman fled into the wilderness.

But God sent an angel to meet Hagar there in the desert.  The angel promised her that her son too would be the father of a great nation and told her to name the boy Ishmael, meaning “God hearkens”, or “God listens”.

And then the angel sent her back to live with Abraham and Sarah.  And things settled down for awhile, until the day finally arrived about 14c years later, when Sarah, at the age of ninety, finally conceived and bore her one and only child, Isaac.

At last the promise was fulfilled, as the Lord had said that it would be, and it is quite possible that if people had placed more trust in the promise even then, that Abraham’s sons could have grown up together and in time went each in their own way to found their great nations.

But it was not to be.  For one day, the scriptures tell us, Sarah saw Ishmael playing with her precious Isaac, according to some translations possibly mocking her precious  Isaac, and all her old fears and all her old hurts rose to the surface. 

She realized in that moment that not only did they not need Hagar and Ishmael anymore, Hagar and Ishmael were now a threat, and so she told Abraham to send them away. “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

It is a dark moment, and the weight of it falls hard upon Abraham, for he loved Ishmael as any father would love his first born son.  In fact, these is a point early on where God comes to Abraham after the birth of Ishmael and tells him once again that someday Sarah will conceive and bear him a son, and Abraham tells God not to worry about it anymore, they have Ishmael now, let the Lord look upon him.

Ishmael was never second best in Abraham’s eyes. He was the first born son of his house. And so Abraham was reluctant to comply with Sarah’s wishes. But the Lord told him not to worry, only to do what Sarah said and that all would be well.

You know, Abraham is famous in our tradition for being called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac.  We forget sometimes that Abraham had two sons, and that he was called upon to sacrifice them both.

In obedience to the Lord, Abraham woke up early, placed some food and water upon Hagar’s shoulder, and then told them to go.  Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and you know the rest of the story for you heard it today. But I wonder, had you heard it before? How many of you have ever heard a sermon on Hagar an Ishmael?

I wouldn’t expect many hands, because this is not just a dark story, it is not just a story of our Abraham and our Sarah behaving so badly, it is also the story of the beginnings of Islam, and we have evidence right here before us as Christians and as Jews that Ishmael and his descendants were under God’s care from the very beginning and part of God’s plan. 

I think we haven’t really known what we should do with that information and so we’ve just not talked about it very much.  Further more, I learned this week that the story of Hagar and Ishmael was not included in the original common lectionary, the list of readings we cycle through during the church year, which is in part why it was revised, but you can see that this would make the story even easier to avoid.

You see, the story of Hagar and Ishmael is not a story for everyone. For those of us who feel, like Abraham and Sarah did after the birth of Isaac, that we finally have it altogether, that things are finally as we would have them be, it can be really uncomfortable to come face to face with someone like Hagar, someone who now has less because we finally have more.

In that sense our world is teeming with Hagars, women and men who suffer to the point of not being able to sustain their own children, while others profit from their pain and suffering.  I shudder to think how much of our country’s wealth is the direct result of the suffering of men and women like Hagar.

From the genocide of Native peoples to the enslavement of Africans, to the gross abuses of off shore marketing and the lack of aid afforded those effected by AIDS - millions of nameless, faceless, powerless Hagars have suffered that others might prosper .

I am deeply encouraged by the news this past week that much of the debt of the world’s poorest countries will be forgiven, so we are making progress, but we still have a long way to go, and progress has been so slow. Perhaps because it has been so hard to face the reality and needlessness of human suffering. It has never been easy to look the Hagars of the world in the face.

So for some of us, whether for theological or social reasons, Hagar’s story can be hard to hear. But for others, Hagar’s story is our story, and we need to hear it, because unlike the Abrahams and Sarahs of the world, we can relate to her pain, we can relate to her sense of isolation, her feelings of helplessness, and we need to know that just as God did not abandon her in her wilderness, so God will not abandon us in ours. 

For we all go through times in life where the pain of our circumstance is such that we do feel alone. People have no idea how to help us, and we don’t know what to tell them. It could be depression, unemployment, grief, illness, disability, failure, or divorce. 

There are times in our lives when our pain is so raw, our circumstances so dire, that other people are afraid to come near.  They don’t know how to help us.  They don’t know what to say.  They don’t know how to begin, and so like Hagar we find ourselves alone, unable to care for those we love most, unsure of how we will make it through the afternoon, let alone through tomorrow. 

And so, in Hagar’s story, as awful and tragic as it might be, we actually find hope. Hagar brings us face to face with our God, a God who sees us, a God who hears us, a God who does not, who cannot, who will not, turn away from our pain. We know, through her experience, that our cries do not go unheeded. And when we are suffering that is something we desperately need to know.

The title of my sermon today is actually borrowed from something my friend Susan Ivany once said.  Susan is a pastor, a mother and  wife to a wonderful man who is living with MS, so she knows something of suffering and fear and loss.  She knows of what she speaks when she says:

“ We have been in our own wilderness places, where the desolating emptiness surrounds us and we feel abandoned by all forms of care, including that of God. The desperate injustices dealt to Hagar and her son remind us that our lamentations do not fall into empty, arid space, even in the wilderness of our suffering. Our cries (forever and always) fall into the heart of the holy” (Susan Ivany AHA! June 19, 2005). 

Through this story, so easy to avoid, but so important to remember, we come to know that God hears us as surely as he heard Ishmael. We come to know that God loves us, as surely as he loved Hagar. And we come to know deep down, no matter how desolate we might feel, that we are not alone.

Abraham and Sarah, pastors and people, even the lectionary … we don’t always know what to do with the Hagars in our midst, but God still does. We may be quick at times to limit ourselves and likewise quick to limit God, but God’s love knows no limits. 

In her hour of great desperation, God did not turn away from Hagar and he will not turn away from you.  For where people strove to limit the promise, God extended it.  When Sarah wanted to close ranks, the Lord only widened the circle. In the wilderness when hope had failed, God extended the reach of his providence … for Hagar, for Ishmael, for you. 

Let us pray

Lord, You are a God of extravagant promise. Promises of fidelity and presence and hope.

And Lord there are times when we would take a false pride in your promises

Only to find out, always and too late, that your promise always comes

In the midst of a hard, deep call to obedience.

You are the God who calls people like us,

and the long list of mothers and fathers before us,

men and women who trusted the promise enough to keep the call.

So we give you thanks that you are a God who is still speaking,

A God who calls us always to new and dangerous places.

We pray enough of your grace and mercy among us That we might be among those

Who believe your promises enough To respond to your call.

We pray in the name of the one who embodied your promise

and lived your call, we pray in the name of Jesus the Christ, amen.