Genesis 21:1-21
November 10
David A. Davis
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As you can imagine, many of my Presbyterian pastor colleagues have been asking each other the same question this week: “What are you going to preach on?” That is not a version of “What are you going to say?” It is a question about what biblical text you are going to use. We are nearing the end of our fall Linked-In series on “Women in the Old Testament”. Some will remember that I and the other preachers did not choose the texts. Neither did we choose the order. That was determined by the availability of adult education leaders. This morning our text tells the story of Sarah and Hagar in the Book of Genesis. That question among preachers this week also implies another question. “Are you going to change your biblical text this week?” I, for one, certainly thought about it. I also thought about asking Noel to lead a hymn sing. But when teaching preaching at Princeton Seminary, I told students what I have often shared from this pulpit over the years. “Never underestimate the work of the Holy Spirit and the power of the Living Word when you bring the world to bear on an unsuspecting biblical text.” So we’re sticking with Genesis 21 and Hagar and Ishmael.
One other note from my experience in the classroom down the street. You have heard it before but it bears repeating. Over the years, I have often been invited to the Introduction to the Old Testament class to participate on a panel discussing “Preaching from the Old Testament”. Students were invited to submit questions ahead of time that were shared with the members of the panel. Every year there was a block of questions about preaching difficult passages with the students referencing God’s judgment, war, violence, and sexual violence. In my attempt to answer, I would add another group of texts to the list: stories like the text for today that tell of barrenness and fertility. It is a significant theological motif that stirs questions, emotions, pain, grief, and now fear, for those who have lived the realities of infertility. A reality all too often ignored by the church or by preachers like me and worse, invoked by the church or preachers and people of power as a justification to threaten and do harm. Bringing the world to bear on unsuspecting biblical texts, it seems, just gets harder and harder and harder.
Feeling a deep need for a whole lot more of the Holy Spirit this morning, please pray with me as I offer two traditional prayers from our liturgical tradition:
Genesis 21:1-21
This scene in the wilderness is not Hagar’s first trip to the wilderness. When Abraham and Sarah were still Abram and Sarai, back when God had promised to make Abram a great nation and Sarai had no children, Sarai suggested that Abram have a child with Hagar, Sarai’s slave woman. After Hagar became pregnant Sarai regretted the plan, Abram told Sarai that Hagar was still under her power and could do what she pleased with Hagar. The text says, “Then Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar and Hagar ran away from her.” Scholars point out the reference to Hagar being treated harshly was the same description of how the enslaved people of Israel were treated in Egypt. That treatment included hard labor and physical abuse.
As Hagar fled from the abuse to the wilderness, an angel of the Lord found Hagar and told her to return, that God would greatly multiply her offspring: “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.” The name Ishmael in Hebrew means “God hears”. As often happens in the pages of the Hebrew Bible when God speaks to someone, the well where the angel speaks to Hagar is given a name. Here in the Book of Genesis, Hagar is only the second person to whom God speaks. She doesn’t just name the location. She names God as well. “She names the Lord who spoke to her, ‘you are El-roi” which means “God sees”.
As we get to chapter 21, according to the recording of Abraham and Sarah’s age, Ismael is a young teenager. Baby Isaac has grown a bit and according to the story as told here in the NRSV, Sarah saw Hagar’s son “playing with her son, Isaac”. The Hebrew text stops with “playing” and makes no mention of Isaac. The Hebrew does not include “with her son Isaac.” Instead of “playing”, other translations use “mocking” or “scoffing”. It’s a fascinating example of how tradition, interpretation, and translation can so easily be influenced by the assumptions, the biases, and the humanity we all bring to the text. All the text says is that Sarah saw him playing
A few scholars working with the text argue that the word for “playing” can also be translated as “laughing”. Sarah sees Ishmael laughing and given Isaac’s name, and Sarah’s laughing, well, the deeper literary insult becomes clear. In Sarah’s eyes, only Isaac should have the privilege of laughing. Culturally speaking, Ismael was still the firstborn son of Abraham so would still be entitled to the privileges that entails. We should not be surprised that at the end of the day, Hagar’s second journey to the wilderness with her child is about power, privilege, and money. Despite Abraham’s distress, Hagar is still an enslaved foreign woman whose son is perceived as a threat.
Notice, too, that after Isaac is born, Ishmael’s name falls off the page. He is no longer Ishmael, he becomes only “her son”, or “that boy”. This account of Hagar and Ishmael being sent away never refers to Ishmael by name. Even the narrator doesn’t use his name. Here in the story of Hagar and Ishmael’s wilderness deportation, the only reference to the boy’s name comes in God’s action. As in “God heard”. In the Hebrew text, to the ear of someone listening to the Hebrew, Ishmael is named even as God heard. His name comes in the verb. Hagar lifted up her voice. Hagar wept. But God heard the voice of the boy himself. God “Ishmaeled” the boy who by now, according to Sarah and Abraham and the writer of the story, is pretty much nameless. God heard. As God promised, God made a great nation of Ishmael. Through Abraham, God’s covenant with two nations.
One cannot bring the world to bear on this biblical text this week and understate who Hagar and Ismael were and what was done to them by a system, a culture, and those closest to them. Hagar was an enslaved foreign woman who, though it was a cultural practice, was raped, sexually assaulted, physically abused, and eventually sent off into the desert with her teenage son with little to no chance of surviving. Ishmael was stereotyped by the biblical writers themselves; described as a child who “shall be a wild ass of a man.” He was maligned by the wife of his father, and accused by translators and scripture interpreters of misbehaving around baby Isaac or doing worse to Isaac with absolutely nothing in the ancient text to support the allegation. All because they were powerless, vulnerable foreigners, helpless in the system, the culture, and the “family” that owned them. And then, even then, even for them, God sees and God hears. The most powerless, the most vulnerable, the most abused, the most marginalized, God sees and God hears.
Allow me to use the words of Dr. Kathi Sakenfeld. Kathi concludes her chapter on Sarah and Hagar in her book Just Wives. “Next time you hear about Abraham, remember Sarah, and when you remember Sarah, remember Hagar. Remember that in Hagar God has affirmed the marginalized in their desire to be included in history. Remember so that you will be more open to those not like yourself, Remember so that your heart will be opened to the outcast and downtrodden. Remember so that you will believe that God sees and hears, that the cry of one lonely and fearful person in the wilderness does not go unheard.”
To build upon Dr. Sakenfeld’s charge to her reader in her book written now twenty years ago, for the disciple of Jesus Christ today, for someone striving to live the gospel Christ teaches in scripture, remembering in and of itself, is not enough. Because all the Hagar’s and Ishmael’s around us these days are scared to death. When threats of vengeance and violence, bigotry and hate, vulgarity, and misogyny win, the number of people who find themselves more like Hagar and Ishmael grows exponentially. When systems and cultures plant fear, violence, and hate, the people of God are called to cling to hope and promise that God sees and God hears. When systems and cultures seed fear, violence, and hate, the followers of Jesus are called to witness to the teaching of Jesus in the gospel, to live out that gospel in word and deed, to feed the hungry, and to give drink to the thirsty, and welcome the stranger, and clothe the naked, and care for the sick, and visit those in prison. When systems and cultures stoke fear, violence, and hate, the servants of Jesus Christ are called to embrace the unclean, to speak for the long silenced, to love the neighbor, to protect the marginalized, to work for peace, to rise for justice, to spread seeds of mercy, and pray for the very righteousness of God to fill the land.
As the Apostle Paul proclaims, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is low and despised in the word, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” God hears and God sees. It is a profound promise to cling to because as the writer of I John reminds us, “God is greater than our hearts.”
A retired pastor in our midst gave me a gift this week. We were having a cup of tea at my office to the north and west at the Dunkin at Princeton Shopping Center. We were meeting to talk about some of the work I have been doing at the national levels of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Yes, we talked about other things of the week. As we were wrapping up our time together, the pastor casually mentioned an article they had just earlier that morning in the Christian Century. They even told me the page number in the issue. “You may want to take a look at it,” they said.
It is a short essay written by the Lutheran pastor and writer Heidi Neumark entitled “Conspiracies of Goodness”. She begins by quoting the new Episcopal bishop of New York who says that “The Holy Spirit moves at ground level.” Then she goes on to tell of a French priest named Andre Trocme who was sent to serve a small French village in 1934. Under Father Trocme’s leadership, the village became known as the safest place in Europe for refugees. More than 5,000 Jewish lives, mostly children, were saved by families in the village who took them in. Neumark reports that the priest preached almost always on the Beatitudes and the Good Samaritan never mentioning the war. His pastoral visitation was considered key in the encouragement of families to be bold and courageous in their faithfulness. His ministry came to be described as “the kitchen table struggle” by some. Heidi Neumark writes that “[the village] became a center of organized resistance to hate through a series of daily-on-the-ground, compassionate acts, ordinary acts that saved lives and required extraordinary courage.”
She concludes that in those Beatitudes Father Trocme preached, “Jesus declares blessings upon those who are disregarded, dehumanized or slated for extermination. Jesus promises that in the end, God’s way of seeing will prevail.”
God’s way of seeing. God’s way of hearing.
God sees. God hears. And so shall we.