Scripture: Genesis 21:1-21
Scripture Part 1 : Genesis 21:1-7
The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” 7 And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
Meditation Part 1
Finally. Finally! The long-awaited child has come. Sarah and Abraham welcome their son, Isaac.
The bitter laughter has been turned to joy. Their son, a child named “Laughter.”
But something else is going on. A discontent that is bound to erupt, to disrupt, and cause a weight of grief to spread throughout this family like cloud cover obscuring a bright summer sky.
Scripture Part 2: Genesis 21:8-14
The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. 1So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.
Meditation Part 2
Hold up. What?
Yeah. Every family has its stories. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Here we are filled in on a part of the story that actually began in chapter 16.
Sarah has an Egyptian slave named Hagar. Actually, she is called Hagar, but I learned from Womanist scholar Wilda Gafney, that actually means “The Alien,” “The Foreigner.” Hagar’s real name, we do not know.
In chapter 16, after waiting for the promise to be fulfilled for a good ten years, Sarah takes matters into her own hands. She marches Hagar into her husband Abraham’s tent and says, “I have this slave-girl, The Foreigner. Why don’t you give me a child through her?” And Abraham agrees.
To be clear: Sarah has just initiated a project designed to manipulate God’s promise into happening. We humans do that sometimes. Waiting on God’s timing loses its charm for us, and we decide we’d best do it our own way.
Sarah suggests, and her husband accepts, a plan to use Hagar’s body to produce a child that will really not be Hagar’s own child, but will be theirs, Abraham and Sarah’s. Anyone who’s seen the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” has gotten a glimpse of an imagined future dystopian society in which this is commonplace. Those of us who live in the United States have to reckon with a history in which slave-owners regularly impregnated their female slaves, at the same time enacting laws which prevented the children being born as a result, from being considered full persons. African slave women in the United States were the only women who, by law, give birth to children who were not citizens. They also didn’t belong to their mothers.
Our story tells us that Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham as a wife. But when Hagar becomes pregnant, and begins to gain a sense of her own power and pride in that power, we read, she looked down on Sarah. Sarah’s response is absolute rage. Unbridled fury. She blames her husband, and tells him all this topsy-turvy situation is his fault. Abraham cries uncle and retreats to his tent.
Sarah deals with Hagar harshly. Those words “deals harshly;” those are the very same words the Bible uses to described how the Egyptian Pharaoh treated the Hebrew slaves in the Exodus story. As the Rev. Dr. Gafney says, Sarah brutalizes Hagar, and Hagar, who is not protected by anyone, including the father of her child, runs away.
An angel of God finds her roaming the wilderness, and says, “Hagar the Egyptian, where did you come from, and where are you going?” She tells her story, which, of course, the angel already knows.
What the angel says next makes our jaws drop. Return, he says. Submit to your mistress. Though she is, allegedly, a wife, this slave-woman, a surrogate with no rights of her own, is instructed to go back to the woman whose brutalized her.
But then the angel makes Hagar a beautiful—and entirely unforeseen—promise. I will so greatly multiply your offspring, the angel says, that they cannot be counted for multitude. This is the same promise God made to Abraham. Go back. Have your baby. Name him Ishmael, because God hears.
But Hagar also knows that God has seen. God has seen her misery. And so, she gives God a name: El-Roi, God-Who-Sees.
She is the only person in the bible to do this.
She is the only person in the bible to name God.
So Hagar returns, and the child is born, and his father names him Ishmael, because, as it turns out, God has also heard the cries of Abraham for a child.
Scripture Part 3 : Genesis 21:15-19
When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.
Meditation Part 3
And now, fourteen years later, Hagar and Ishmael are once again in the wilderness, only this time, Hagar hasn’t run away. Sarah has thrown them out.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on in Sarah’s mind, and the text doesn’t help us much. The translations often say that Sarah saw Ishmael—who, by this time, would be about 17 years old—“playing” with Isaac. But that’s not there in the Hebrew. All it says is that Sarah saw Ishmael playing. But this has been interpreted as everything from Ishmael mocking the child Isaac—who’s now, about three or four—to tormenting him, to abusing him in some way. But it’s just not there in the text.
What is there? Sarah sees Ishmael. Really sees him. He has been with his father from infancy, and now he is on the brink of manhood. We don’t have to try to imagine what’s going on in Sarah’s mind; she tells us.
“Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”
She can’t even use their names. But she can say clearly that, in this family, there’s going to be a winner and a loser—and the loser is about to be thrown out.
Here’s the thing. Both Sarah and Hagar are caught in interpersonal triangle with the kinds of stresses that make you want to completely cast the object of your wrath out into the deepest darkness. I get that. But more critically, they are also caught in a system, a structure, that controls everything.
Who has status, and who doesn’t.
Who is a full member of the family and who isn’t.
Who can make decisions about her body and safety, and who can’t.
Who can protect her child, and who can’t.
Sarah and Hagar are both stuck in a system that determines all these things. But only one of them benefits from the system. Only Sarah.
So now, Hagar and her son are in the wilderness again. And for some reason the story acts as if Ishmael is a little boy here in these verses, even though we know he’s a man… maybe that’s a measure of the fear and devastation resulting from being thrown out into the wilderness by his own father.
The humans do so much damage in this story. And it’s the ones who are, supposedly, the heroes of the story that do the damage. I, for one, love that scripture tells us the whole story—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The stories of Genesis weren’t woven together to tell us about Hagar’s—she’s the outsider, literally, the Alien. They were woven together to tell Sarah and Abraham’s and story, and the stories of their son Isaac, and his son Jacob—later called “Israel.” These are the heroes, our ancestors in faith. But scripture regularly tells us the stories of the how these heroes screw up, badly. I think scripture does that to help us recognize it when we do it. When—not if. We all do. We all will.
But scripture also tells us, in stories like this, how connected we are… even if our instinct is to not want to be connected. Even if we prefer our tribal affiliations over the recognition that we are all God’s children. Hagar will be cast out into the wilderness, but she will never not be a part of the family. Ishmael will never not be Abraham’s son, and Sarah’s too.
In the end, the angel of the God-Who-Sees is, once again, there to reassure Hagar. To tell her that the God she has named will not forsake her or Ishmael—even though they weren’t supposed to be the heroes of this particular story. And then, the God-Who-Sees speaks to Hagar directly, to tell her that her story isn’t over, and neither is Ishmael’s, not by a long shot. “I will make a great nation of him.”
And with that, the mother and son drink from the well, drink the life-giving water, and go on their way.
Scripture Part 4 : Genesis 21:20-21
God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Meditation Part 4
These last verses provide us with a lovely postscript. Ishmael grows up. He becomes particularly good at making long shots. My guess is, he never throws away a single one.
And Hagar? I’d like to leave us with this. Hagar is indelibly a part of Jewish and Christian tradition, but she is also a part of the Muslim tradition. There she is called “Hajar.” Hajar does not mean “The Alien” or “The Foreigner.” It means, “Nourishing.” It means, “Splendid.” Among Muslim children of Abraham, she is lifted up as the hero she surely is.
God is with her.
And God is with us, when we do beautiful heroic things, when we show love, and when we screw up.
God is with us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.