So we’ve begun this summer working our way through Genesis, the book of the Bible about beginnings.  We’ve met Abraham and Sarah, God’s unlikely choice for beginning to build a nation that will be a light to the nations.  They are old, they are nomads, and Sarah is barren.  So God promises them land and offspring.  They laugh.  Since that episode, they have traveled to Egypt where Abraham lied to the Pharoah, saying that Sarah was not his wife, but was his sister.  Sarah is taken into the household of Pharoah, where she is given a handmaiden named Hagar.  Since Sarah believes that God’s promise cannot be fulfilled through her, she gives Hagar to Abraham so that Hagar can conceive a child.  Which she does.  He is named Ishmael.

So go the days of the lives of the patriarch.

And then, God being God, the promise is kept and Sarah herself has a son.  She becomes jealous of the first son, Ishmael.

The Hebrew bible stories are rich with detail and rich with the complexity of human relationships and emotions.  This story has jealousy, betrayal, abuse, despair, grief, and not a little divine grace.  Maybe you know a family that’s been divided by jealousy.  Maybe you know a single mother who has found herself and her child cast out; without a secure home, without economic means of support, without a hopeful future.  This is that kind of story.

Maybe you think that all the heroes of the biblical story and good and perfect and purely faithful people who are not subject to the frailties of human nature.

You would be wrong about that.

Sarah and Abraham repeatedly make errors in judgment and allow themselves to be drawn away from confidence in the promise by human emotions that we would clearly name as sinful.  Sarah’s jealousy and Abraham’s agreement to cast out a child for whom he clearly has affection are despicable.  This is not decent human behavior – to cast a mother and a child into the desert to die.  The desert is not a hospitable place.  It is not safe.  Without the protection of a household, a woman and child alone in the desert are sure to die.  Abraham is sending Hagar and Ishmael to their deaths in response to Sarah’s jealousy.

You might think that God would stop this ridiculous plan and intervene to restore some kind of balance and harmony to this little family that is the bearer of God’s whole plan of salvation for the world.

But these stories not only teach us about the biblical matriarchs and patriarchs, they teach us about how God works with people and the sins and failures and shortcomings of people.  God doesn’t try to dissuade them from their plan – God apparently accepts that the condition of jealousy and resentment has broken the relationship.  God is described as approving of the plan to cast out Hagar.  The damage is done.  The consequences are inevitable.  But, in response to Abraham and Sarah’s failures to trust and their mistakes in judgment, God widens God’s plan, expands the availability of grace, and extends the promise.

“As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him, too, because he is also your son.”

God does not punish their indiscretions or their sin.  God meets it with grace and redemption.  That is a good thing to learn, already in the book of beginnings, about the God that we worship.  God’s is to widen God’s own grace in response to human failure.

Now maybe your family life hasn’t always worked out the way you hoped it would, or dreamed it would, or worked toward.  Maybe damage has been done in relationships, and consequences that can’t be undone have resulted.  Isn’t it a good thing to know that God’s way of responding to that situation is to widen the possibilities for grace and redemption?

Maybe you can’t quite see where the possibility for that grace and redemption lies right now.

Consider Hagar’s story.  She is alone in the wilderness with her child.  She is utterly without the protection of family and community.  Her circumstances have been handed to her by people with power.  She has been Sarah’s slave – with no freedom to choose if she became the mother of Abraham’s child or not.  Now she is cast out with no choice in the matter.  If ever there was a victim – it is Hagar.  She has no knowledge of God’s promise to Abraham about Ishmael.  She has every reason to believe in the predictable outcome and when the resources provided by Abraham are exhausted, she believes her child is about to die.  She cannot bear it.  Leaving her child alone, she goes off to grieve.

But God’s attention is on the child, and when God’s messenger reassures Hagar that her child has not been forgotten by God.  The promise that has heretofore been made only to Abraham is made to Hager – a cast out slave women.  “I will make a great nation of your child.”

When God’s reassurance is perceived by Hagar, her eyes are opened to resources that in her grief and despair, she could not see.  Water for their immediate need is right there.  And having seen the water that saves their lives, it is nothing for Hagar to raise her child, find him a wife, and participate with God in fulfilling the promise.  She is, indeed, a resourceful woman in a patriarchal culture and has a critical role in the biblical narrative – one which is thoroughly influenced by patriarchy even to this day.

Hagar’s story is empowering for powerless people.  African American womanist theologian Delores Williams has found in Hagar’s story a prototype for the struggle of African American women.  In her book Sisters in the Wilderness, Williams explores the “themes inherent in Hagar’s story – poverty and slavery, ethnicity and sexual exploitation, exile and encounters with God.” [1]

Together, Hagar and God make a way out of no way.  And for anyone, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity, who has ever been a victim – this ability to cooperate with God in making a way out of no way is empowering and healing and redemptive.  No one is ever without an advocate.  God did not abandon Hagar, and does not abandon anyone who will lift up their eyes and discover the resources for recovery and healing that are right there, waiting to be claimed Hagar’s story is a good story to know.  Hagar’s story says to you who are struggling with the pain of being victimized – “lift up your eyes, and look around.  You can pick yourself up and make your way.  You are not defined by what has been done to you, but by what you can do for yourself.”

The text does not tell us what Sarah’s response was to God’s expansive grace.  Surely she thought that she had fixed all the problems of her family by using her power to eliminate Hagar and Ishmael.  She must have felt secure that she had preserved God’s promise with her actions.

I wonder if Sarah ever knew that God’s grace extended also to her enemy.  Whether she knew or not, it is a truth about the nature of God that we should learn from this story.  God is also gracious to those we name and treat as enemies.  We do not decide to whom God will be gracious, and to claim God’s grace as exclusively on our side is to misjudge God.  That just falls in the category of “good to know.” And, also, wise to remember.

Though Hagar disappears from the biblical narrative after this episode, the narration suggests that her story will continue to influence human relationships.  The word that she finds a wife for Ishmael assures us that her story continues.  And, indeed, tradition has much more to tell us about the story of jealousy and division in this family and many believe that human history is haunted even to this day by this very old story.  This is not just an interesting family story.

This is a story that continues to be interpreted as describing the source of animosity between the very nations which Abraham’s family was chosen to enlighten.

Arabic peoples trace their connection to Abraham through Ishmael.  Muhammad is considered a descendent of Ishmael.  A ritual remembering Hagar’s search for water is re-enacted as part of Islamic pilgrimage.  Hagar and Ishmael have an important role in the Quran.  Hagar’s story has taken on political implications in modern day Israel for those who oppose the Israeli occupation of Arab territory.

The story as it comes to us in the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms God’s intent that both Isaac and Ishmael become the progenitors of faith communities.  There is no either/or choice made by God.  Any animosity that continues between the major Abrahamic faith traditions is not a product of God’s purpose and will – but of the same kind of jealousy that consumed Sarah.

Ultimately, Abraham’s decision to cast out Hagar was a decision to trust God and the divine promise.

So long as humans try to work out our personal preferences by claiming that we are protecting God’s purposes and plan, and so long as we claim the favor of God preferentially or exclusively for one group over others, we continue to inflict suffering on others.  And in times of war and genocide and social injustice, women and children always suffer the most.

In the end, Hagar’s story can be read as a very personal story – and it can be read as a hopeful story for the whole human community.

Hagar’s story invites us, I would suggest, to prayer and action on behalf of our community.  Does Should we accept children who can’t read and children with no health care coverage, or should we claim God’s promise and lift up our eyes and find the resources? Should we accept wage structures that leave families hungry, or should we find the resources?

Should we accept the violence that we are continually offered as a solution to our human problems, or should we find the resources for peace and prosperity for children and families from generation to generation?

Hagar’s story reminds us that God is already at work in all the wilderness places.

That’s good to know.

[1]  Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, 1993: Maryknoll NY, Orbis, quotation from the book jacket.