Even when we forget

Genesis 12-21 

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah

I spent several days this week gathered in Maine with pastors who have been in a grant together for three years called “From Relevance to Resonance,” seeking to orient our lives and ministry work around the action of God. We gathered to talk about how fast our world moves, and how what keeps us human is not striving to keep up but receiving the resonant moments of uncontrollable aliveness that awaken us to the world and reconnect us to God and each other. And we discussed how we want to lead in the church to help each other pay attention to God. But even these people, who were literally there talking about trusting that God is real and really does stuff, found ourselves forgetting that God is real and really does stuff.  

It’s so easy to slip into thinking that it’s up to us – whatever it is. That we are supposed to make God’s work happen or bring about God’s future.  This is a foolish and dangerous mistake, but nevertheless, there you go. We all keep making it.

And with that, we turn to our ancestor, Abram.  God promises Abram that his descendants will number the stars, and through Abram’s line the whole world will be blessed.  But there is no way for Abram and his wife Sarai to fulfill this promise – they can’t create a multitude, let alone a single child. This blessing has to come from God. 

The covenant God made with all creation back with Noah, to never give up on the world, gets legs in the covenant God makes with Abraham. God chooses one family to know God and be in direct relationship with God, so that through them God might gather the whole beloved world into God’s Shalom, fullness of life.

So, leaving everything they know, all the ties and security they had, uprooted and wandering, Abram obeys. They go where God leads them, with only God’s promise holding them. 

But if you’ve read the whole scripture texts we’re covering today, you’ve seen that they keep on forgetting God is the one leading. And God has to keep reminding them that they are not in it to save their own skin; they are in this life to know and love God, and to let God make them a blessing to the world.  

God didn’t choose Abram and Sarai because of their great character or their unique skills. They were not especially worthy or extraordinary.  They became the people in whom God’s story is concentrated because God’s goodness and mercy can be revealed in any life, every life. God chose these people to be the ones through whom God would bless the world and so that is what happens. 

But it’s a really long wait. Really long, and even though God keeps reminding them their offspring will number the stars and will bless the world, instead of trusting God to fulfill the promise through them, Abram and Sarai get tired of waiting and take things into their own hands. They attempt to produce what God has promised to provide. 

A sure sign we’re NOT living in the covenant love of God is when we instrumentalize others.  When other people are not siblings in the human family who belong to God and to us, but obstacles to resist or despise, or objects to use or discard, we have turned our back on God and each other and made this about saving ourselves. 

So they make their slave-girl into a means to an end. They try to transcend their own limitations and their own embodiment by using her body to do God’s work for God.

Only once this thing they’ve schemed - that denies their belonging to God and violates their belonging to each other - achieves what they’d hoped it would, things get ugly. 

When the pregnancy begins to show suddenly it’s no longer like placing an order from an online shopping site. They are human beings, all, in this together. The way sin plays out, if we remember Adam and Eve, is that when we forget that God is God and we are in God’s loving care, when we violate our belonging in mutuality to one another, what comes next is shame, blaming, hiding and competing. We’ve moved ourselves to the center of our story, so the people around us become a threat. God cannot be trusted, we are lost in the consequences of our sin, unable to free ourselves from the cycles of fear, anger and selfishness that got us there in the first place. We are unavailable to God or one another, and the life-giving moments of resonance that reconnect us cannot be received. We are cut off from the life we are made for, life in relationship. Inaccessible and isolated, we only relate to the world through aggression. 

Remember, in the days of Noah, humankind became so violent, and ‘pursued only evil continually’ that they lost their humanity, and wreaked destruction on God’s beloved creation. This grieved God so badly that God almost wiped everything out, returning the world to nothingness to start over. But God’s deep love for creation and God’s mercy prevailed, and God committed to never give up on us. 

When Sarai abuses the girl she flees to the wilderness, which was like plunging into nothingness, into non-being. It’s the untamed wild where, centuries later, the Holy Spirit will drive Jesus, right after he is baptized. Barren, desolate and dangerous, the wilderness is the physical location of utter isolation. At that time deities were always attached to people and places, so to head to nowhere was to go literally into godforsakenness, to go where the gods don’t even go, to lose the groundedness in time and space that define us as creatures. She is fleeing to most certainly die.

But instead of becoming nothing, nowhere, we’re told exactly where Hagar is. “God found her by a spring of water in the wilderness- the one on the way to Shur.” 

God found her because God was looking for her. God looks for us. God goes where no decent god goes, into the wilderness and nothingness, to find us. God calls Hagar by name-  the first time she’s addressed that way in the story.  God says, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? 

Why does God ask questions? It’s not like God doesn’t know the answers. When Adam and Eve hide naked from God in the garden and God asks, Where are you?  Of course God knows right where they are. So why ask? God asks questions to invite us back into the conversation. God brings us back into relationship and response. God addresses us as persons, and summons us back to the belonging that holds us.  

 “I am running away,” Hagar answers God. 

God meets Hagar in her despair. Tell your story to me Hagar, so it will no longer be what has power over you.Let me bear with you your experience of nothingness so that I may heal you and restore you to your true identity as one whom I care for who is called to care for others.  

After God hears Hagar and ministers to her, God tells her to go back. Not to a place, but to a person, Go back to Sarai. Humbly submit to her.  Instead of Sarai forcing her slave girl to submit, Hagar, seen by God, is going to Sarai in freedom and offering to care for Sarai. It’s Jesus’ Turn the other cheek–  a self-emptying action that requires that you see me as a person with agency, choosing to address you, another person. 

No longer as an object to use, or an enemy to despise, they must encounter one another as persons. From the nothingness of despair, Hagar is restored to personhood and agency, and sent to minister to Sarai, who is trapped in her own wilderness of regret and rage.  

 Then God makes a covenant with Hagar, giving her a future and a promise greater than any wrongs done to her. Her story will live on through generations too numerous to count – a promise mirroring the one given to Abram and Sarai. 

God pulls us out of nothingness and gathers us into the future God is bringing into the world. This is God’s future, not ours. So we don’t get to decide when or how it comes. We get to watch and join in as it comes.

Finally God gives Hagar the name for her son, swaddling him in promise before he’s even born. Ishmael means “God listens.” Then something quite marvelous happens: Hagar names God.  She is the first person in scripture with the boldness to name God. She calls God The God who sees.

Hagar returns to Sarai, and ministers to her in her despair. She shares the story of being found by God; she comes trusting in the promises of a God who sees us.   

Fourteen years later Sarai conceives, and at 90 years old her waiting finally end. God’s promised blessing is fulfilled through utter impossibility, because it’s God who acts, and not we who make God’s work happen or bring about God’s future. And Sarai, whose name meant ‘Princess’ will become Sarah, ‘Mother of Nations.’ alongside Abraham, “Father of a multitude of nations.”

And wouldn’t it be great if human beings just got it and stayed in right connection to God and each other all the time? But we don’t. Abraham and Sarah’s story continues, and they do a lot of dumb stuff with bad consequences. They keep forgetting God is the one leading. And God keeps reminding them that they are not in it to save their own skin; they are in this life to know and love God, and to let God make them a blessing to the world. And our bible includes all of that because this is not about extraordinary people doing great things, it’s about the God who chooses ordinary people to participate in God’s healing and trust in God’s promises together. 

So often in life things feel impossible and hard. But this God moves in impossibility. This God goes to the desolate places where the gods of this world will not go, and asks questions that set us free. This God listens, and sees, and calls us to minister to real people, and live into God’s future with hope. This God is so committed to loving and saving the world that God comes into this world as one of us, vulnerable and weak, and then plunges into the godforsakeness of death, so that not even that death separate us from God. 

God’s covenant with us means God’s grace comes first, before we mess up, claiming us for love. And God’s grace comes last, after all is said and done, claiming the world for love. And in the middle as we muddle, God’s grace continues claiming us for love. 

Humans can be horrible. And humans can be amazing. We can be courageous and loving, kind and brave. And we can be selfish and awful, calloused and uncaring. If the trajectory of the world were up to us, clearly, we’d be doomed. It’s easy to go down that path and assume that’s where it’s all headed. But God is real rightnow, and does stuff right here, in our very own lives, and way over there in the lives we can only watch from afar with sorrow and helplessness. God is real and doing stuff in the world.  We’re invited to trust this and join this.

Today we will baptize Imogen into the covenant family of God, this family that includes Isaac and Ishmael, Hagar and Sarah, Abraham and Noah and Eve and Adam, and you and me too. Her middle name already means “grace” in Japanese, and when we make the sign of Christ’s death and resurrection upon her, her new first name will forevermore be “Beloved, Child of God.”  

And the God who is real will really do stuff in Imogen’s life.  And we are here for it. We’re here to help her watch and join in. We’re here to listen to her stories, and encourage her in ministry, and be open together to those resonant moments we can’t control when we taste the fullness of it all. We’re here to live into the promises of God together, and practice trusting God to fulfill those promises through us. We get to practice living bravely into God’s reality even when it’s impossible, or especially then, seeing the world in all its beauty, and not shying away from its pain, because God comes into nothingness to minister to us and sends us there to minister to others.  

And because we all forget and remember together, one day, Imogen will undoubtedly remind you in some way or another of God’s grace, the love that claims us, and in this way, like those before us, we will continue to live in God’s covenant of shalom that gathers us and holds the world forever. 

Amen. 

 

God and the slave-girl

ADVENT 2: PEACE (Grace Embodied, Part 2. Go here for Part 1.)

Genesis 16

The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion.”  Saying Shalom as a greeting is to say, “May you be completed.”

Peace is not an ethereal idea. It’s an actual thing.
Conflict and division – they are real, heavy and dark and sharp, crushing and weighty things. Peace is not just taking that away, leaving nothing but a vacuum, shallow emptiness where squashed-down discord smolders or discontent breeds like mildew.
Peace is not an empty space of enforced silence between otherwise foes.  No. Peace has substance and girth. It exists in the world. It is something you can hold and touch and smell; Peace is tangible and real wholeness.  

It’s what God’s kind of life tastes like and feels like in your hands. 

We know the feel of peace.

It’s that thing that happens between people when forgiveness is slowly labored into,
and when love is discovered and shared. 

It’s when, drifting along untethered, someone sees you and values you.

To the drug-addled mind and listless soul, peace is clarity and grounding.

To the fearful and lonely person, peace is belonging and trust.

To the frenzied and chaotic life, peace is order and settled calm.

To the lost and abandoned person, peace is home and safety.

To the heartbroken and despairing ones, peace is solidarity and hope.

Between warring factions, peace is not just taking away weapons or working out a tenuous agreement to not set each other off.  It’s the building of bridges, the joining together, the solidarity of shared humanity.  It is whole instead of shattered. Harmony instead of discord.  Peace is fullness of life. Jesus said I came that you may life, and have it abundantly. Shalom.

Last week we said that the first grace the human ever knows is our creatureliness itself, our embodied, fragile, mortality.  We are creatures connected to the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space. And it is from within these vulnerable bodies, from within these confines of time and space, that God’s grace encounters us.  We were made for this conversation, a dialogue with the speaking, living God and with one another.  God ministers to us, and we, made in God’s image are made to minister to each other. To live Shalom, peace.

Now, all this talk of peace, and creatureliness gives us the perfect backdrop against which to hear again the story of Hagar, which at first glance is perhaps the strangest text ever paired with the second week of Advent. 

But, Abram and Sarai are a perfect case in point that, as we saw last week with Adam and Eve, as soon as we try to transcend our creatureliness, we run into problems. Whenever we reach for God’s role, when we deny our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and ignore our need for a minister, we’ve stepped outside of the grace of our creaturliness – we’ve stepped away from God and out of peace.

Decades earlier, God had given Abram a promise – that his descendants would number the stars, and through his line the whole world would be blessed. This is God’s grace.  God promised this; God will do it.

Only, a long time has gone by, and it’s not happening.  And the two of them begin looking at each other and thinking that between their lack of youth and utter barrenness, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of fulfilling this promise.  After so very long of waiting, they’ve forgotten that it’s God’s job to fulfill God’s promises and not ours.  

So Sarai hatches a plan.

Take the slave girl- she says to Abram. Have a baby by her and the promise will be fulfilled.

There are lots of red flags here, friends, lots of signs they are most assuredly notliving in the grace and peace of their creaturliness before God, not least of which is that Hagar is simply a means to an end, and object, and not a human being at all. They are seeking to transcend their own creatureliness, their own embodiment, by using herbody to do God’s work for God. They don’t even call her by her name – neither of them, throughout this whole narrative. They call her ‘the slave girl.’  She is her place, her station, her role that is subservient and disposable; she is a thing. 

So they do this.  And then, predictably, things between them get really tricky. 

Hagar conceives.  Presumably she will have no say over this child; it will be raised by Abram and Sarai, designated to be the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram. She was just a vessel. Except no human is that.  We belong to each other; we share humanity in common. So when her pregnancy begins to show, when the reality of bearing new life comes over her, Sarai sees it, and it’s suddenly not like placing an order from an online shopping site. It’s a young, fertile woman living in her house, walking around carrying her husband’s child inside her. Even before the child is delivered Hagar is giving him what Sarai never could. 

How can Abram not be dizzy with the promise of a coming child? 

How can Hagar, drawn into this thing against her will, not deeply resent and hate Sarai?  

And how can Sarai not be filled with rage and shame? 

Her plan - which seemed so perfect when she thought it up – turns out to be a poison to her, body and soul it does nothing but drain her of peace and fill her with nearly unbearable pain, regret and hopelessness. 

She lashes out at Abram and blames him. The slave-girl you knocked up looks at me with contempt and sees me as worthless now! (Now Abram comes across as the weakest of characters in this trio, and not just in this story, but throughout his whole life story, he doesn’t do a very good job of seeming worthy of the faith God puts in him, and frequently forgets to put his faith in God.  But again, God’s promises and God’s work are about God’s ability and God’s strength, not ours).  

Don’t blame me, woman! Abram shoots back, in his own shame and confusion at what has happened to them, I don’t care about the slave girl; do whatever you want with her!  So Sarai turns her humiliation and anger onto Hagar and “humbles her, forcing her to submit.”   She abuses Hagar so badly that Hagar flees to the wilderness.

Fleeing to the wilderness doesn’t mean she went on a spiritual walkabout or ran away to start a new life in a nearby city. It’s more like heading into nothingness, into non-being.  There are no roadside food stands or mile marker gas stations. It’s the wild – wild animals, the elements, at the mercy of the untamed.  It’s where the Holy Spirit, centuries later, drives Jesus, right after he is baptized.  Barren, desolate and dangerous.  At that time deities were always attached to people and places, so to head out to nowhere was to go literally into godforsakenness, to go where the gods don’t even go. She is fleeing to most certainly die.

Remember we are creatures, rooted in time and space? 

All the things that happen in our lives happen in a place and at a time.  And any stories we tell about those things, begin with – or at least eventually mention – these elements, “This one time, at band camp…” 

Hagar has left her home, her life, her identity and role; she’s exchanged all that to be nothing, nowhere.  Except she isn’t. We’re told exactly where she is. “God found her by a spring of water in the wilderness- the one on the way to Shur.” 

God found her because God was looking for her. God looks for us. God goes where no decent God goes, to the wilderness, into the nothingness to seek Hagar. Here her life begins again.  In this place, at this time, God calls her by name.  For the first time in the story, she is called by name.  Hagar, God says, slave girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?

Theologian Andy Root points out the God who speaks speaks to Hagar first with a question, then a command, and finally and most fully, with a promise. 

Here’s the question:  Where have you come from and where are you going?  This is like God’s words last week to Adam and Eve, when they were hiding behind a tree from the Creator of the world – Where are you? God doesn’t ask these questions because God doesn’t know the answer. God asks because answering God is part of the conversation we earth creatures are in with the Transcendent One.  We have to have a chance to tell our story, to claim our reality, to place ourselves in time and space. We have to confess our creatureliness if we are to receive the grace God has for us.

God signals in the question that God knows what’s up with Hagar; God knows who she has been, who she was seen as, this thing that was done to her, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai,God says. She’s first called by her name, her true self, and then invited to tell what it was like to be the object.  She’s invited to share her death experience with the living God.

 “I am running away,” Hagar answers God. 

In order for God to give us a new story, we have to own and inhabit the old one. We have to speak it, to give words to it, to say how it has shaped us so that it can be stripped of its power to continue to do so.  

God is a God who speaks our name, who seeks us out where gods don’t go, who invites us to share our story, to be known, to be vulnerable. Because remember? God is first minister. It is how God relates to us.  God cares for us in our real selves in our real circumstances. God arrives into our experiences and bears them with us in order to heal us, to bring us to peace – to our fullness, our place as ministers made in the image of the Divine minister.

So after God hears Hagar’s story, God gives her a command. 

Go back. Go back – not to a place, but to a person.  

Go back to Sarai. Humbly submit to her.  This is the same verb that drove Hagar away; but it’s the opposite action.  Instead of Sarai forcing her slave girl to submit to her, Hagar is coming to Sarai in freedom and choice, and offering herself to care for Sarai.  It’s Jesus’ Turn the other cheek– It’s a self-empting action that requires that you see me as a person, a person with agency, and I am choosing to use that agency to serve you, another person, powerfully humbling both.  Sarai is forced to see Hagar as a person. And in order to do this, Hagar must also see Sarai as a person, not an oppressive force, an object of hatred, an enemy.  A person trapped in grief and shame and rage, Sarai is in her own kind of wilderness.  So God tells Hagar to go and seek Sarai in her despair and nothingness; to go back and minister to her in that place as God has ministered to Hagar.

Question, command, and now promise. The longest part.

You have a future, God says to her. Your child will have a future. This promise is greater than the wrong that was done to you, it will shape you far beyond the things that were taken from you. Your story is not over, in fact, it will live beyond you in generations too numerous to count – a promise we’ve heard before. The self-emptying God who speaks, who seeks us, who ministers to us, makes promises and keeps them. God pulls us out of nothingness into the future God is bringing into the world.

Then God gives Hagar the name for her son, and the child who not yet born is swaddled in promise as well. The name means “God listens.”  This name will define him; it will follow him and go ahead of him. God saw him before he was born, heard him then, heard his mother when she was lost, sought and found her and made her a minister. Ishmael’s very identity will always reflect this story and truth: God listens.

Then something quite marvelous happens. Hagar returns the favor. Hagar names God.  She is the first person in scripture with the chutzpah to name God. She calls God, “The God of seeing” because God came looking for her, God saw her true personhood beneath the story she had been living in, God found her.  God sees her, and she sees God, and names the Source of all life, The God who sees us.

So Hagar returns to Sarai. And she ministers to her in her despair. She shares the story of being found by God; she comes bearing faith in the promises of a God who sees us.  And when Ishmael is born, Abram – who has heard God himself in the past, respects Hagar’s encounter with God and he names the child Ishmael, God listens.  

Fourteen years later Sarah will conceive, her Advent waiting will end, and the promised blessing will be fulfilled through the impossibility of a barren womb, because impossibility is how God does things. And when it is, Sarai, whose name meant ‘Princess’ becomes Sarah, ‘Mother of Nations.’

And Hagar becomes the matriarch of peace-makers, the mother of ministers. Having being seen by God, she can see others. Sharing in God’s fullness, she contributes to others’ fullness. Making peace is a form of active, humble submitting, as Hagar does; it’s being surrendered to God, who surrenders to us, and then surrendering to each other, to come alongside each other as God comes alongside us. It’s seeing one another in our shared creatureliness.  Peace-making is what ethicist Glen Stassen describes as “abandon[ing] the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of enemies. God comes to us in Christ to make peace with us; and we participate in God's grace as we go to our enemies to make peace.”  Blessed are the peace-makers, Jesus’ says, centuries later.  Blessed are the fullness-seekers, the ministers.

One day there will be no more darkness, but for now, we are found in the darkness by the light of the world that no darkness can put out. Advent is our invitation to be vulnerable creatures who speak of the darkness in which we find ourselves, to the God who speaks, listens, sees us, calls us by name, draws us by grace into God’s fullness, and sends us to each other to seek fullness for one another. 

We are promised peace; God will do this.  In hope we will trust that peace will be so, by joining in its coming.  

Come and let the God of grace meet you here and send you out in peace.

Amen.