Hey all!
Below, I've included the first sermon I'll be giving for my preaching class. I'll be giving it twice, once for class on Nov 7 and once at church on Nov 19. Let me know what you think, and if there's anything you feel needs significant work or improvement.
Amy







"I am a daughter of Hagar, outside of the covenant."

Spoken by a black woman borrowing the Biblical story to express her own sense of deserted-ness as she expressed the desolation of those shackled by our social systems of sexism, classism, and racism; remembered and recorded by Phyllis Trible; these words ring with the sense of isolation that comes when our expectations are deflated and our hopes are dashed. They voice the hollowed-out existence of those who have dared to trust, and seen that trust broken. Hagar, like many of her daughters and sons, nurses a body bruised and a spirit broken by the abandonment of those who surrounded her.

Yet Hagar has also been adopted as a sign of hope and persistence by people such as the Women in Black, who stand vigil in Hagar Square of Jerusalem each day, waiting for an end to the Palestinian Occupation. They see her as a symbol of God’s promised refreshment in the face of violence and death. Who is this Hagar, that she is read as a symbol of both victimization and liberation? What is the source of this grief and inspiration? How do two such disparate visions find a basis in the same narrative?

Our story begins approximately 14 years before the commencement of the passage this morning. Last week, we learned of Sarah’s rolling laughter at the notice that she would carry and bear a child. Yet, this was not the first time that a child had been predicted to their family; her conception was not the first in their household, nor was Isaac the first child to call Abraham by the tender name of "Daddy."

Fourteen years and five chapters before Sarah and Hagar’s conflict reaches the breaking point, when Abraham and Sarah were still Abram and Sarai, Abram is promised as many descendants as there are stars. And, yet, a problem remains. Sarai, Abram’s wife, appears to be infertile. After many decades of marriage, they are still childless. There is no one to support them in their increasingly old age. They have produced no heirs to fill the vision of multitudes that God has laid out for them.

But Sarai; cunning, wizened Sarai; Sarai who HERSELF had been given to Pharaoh in order to protect her husband; Sarai has an idea. She pulls Abram aside one night to discuss their little problem. Sarai arranges for Abram to take Hagar, her slave, in order that Hagar will give him a child and provide the progeny that he and Sarai had been denied. Hagar is brought in without her consent as a remedy for Sarai’s infertility.

There, in that short exchange between a husband and wife, Hagar was sold into a forced marriage by a woman who had been sold into a similar situation just a few chapters earlier. Hagar, who was given neither voice nor choice in this little family business arrangement would lose the last bit of freedom offered to her as a slave. The covenant of marriage had been replaced by a contract of convenience.

Soon, it says, Hagar became pregnant, and her opinion of Sarai began to lessen. Quite understandable, as Sarai was the broker of the deal that robbed Hagar of her dignity. As her belly swelled, did Hagar’s throat swell up from cries of remembrance? Did she confuse the nausea of morning sickness with the symptoms of emotional distress? Did each kick from the child growing in her belly remind her of a motherhood that was thrust upon her?
Whatever her situation, we know it wasn’t one of contentment, excitement, and anticipation. We are told that as the pregnancy wore on, Sarai began to complain to Abram about her. When Abram shrugged off her complaints, saying "Hagar is your slave; You decide what to do," Sarai even became abusive.

We are not given details of this abuse; It may be better that way. As the founding parents of the Hebrew people, we are supposed to respect and love Abram and Sarai. Sometimes, just as living with those we love means embracing and supporting while recognizing and challenging their destructive tendencies, so too we need to learn and embrace our faith stories like those in Genesis, while recognizing and challenging the faults in the characters we lift up as heroes. Documenting the details of Sarai’s abuse of Hagar could only make our job of learning to love and challenge the characters in our sacred text more difficult than it already is.

What we do know is that this mistreatment so affected Hagar that she chose to run off into the desert while still expecting rather than remain with Abram and Sarai. I can see her, stumbling through the sands while still learning to navigate her ever-changing center of balance, struggling for a resting place not too easily spotted lest Abram and Sarai had set out looking for her. It is now, in her first lonely venture into the wilderness, that Hagar encounters God. She is told to return to Abram and Sarai; to raise her son with them; that he will grow strong and proud; and that she is to name him "Ishmael," which means "God hears." She responds to this charge by naming God as "The God who Sees Me." At this moment, Hagar herself creates a covenant with the Holy One. Hagar is claiming God as a witness to the slavery and the oppression to which she is returning. She, in essence, says that she can and will return only because she knows that God will bear witness to her suffering. She is returning, as she has been mandated, in order that her pain may be exposed before God.

Hagar returned to the home of Abram and Sarai. She had her baby. They named him Ishmael. We are given no more details about the lives of Hagar and Ishmael until 13 years later, where our scripture selection picks up.

At this point, Abram and Sarai have changed their names to Abraham and Sarah. Sarah has finally conceived in her old age, and bore a child named after the same raucous laughter than accompanied hearing the prediction of her son. At first, Sarah is content in motherhood. After the first few years, though, Sarah’s bitterness and anger sets in again. She sees Ishmael, at his brothers weaning celebration, laughing with the same mirth she herself has shown in earlier passages. Once again, she cries out to her husband Abraham, complaining that the son of "THAT SLAVE WOMAN" would inherit alongside her own beloved Isaac. Sarah demands the immediate expulsion of both Ishmael and Hagar.

Abraham, who in earlier stories had so easily acquiesced to Sarah’s often unreasonable demands, is understandably hesitant. Sarah has demanded that Abraham cut off all ties with his own son; she has commanded Ishmael’s ex-communication and disinheritance. Abraham becomes disheartened and dismayed at this domestic conflict that is tearing apart those he loves. In all respects, Ishmael had become the promised son; Ishmael, too, was understood as the fruit of God’s covenant with Abraham. To cast him off, with his mother, would be to abandon the first produce of God’s faithfulness.

And yet, as Abraham is grieving over the choice he is being forced to make between his beloved and beautiful wife of many decades, and his oldest son and potential heir, the God - Who - Hears comforts Abraham, telling him not to worry. Abraham is instructed to follow Sarah’s wishes, and send his son off into the desert with only his mother to accompany him. Both Isaac and Ishmael will be named the founders and nations; both will become the means of God’s promised multitude. Remembering and trusting this conversation, Abraham wakes Hagar and Ishmael in the wee hours of the morning, and sends them away from camp with only a small canteen and a sack of food, and casts them off to whatever unknown experiences may await them.
Soon, the canteen had been emptied and with it had dried up Hagar and Ishmael’s hope of survival in the harsh desert environment. Without a source of food or water in sight, without any sign of sustenance, Hagar lays her young son down under a shrub, and sits a ways off so that she will not have to watch him die. Her parched throat produced the raspy, weary sobs of the deserted.

Hagar, bewildered and bedraggled, must have felt like she had been excluded from that same covenant which had hovered around her campsite since she had left her home in Egypt. Hagar had been used by her owners, in order to take advantage of her fertility. She had attempted to leave while still on her own, but been sent back to a life of slavery. Now, she knew with the intuitive knowledge of a burden-laden mother that the same son God had promised would grow and thrive was about to die of dehydration; a death that was the direct result of banishment by his own father. God’s witness to their suffering appeared to have evaporated in the heat. It would seem that all of the promise and hope that filled the potential life of Hagar and her son had been drained away with this final act of abandonment. In fact, "Beersheba," the name of the land in which Hagar and Ishmael wandered, can be translated as the "Well of Oaths." There, once again surrounded by isolation and the desert sands, Hagar is drowning in a lifetime of empty promises and broken relationships. Even the vow of God seemed hollow and worthless.

It is at that point that the name "Ishmael," "God hears," begins to take on a prophetic nature. A messenger descends, and taps Hagar on the shoulder. The messenger tell Hagar that God has indeed heard the cries of her son and has responded with the nourishment and sustenance she had been promised since her first weary trip into the desert. She is pointed to a spring, a well of water that will quench their thirst and replenish their spirits.

Hagar fills her canteen, and with the loving care of a once-grieving mother, she holds it to the lips of the son she has raised up these thirteen years. Like the infant she carried in her arms more than a decade early, Ishmael suckles at the canteen as the water strengthens, renews, and refreshes his parched throat.

In fact, this forbidding land filled with reminders of empty promises was to become their home, and would itself bear witness to a burgeoning and a thriving of the life of Hagar, Ishmael, and their future descendants that could not have been foreseen on that hot and dusty afternoon. It is written that Ishmael grew strong, and made a home in that desert, re-named the "Wilderness of Abundant Foliage." He married a woman that Hagar brought from her home for him, and their settlement grew and multiplied. In deed, tradition states that Ishmael became the father of the Arab peoples, and the religion of Islam traces their roots back to Ishmael, Hagar, and the home they made for themselves in that same land they thought would take their lives.

Was Hagar ever truly outside of the covenant? On that blinding bright afternoon when the blazing sun was causing their last hope of survival to evaporate, she certainly appeared that way. Hagar, like the woman who calls on her name, felt abandoned by those who had pledged to support her, victimized by systems that restricted her from deciding her own destiny, drowning in the well of empty and illusory promises. And yet, we know from that miraculous provision of water, and the generations that call her their foremother, that the covenant never truly left Hagar. Rather, it stayed with her and came to fruition even when death seemed certain. It is that covenantal relationship which we celebrate tomorrow at the "Children of Abraham" dinner. We know that Sarah and Hagar are equally foremothers of the multitudes that name and follow the God who witnessed their desert pilgrimage.

How often do we feel that same sense of powerlessness? How commonly do we see that which we depend on leave us stranded in the desert? How frequently do we feel parched for that life-giving nourishment which will promise us another day?

I, like Phyllis Trible, am haunted by the memory of the woman whose quote we heard earlier. She knew the story of Hagar because she lived the story of Hagar, but her individual version is not provided. She, too had seen her hope evaporate in the midst of desolation. Is this sister of ours one of the thousands of women lured to the United States by a promise of marriage or money, only to become a nameless victim of human sex trafficking? Is she one of our neighbors in Appalachia who have seen their homelands devoured by the appetite of the coal mining companies? Is she my grocery clerk, with bags under her eyes from the heavy burden of life in low-wage America?

Additionally, I long to know how and where her well appeared.

Not all of our experiences of the "Well of Empty Promises" are as grandiose as Hagar’s abandonment. Some are as quiet and indiscernible as a household where rollicking laughter has been replaced by silence. Some sow disappointment in our sense of service to God, like those who follow God's calling only to find their ministry pulled out from underneath. Still others tear the fabric of family life, like the shadows of abuse and addiction that shade over generations. Each of these, and all of the varied and individual situations that tear away at what is left of our hope, are desert experiences in the lives of God’s covenant people. They are not to be taken lightly, brushed off like dust that has alighted on our shoulders. Yet, we also must remember to listen and wait as we are directed towards nourishment and refreshment even as our parched throats are crying out to God as witness.

As we search for that hidden well, we also must keep vigilant, and struggle with our own role as Abraham and Sarah as this same story is played out within our society. I cannot condemn their role in Hagar’s marginalization without taking action and reforming my own role in our systemic and personal cycles of exploitation. I must offer myself the same challenge I offer to the Biblical narrative.

*I am a daughter of Hagar, waiting and watching for my spring to appear.*

I am a daughter of both Sarah and Hagar, waiting and watching for the spring.



* I did end up making a few changes. Everything I added is in bold with italics. Those lines I changed are listed first in the original version, surrounded by asterisks, and then afterwards in the final version.