Sermon 6/21/2020: We Need You To Survive (Pr. Ben Adams)

Pr. Ben Adams

Lectionary 12a

June 21, 2020

We Need You To Survive

It may be Father’s Day, and while all you dads out there are awesome and we have nothing but love for you, today instead, we are going to focus our attention on a mother, and not just any mother, but a strong, resilient, steadfast mother named Hagar. But to any and all of you dads out there, I do hope you especially listen in, because through honestly and directly focusing on the story of Hagar, I believe we promote the best in fathers by calling out the brutal patriarchal, racist, and classist conditions that Hagar was subjected to.

Now the story of Hagar is a story of slavery, a story of surrogacy, a story of status, and most of all a story of survival, but what we heard today in our first reading from Genesis is actually the second of two dramatic desert stories of Hagar. The first occurs a bit earlier in the 16th chapter of Genesis, and without this context, it's hard to really grasp the fullness of Hagar’s unyielding life.

So let’s begin there, back before Abraham and Sarah are visited by three divine beings who announce that Sarah will bear a son and they laugh at how ludicrous that sounds at their old age. Before this miraculous promise of a son and before Isaac was eventually born, Sarah was desperate to fulfill her duty in a patriarchal society where her role was to bear children and be obedient to Abraham, but at this point in the narrative she’s resigned herself to the reality that she will never be able to fulfill her duty of bearing a child, so she offers her slave Hagar to Abraham. You see, in this relationship, Sarah believes that Hagar belongs to her, as property, therefore the child born of Hagar would also belong to Sarah as well. This was a common practice in situations like this in antiquity.

So the text then says that Abraham went into Hagar, but as Lutherans we have to name a thing for what it is. What is done to Hagar at the hands of Abraham and Sarah here is non-consensual rape. Hagar has no bodily autonomy as a slave, and she has no ability to consent or say no when she is offered to Abraham. But when Hagar then conceives a child with Abraham, all of a sudden, Hagar no longer looks up to Sarah in the way she once did, and Sarah feels this status change. No longer is Hagar just a piece of property, but a powerful woman with the ability to foster life in her womb. Sarah’s response to this dynamic shift in the relationship between them is to “deal harshly” with Hagar. But again, to name a thing what it is, this is physical abuse with the intent of dehumanizing Hagar, putting her back in her place as Sarah’s powerless object.

But Hagar is not powerless, and she refuses to be put back in a subjected place. She is a fighter, a resistor, and so instead of remaining with her rapist and abuser, she flees her brutal enslavement and runs away into the desert. Now this is where we have to start taking notes, because this next moment of the story says a lot about who God is, because when Hagar is in her most vulnerable state, in exile, in the desert without any help, that is when God shows up. The Lord finds Hagar near a spring and instructs her to return to Sarah and Abraham, to deliver the child, and to name the child Ishmael, meaning “God hears.” At that moment, Hagar is no longer just an exiled slave, she is a woman of God’s promise, and this is where Hagar does something unprecedented, she names God. Hagar is the only person in the Bible to give a name to God and the name she gives God is El-Roi, meaning the God who sees ME. Dang that’s powerful.

So Hagar does as God instructs, returns to her brutal owners, and gives birth to Ishmael. So it’s with this context that we pick this story back up today. Now it’s a little bit later, Sarah has now given birth to her own son Isaac, and it’s during the celebration of Isaac’s weaning that Sarah witnesses Ishmael playing with Isaac, or more literally in the Hebrew, making him laugh. Sarah cannot bear the thought of Hagar’s son Ishmael sharing the inheritance with her son Isaac, so she orders Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael back into the desert.

And much like when God perplexingly instructs Hagar to return to her rapist and abuser the first time after fleeing into the desert, God does another perplexing thing here by appearing to Abraham and actually instructing him to do as Sarah has commanded and cast Hagar out. So Abraham obeys, and let’s be honest, with only a skin of water and some bread, the exile of Hagar back into the wilderness, with her son Ishmael is the equivalent of a death sentence. 

Because inevitably, the water runs out, so instead of watching her son die of dehydration, Hagar casts Ishmael under a bush. And can you blame her? After all Hagar has had to endure, the last thing she needs is to be a witness to her son’s death. She even cries out to God, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." But, if you remember, Ishmael’s name means “God hears” and God does hear the boy’s cries from under the bush. God then appears to Hagar, and making a way out of no way, God opens Hagar's eyes to see a well of water right there in the desert, and she fills the skin and gives Ishmael a drink.  Ishmael and Hagar then live out their lives in the wilderness, and eventually Hagar find’s Ishmael a wife like herself, from Egypt. 

In this story, ultimately God does provide what Hagar and Ishmael need to survive, but we can’t go so far as to call this a story of liberation. There is no promised land, but Hagar does find a way to survive her enslavement and her wilderness experiences with God’s help. Several scholars have searched for the answer as to why God does not liberate Hagar in the first place, but it’s womanist theologian Delores Williams who offers the concept of survival theology to allow for an understanding of Hagar's "wilderness experience" and give meaning to what seems on the surface to be Hagar's abandonment.

Womanist theologians like Delores Williams approach their theology from their intersectional experience of being black women. And for many womanist theologians like Williams, Hagar has been a cherished biblical character. Williams explains:

“The African-American community has taken Hagar’s story unto itself. Hagar has ‘spoken’ to generation after generation of black women because her story has been validated as true by suffering black people. She and Ishmael together, as family, model many black American families in which a lone woman/mother struggles to hold the family together in spite of the poverty to which ruling class economics consign it. Hagar, like many black women, goes into the wide world to make a living for herself and her child, with only God by her side.”

You see, even though God does not deliver liberation, God provides survival techniques so that the oppressed can work toward liberating themselves.

This means that for those of you who are white like me, we too can find hope that like Hagar, God hears us and sees us too, but we must not appropriate Hagar’s story as our own. As tough of a pill as it is to swallow, we cannot locate ourselves in this story in the role of the oppressed Hagar. Instead we must recognize that we are Abraham and Sarah, the story’s oppressors. This is a reality we must take seriously and allow it to transform us into people of repentance for the sin of racism.

This week we had a chance to do just that. On Wednesday we came together with many others from the ELCA and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, we commemorated the Emmanuel Nine, the nine black people killed in 2015 by a white supremacist while in bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Just two days later, on Friday we observed and celebrated Juneteenth, the day attributed to the moment that word finally reached Texas that slavery had been abolished, two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

These events are a reminder that there is work still to be done because even now, 155 years after that first Juneteenth moment, and only five years since a white supremacist with an ELCA upbringing took the lives of nine sacred black siblings, we are still so far from a day when black lives truly matter, especially the lives of black women who suffer the intersecting marginalization of racism, sexism, and classism.

If the murder of the Emmanuel Nine at the hands of a former ELCA Lutheran can teach us anything, it's that the sin of racism is closer to home than many of us might want to admit. This is not a problem outside of our beloved church, but it’s within our church and needs to be dismantled here first. 

And if Juneteenth can teach us anything it’s that the end of slavery did not actually end slavery. Emily Peecook of Denison University says, “While slavery may be over, America has made many economic slaves of its people and a vast majority of the black community is shackled by poverty and lack of opportunity.” So those who continue to be denied full and complete liberation and continue to experience this slavery by another name can find hope in the Hagar narrative because they can trust that God is a provider of all they need to survive to help them liberate themselves. In other words, the oppressed do not always experience God's liberating power, but often must draw that power from within them with God's help.

That might seem a little less God-centered than the theology we’re used to, but I just think it puts a new spin on the ELCA’s tagline, God’s Work, Our Hands.  And especially in a racist, sexist, classist society, where those on the margins have still not experienced full liberation, it is a valid theology of resistance and hope given our reality.

So for our black sisters, may the powerful story of Hagar go with you, because as a single mother on her own in the wilderness, Hagar may not have experienced liberation, but she was found by a God who saw her struggle, heard the cry of her dying son, and helped her survive. And that says a lot about who God is and who God shows up for. And for us all, may Hagar’s story challenge and agitate us to dismantle the same patriarchal, racist, classist structures that held Hagar down, and that continue to especially hold our black sisters down today.  We need you to survive, and together, we can move forward with the help of God trusting that the moral arc of the universe ultimately bends towards justice. Amen.