Monday, I preached my last short sermon for my homiletics class. I liken it to learning to write a short story. Small doses required: find one tiny point to capture and get to the point quickly. I’ll preach at church this summer on Huldah and it will be closer to forty-five minutes long instead of the twelve minutes of this week.1 This preaching class (that’s what homiletics is: the art of preaching) has been phenomenal. We’ve studied the craft of words, read poetry, listened to sermons, and discussed embodiment.2 We have to preach three sermons for the class and the previous two sermons have been from the New Testament. Our final sermon had to come from one of four specific passages from the Hebrew Scripture. I chose Genesis 16, which is a passage on Hagar.
The stories from the Old Testament are interesting and often hard to read. There are gaps in the stories on purpose; the more I read, the more questions I have. Bible Project insists it is Jewish meditation literature. The point is to read and consider and wonder and wander over into a different story that the first story made you think of, and so on. We don’t master the text; the text is supposed to master us. It’s designed to make us thoughtful. If you don’t want to get lost here, it will help if you go read or listen to Genesis 16.
Wilda Gafney points out that Hagar’s name is probably a wordplay. The word literally means “the foreigner” and what mother names her child “the foreigner”? But Hagar is a foreigner. She’s an Egyptian living in Canaan. Slave or servant she had no control over her life, was far from home, and the reader has no idea how she got there.3 What has this woman’s experience been? What did she do for Abram and Sarai before this passage? How old was she? In the first half of the story, Hagar is almost an afterthought. Listening to Abram and Sarai talk, she might have been a vase that they needed. They never speak to her. They never say her name. They never acknowledge her humanity. Did they have other servants that they treated like this? How were they so removed from her life?
Often the world of the Hebrew Scriptures is characterized as patriarchy but it’s a little more complicated than that sometimes. Not all men had the power to oppress others, and often there were layers like what we see in this story: people who are oppressed in one way can still oppress others. In this story, Sarai is the powerful person who dominates and manipulates others. She is the oppressor because, as is often the case, the people with equal or more power never challenge her. She hands her slave over to produce an heir for her, exploiting Hagar in the process. Introducing a “surrogate mother” of sorts is not a strange concept for this time period. Marriage contracts frequently had clauses for a second wife, especially if that wife had a lesser status, if the first wife was unable to conceive. This was a culturally acceptable solution for Sarai. I don’t intend to downplay Sarai’s situation. God promised to make a great nation of Abram only a handful of chapters before when we read it, but over ten years ago in their real lives. There is no heir. This is a desperate situation because an heir meant everything even without God’s promise. How did Hagar react to the news of her role in Sarai’s scheme? How Abram been wanting to sleep with her anyway? What culturally acceptable ways am I dehumanizing the people around me? There is so much about this story that I can’t imagine but the one part that I can is how jealousy must have spiraled through Sarai as she shared her husband with another woman. It must have grown like an angry monster once Hagar got pregnant.
Like most angry monsters, it devoured. Sarai treated Hagar so badly that this woman, pregnant and possessing nothing, ran away into the wilderness. There was no food. No water. No bus that was going to pick her up and take her back to Egypt, though that’s the direction she headed. No maternity hospital where she and her baby would be cared for. Where was she planning to go? How was she planning to get there? Had she simply given up? She headed to a spring and had an encounter there. The angel of the Lord showed up. He speaks to Hagar and this is the first time anyone does so in the story. He addresses her by name. He gave her the dignity of speaking about her life even though he knew the answers. She answers with the truth; she’s running away. He tells her to go back.
Full stop: I’m aware that it is stories like these that give God a bad rap in the OT. I, too, would prefer an imprecatory psalm here. I would like judgment cast down on Hagar’s enemies.4 I think the best thing we can do here is let Hagar interpret both God’s command and the prophecy about Ishmael. We have to give Hagar the voice that Abram and Sarai did not. Her response to this was to name God “El-roi” and then ask, “have I actually seen the one who sees me?” She walked away believing that God has seen her and that she had seen him and it was astonishing. How did it feel to see God? How did she see God when God tells Moses no man can see him? What was it like when she went back? How did this encounter change her?
Hagar is the only person in the Hebrew Scripture to name God. This woman was invisible even to God’s people. She was abused and mistreated and scorned. Her humanity was undermined in every way. God is the one that dignified her. That shared a promise. That sent her back to sustenance.5 That allowed himself to be named. He kept all his promises to Hagar. God sees the vulnerable, the mistreated, the exiled, the foreigner. There’s only one other story about Hagar, when she is again cast out and the angel of the Lord again meets her in the wilderness. What were the between years like? How had she nurtured her relationship with Ishmael? Did anyone nurture her? Hagar’s story leaves me sad but the story lingers after I’m finished reading. I am prompted to consider who is the vulnerable near me. Who am I mistreating so that I can I can fulfill God’s promises on my own? Who has close to the same amount of power that needs to be challenged on how they are using it? Who is Hagar in my life?
For our sermon prep, we had to write a list of questions that we had after reading the text. Not questions about application but questions from the story or the text. Why is this left out? Why does that happen? What about this gap? It’s a great way to start paying more attention to what is—and is not—there.
Huldah is my favorite character in Scripture and very few people know about her. I’m so excited to get to preach an entire sermon on her story. I’ve talked about her for years.
This quarter I’ve taken pastoral ministry which has been taught by an older white woman and homiletics which has been taught by a young(ish) black man. This diversity of faculty is one of the reasons I went to Fuller.
The Hebrew word is “maid-servant” but consists of “belonging” to another person, most often a woman, not just being paid to perform duties. It also is often associated with being a concubine or a type of lesser wife. English translations are pretty split between “servant” and “slave.”
Tim Mackie thinks the sacrifice of Isaac is a direct response to this story.
This woman couldn’t have lived in the desert and the road to Egypt was long and she was pregnant.
I’ve been in the Old Testament a lot lately and find that my questions are so constant that they often feel like they get in the way of studying. I really like your idea to use the questions as a guide to notice more about what is & isn’t there instead. Very helpful!