Refugees
Sermon Notes 25th June 2023
Doug Bannerman
Genesis 21.8-21
The story of Hagar is heart wrenching to say the least. Hagar is an Egyptian slave who has sought asylum in the land of Canaan. She is a refugee.
Abram has also recently arrived in Canaan from Egypt, and his part in the story pivots on two women – Sarai, his wife, and Hagar her maid.[1] As the wife of a wealthy herdsman (Genesis 13.2), Sarai has privilege and power, although she does not escape the limitations of strong patriarchal social structures. She is, however, barren, a terrible affliction for the couple – to be without a family was to be without identity. So, Sarai tells Abram to secure a child through Hagar.
Ironically, when Hagar finds that she has conceived, she has the insight that she is other than a tool; she is a real person, with identity. She has experienced a new reality that challenges the power structure. So, in the face of Sarai’s jealousy, Hagar takes command of her own life and runs away to the wilderness, a hospitable place symbolized by a spring on the way to Shur.[2]
An angel of the Lord comes to her, declaring that if she returns to her mistress, her son, who is to be named Ishmael, will give rise to innumerable descendants (21.10 – 11). For the first time, a character addresses Hagar by name; and for the first time, Hagar speaks. ‘You are El-roi’ [the God of seeing] … ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’ (21.13). A unique encounter in the OT – to see and be seen by the Divine.
The encounter has the threefold character of Annunciation – that is to say the prediction of a male child, naming the child and foretelling his future life. As the first to receive an annunciation, Hagar, the Egyptian refugee, becomes the prototype of special mothers in Israel.
The name Ishmael, however, has two meanings; comfort and suffering. The divine promise of Ishmael means a life at the boundary of consolation and desolation. Hagar returns.
And Hagar Bore to Abram a son,
and Abram called the name of his son,
whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.
Now Abram was eighty-six years old
when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. (16.15-16)
We note, that the very first word of this part of the story was Sarai (16.1); but the last is Abram, an ending that continues to undermine Hagar. It may restore her name, but it silences her voice. It stresses not her motherhood but Abram’s fatherhood. The report that Abram named the son Ishmael obliterates the power that God gave to her. And Sarai receives no mention at all. Both Hagar and Sarai are sidelined.
Following this, Sarai and Abram become Sarah and Abraham, symbolic of the promise of a new covenant, that Abraham will become the ‘ancestor of a multitude of nations. Hagar disappears but her story remains. Ishmael now becomes the object of divine rejection because Hagar, not Sarah, is his mother (17.15-21).
We have arrived at today’s reading. Sarah, observing the healthy growing boy Ishmael at play with her son Isaac, is vexed. She does not want Ishmael to share Isaac’s inheritance; and so, she commands Abraham to cast out the foreign woman and child.
Abraham is unhappy on several counts, both personal and legal;[3] but God reassures him; ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman …’ (21.12-13). God diminishes Hagar by calling her ‘this slave woman’, and further diminishes her when, in the wilderness, does not appear in person, but speaks remotely from heaven:
What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him (21.17-18).
Hagar cries out in distress, but God hears the voice of ‘the boy’. Hagar loses her God given identity as mother and as one whom God sees, to become once more ‘slave woman’ – an object, a refugee with no identity.
Read in the light of contemporary issues and images, Hagar’s story depicts oppression in three familiar forms: nationality, class and gender.
‘Hagar the Egyptian is a maid; Sarah the Hebrew is her mistress. Conflicts around these two women revolve around three males. At the centre is their common husband. To him belong Ishmael, child of Hagar, and Isaac, child of Sarah. Through their husband and his two sons ,these females have clashed. From the beginning, however, Hagar is powerless because God supports Sarah. Kept in her place, the slave woman is the innocent victim of use, abuse, and rejection.
‘As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people who find their stories in her: she is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the … bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying on handouts from the power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others.
‘Hagar is a pivotal figure in biblical theology. She is the first person in scripture whom a divine messenger visits and the only person who dares to name the deity. Within the historical memories of Israel, she is the first woman to bear a child. This conception and birth make her an extraordinary figure in the story of faith: the first woman to hear an Annunciation, the only one to receive a divine promise of descendants, and the first to weep for her dying child …
‘Beyond these … distinctions, Hagar foreshadows Israel’s pilgrimage of faith … As a maid in bondage, she flees from suffering. Yet she experiences exodus without liberation, revelation without salvation, wilderness without covenant, wanderings without land, promise without fulfilment, and unmerited exile without return. This Egyptian woman is stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted for the transgressions of Israel. She is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, bruised for the iniquities of Sarah and Abraham; upon her is the chastisement that makes them whole.[4]
‘Hagar is Israel, from exodus to exile, yet with differences. And these differences yield terror. All who are heirs of Sarah and Abraham, by flesh and by spirit, must answer for the terror in Hagar’s story. To neglect the theological challenge [that] she presents is to falsify faith.’[5] [6]
Miraculously, Megan McKenna salvages some hope from the debris. McKenna used to work with a group of maids in a local motel, where they watched soapies and read scripture together during their breaks. They were absolutely delighted to hear the beginning of Hagar’s story. One woman, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, said in her halting English: ‘Oh, now Sarai gets a tase of her own medicine. Now she knows what it is like to be a slave and be treated like dirt all the time. Serves her right. She doesn’t like it – well, we don’t either. We don’t live just to clean toilets, iron, and clean up after others and to be pushed around’. When they got to the bit when Hagar runs away, the women at the motel cheered Hagar on. But then, when Hagar is told to go back to her mistress, they ‘cried out loudly against this’[7]. But then one of them said, ’She has to. She has to think of her child not herself.’ There is a time to rebel, a time to run and a time to endure.
Consolation and desolation.
The magic of this little group is that, ‘what followed at the motel were their own stories – of being maids in the houses of the rich, getting pregnant by the husband … and being thrown out …’ Such is the lot of refugees around the world – and even worse for those who are unable to flee from their places of affliction because rich nations close their borders.
As we come to the close of Refugee Week, may we consider our part in their stories of alienation and desperation.
Amen.
Doug Bannerman 2023
[1] Later God renames the couple Abraham and Sarah.
[2] Very different from Israel’s Exodus when ‘Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur, they went three days into the wilderness and found no water’ (Exodus 15.22).
[3] Normally, if a slave-wife had borne children, she was not to be expelled or sold (so, Hammurabi’s laws, § 146), thus Abraham’s unwillingness to do so. See Kenneth A Kitchen The Bible in its World: The Bible and Archaeology Today (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1977 Pbk.) pp168
[4] cf Isaiah 53.5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
[5] Op cit Phyllis Trible Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1984) p28
[6] Shocking as this tale may be, equally shocking is the manifest evidence that the narrators have deliberately attempted to make the male, Abraham, the dominant figure. For example, the narrators rob Hagar of her grief by changing the unambiguous feminine form of the verb forms to masculine constructions. Such alterations make the child lift up his voice and weep. But such masculine emotions cannot silence Hagar. A host of feminine verb forms throughout this section witness unmistakably to Hagar’s tears. See Phyllis Trible op cit.
[7] Megan McKenna Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible (New York: Orbis Books 1994) P177