Hagar's Untold Story--Or When God
Steps Out Of The Main Story
a sermon based on Genesis 21:8-21
by Rev. Thomas N Hall

Nine months have passed since last Sunday morning.  We left Sarah and Abraham in a fit of laughter when God told them that they were going to be parents.  That strange announcement must have hit Sarah’s funny bone, because the Bible tells us that she cracked up.  Can you imagine Sarah and Abraham attending one of those parenting classes for first-time moms?  Sarah can’t see to get the hang of the Lamaze method and Abraham can’t get the timing down.  At the baby shower, the residents have given Sarah doilies and dish towels while old Abraham gets ribbed on the shuffleboard court. 

            But nine months pass and Sarah really does have a baby boy who squirms like a puppy in Sarah’s big arms.  Now convinced that Someone has a sense of humor, Abraham and Sarah play a little joke of their own. They name their son, “Isaac.”  Cute.  The name means “He Laughs.”  That’s what Isaac means, “He Laughs.”  So that every time Abraham and Sarah walk into the room of “He Laughs, they smile as they remember God’s wonderful sense of humor—that God can make the most impossible promises come true even when a man can’t have children and a woman’s womb is as good as dead.  So this story closes with Sarah saying,

God has brought me joy and laughter. 
Everyone who hears about it will laugh with me. . .
for I have borne a son in my old age.

            Sarah truly discovers that the laugh shall be first—for the one woman who had the least reason to laugh because she was barren was able to have the last laugh.

            Now this laughing business, this joking around between God and Abraham and Sarah and baby, “He Laughs,” should be the way the story ends.  Everyone lives happily ever after.  But I want you to meet another character that lurks in the margins of the story.  She is Hagar.  A slave.  How Hagar gets into the story is hard to say.  Hagar got sold to the highest bidder at the auction.  So young Hagar begins as a blue light special in Abraham’s clan.  A nobody.  A clump of property. 

            Hagar sits around the campfire with the other slaves and laughs about the rumor that Sarah thinks she’s going to have a son.  But things take a personal turn one night when old woman Sarah shows up in front of her shack.  “Listen, Hagar, ahhhhh, I have something you gotta do.  I want you to . . . well, go to Abraham’s tent tonight.  That’s an order.”  Hagar would never forget that chilly, arid night as she dutifully slipped into Abraham’s tent and into Abraham’s bed—deliberately ordered to get pregnant.  Her mind must have been spinning with questions!  “Me?  A common slave girl?  I’m supposed to be intimate with the President of the Tribe?”  Hagar, much younger and fertile gets pregnant.  But insider her womb is more than a son’ it is her story about how she goes from pauper to princess.  Her womb reminds her that she’s not junk any more.  She’s not just another stupid slave.  She’s Hagar, the one who carries Abraham’s son, her tribe’s future, and God’s promise inside her body.

            Within two months the pregnancy is confirmed and Hagar gets and attitude—maybe Sarah is not blind—and in a fit of rage, the old woman beats Hagar so severely that she runs away into the desert.  “Hagar, slave of Sarah, what are you doing out here?” a voice calls to her.  “Well, Sarah’s furious that I’m going to have her husband’s child, so she’s beating me.”  “Hagar, I promise you that you will indeed have a son and he will be a great leader; you go back and wait out your time—and I’ll even tell you the name you are to call your son.  “God hears.”  (That’s what Ishmael means.)  “God hears?” Hagar wonders.  “What kind of name is that to give a kid?  “God hears?  Hears what?”  But the conversation ends and Hagar leaves the desert and returns to Sarah.

            Sixteen years pass with not so much as a word about Hagar and her now teenaged son, “God hears.”  During those sixteen years, the promise has come true.  Sarah has become miracle mom.  She has taken over the story line.  She stands proudly beside her own child, “He Laughs” as mom and dad and son pose for the family portrait.  “He Laughs” is all dolled up; Sarah blushes and Abraham stands awkwardly in a tight-fitting suit.  But Hagar lurks just out of the campfire light—at the edge of the clan circle.  Hagar watches the event and sees her hopes die. 

“He Laughs” and “God Hears” are busy playing together when suddenly Sarah’s kid cries.  Maybe older brother took his favorite toy away or something.  But Sarah fumes and demands that this slavewoman and her son be thrown out of the clan.  “Don’t want to share a red cent with any low class slave,” she mutters.  So Hagar is sent packing the next day with less than a day’s supply of food and water; she’s pushed out of the clan on to the desert floor with her child.  Abraham and Sarah refuse to call her even by her name, Hagar. 

Ever been to the Mojave Desert?  Or the Sahara?  They say temperatures can move above 120 degrees out there.  That’s the kind of place Hagar finds herself.   Of course, that’s a good place to put an end to an embarrassing family problem.  She’s being cut out of the picture.  Who will remember Hagar or “God Hears?”  Bleached bones; that’s all that will be left, and dead bones tell no tales.  So that’s what it comes to—an unwanted character simply cut out of the script.  The one shared a bed and a son with Abraham, the one who carried God’s promise.  The one who was going to become a princess is forgotten. 

By high noon Hagar has run out of water.  She tucks her son in the scant shade of a juniper tree then leaves him there to die.  She can’t bring herself to put him out of his misery with the blow from a large rock.  He cries for water, but there is none to quench his thirst.  Finally he pipes down, too weak to cry out.  Her last picture of her promised son is a kid squirming like a worm on a scalding pavement for a drop of water on his tongue.  But there is none.  So she walks as far as she can from him.  There, under a boulder, she pulls herself together and wails and cries and grinds her teeth in bitterness.  Hagar weeps.  Hagar is every woman who has been cut out of the story.  Treated like property and then tossed out when she’s used up.

            We see her everyday on our televisions and see her and her son in our newspapers.  Emaciated, brutalized, and dumped as a piece of property.  Hagar is eleven years old—hasn’t yet reached puberty, but she’s been a prostitute in Bogotá for two years.  Didn’t choose to become Hagar.  She fled an abusive father.  Meet another Hagar from the Philippines.  Divinia.  She has venereal disease; her favorite pastime is sniffing glue.  “I know I’m sick,” she says, “and people treat me like dirt and sometimes I’d just like to die.”  Hagar weeps. 

            Listen to yet another Hagar.  “Last night,” this battered woman begins, “he turned the dining room table over on me.  When he came after me, I covered my head with my arm and crouched in the corner.  I was too afraid to fight back.”  Another:  “Whenever my boyfriend hit me, I was afraid.  But I didn’t think anybody could help me.  I called the police once after he beat me up and kicked holes in all four walls of our apartment living room.  They came, walked him around the block to cool him off and then brought him back home.  He beat the hell out of me for calling the police.  I really couldn’t do anything about it.  I was so afraid and felt completely helpless.”

            That’s what the story of Hagar tells us.  People—women especially—who are completely helpless, who swing between pride and shame.  Who live in a cycle of violence.  Always in danger.  And never convinced that anyone truly loves them.  I don’t know if this is a story for many of us, but it is a story for most of the world.   Most of the world can identify more with Hagar than with Sarah.  More with suffering than with joy.  Hagar is the woman used by her boyfriend, the surrogate mother, the Mexican teen who has followed her family across the border, the runaway kid in Seattle, the pregnant young woman alone in Philly, the expelled wife in Swarthmore, the divorced mother with a child on the way, the welfare mom, the shy woman who has lost her dignity and self-worth because she knows nothing but serving the one she married.[1]

            As we worship this morning, over 60,000 Hagars work as slaves in the sex industry in the Philippines, 250,000 in Brazil, 400,000 in India, and over 800,000 in Thailand.  They’re all Hagars—people written off, cut out of the script, having no future or hope.  Hagar is everyone whose story has been silenced because they have the wrong color of skin, because they speak with a foreign accent, because they are weak.

            But hear the Good News!  Just when this slave was written out of the story.  When she had lost her community, her inheritance, her family, and even her name.  Just at the time when the weaning party was in full swing and the memory of the slave woman is ready being erased from the memory banks, God excuses himself and walks out into the desert heat to listen to his children’s crying.  God’s angel calls this slave woman by her real name.  Hagar.  She hasn’t heard that name for a decade. 

Hagar, what troubles you?  God has heard the
Child crying where you laid him. 

Get to your feet,
lift the child up and hold him in your arms,
because I will make of him a great nation.

            God steps out of the main story to stand beside the very one who cannot stand for herself.  Remember Hagar, they are weak, but he is strong.  God also knows the name of the thousands of Hagar’s children who share a similar story.  He knows Natashi and Sandra and Divinia by name.  We can’t rescue them all, but we can listen to their stories and let God empower us to help change their stories.  Did you know our youth group have taken the first step?  They are helping little Anya, 9 years old.  They write her letters, send her gifts and support her with their offerings.  They’ve never met her and can’t do a lot, but they can give her a cup of water in Jesus’ name.  And so our youth have started to listen to Hagar. 

Let us listen with fresh ears to Hagar.  Perhaps we will be the one God sends out to their desert with the cup of cold water.  Amen.

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                [1] Adapted from Phyllis Trible’s book, Texts of Terror, page 28.