Genesis 16

When I was a teenager, I enjoyed watching a TV show called the Wonder Years. I related to this show because it depicts a very common pre-teenage experience. Kevin Arnold is the young boy that no one really understands or even really knows. We watch him and feel empathy with him as he is bullied by his older brother, copes with the trauma of being an un-athletic boy in junior high gym class, tries in vain to live up to the expectations of his emotionally distant father, and hopes against hope that Winnie, the girl he achingly longs for, will someday return his affection. Kevin Arnold makes his way through these Wonder Years, never really feeling understood, heard, or seen by anyone that matters to him. It is only through a narrator, which is the grown up Kevin Arnold, that the TV audience knows or hears Kevin Arnold.

We relate to Kevin Arnold because we often feel that we have not been heard, seen, or understood. I remember my own Wonder Years. Perhaps like some of you sitting here today, I remember feeling unseen and unheard as a young person. My childhood home in Sacramento boasted a tangerine tree in the backyard. Every January, when the tangerines were ripe, my family would spend a day picking the tangerine tree together. I have wonderful memories of picking and eating those tangerines. In a way, for me they have come to symbolize my childhood and our life in California. We moved to Virginia when I was in the middle of seventh grade. This move was terribly hard on the entire family. The turmoil of the move affected me terribly. I remember sitting in the lunch room at my new Junior High school and not knowing anyone. I remember sitting down by myself and missing our home in California. I longed for my old school and my old friends. I missed the familiarity of the home that I knew. I remember the homesickness I felt when I smelled another student peel a tangerine. When I smelled that tangerine, I was instantly transported to another time, not so long ago, when I didn’t feel quite so alone – a place that I knew, faces that I knew. When I smelled that tangerine I felt lonely and homesick. I remember sitting alone in the lunchroom in silence. There was no one in that lunch room who could understand why I was homesick when I simply smelled a tangerine. There was no one in there who cared how lonely I felt. In that moment, I felt unseen and unheard.

As a young child, my homesickness, initial loneliness in our new home and my ache for Sacramento was a child’s problem. However, it is too easy for us to think that not being heard and seen is a problem limited to adolescence. But feeling that the injustice you suffer goes unnoticed is not a feeling limited to childhood. Sometimes it is the little things that make us feel alone in the world. We get cut off in traffic or are involved in accidents that aren’t our fault. No one sees or cares. Someone cuts in front of us in the cashiers line at the grocery store. You were there first, but who cares? Someone else is parked in your parking spot at work and you spend 30 minutes looking for another place to park. Oh well, life is hard.

Then there are the darker and larger issues that we all see around us on a typical day. Whenever I go to my school, I see the homeless man who lives on the steps of Union Seminary. I pass by him every day. Sometimes I look at him and see him. We get passed up for a promotion that we earned or we get laid off. The unemployment numbers go up by one and no one sees. I see people are suffering in Iraq and Liberia, I change the channel. Sometimes we are just not seen or heard. Sometimes we are the ones who choose not to see or hear. The homeless man continues to sit on the steps, war continues. We change the channel. We walk on neither seeing hearing or being seen or heard.

Hagar is a woman who we often choose not to hear. Hagar is not a woman that we think of often. Her story gets skipped over in Sunday School curriculums and lectionary readings. As it is presented within Genesis, her story is no more than a bump along the road in the Abraham story cycle. Her story is not heard. Her trauma remains unseen by most of us.

Hagar was a woman who got all of the rough breaks this world has to offer. She was a slave woman living in a foreign place. We do not know what her duties were as a slave for Sarah. We have no way of knowing how she became a slave or what her life was like before this story. Hagar’s story on the surface only appears in the text as a negative example of what happens when one does not leave God’s promises to God. But this is not all that is to be seen and heard; we can look through this dark glass and find more that is to be discovered about Hagar and through Hagar about us.

God promised Abraham and Sarah land and descendants. Abraham and Sarah were both aging. But, they still had not had a child. It is very reasonable and understandable that Sarah begins to think that God needs some help to fulfill this promise of descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or the dust of the earth. Rather than trusting that God will fulfill the promise, Sarah takes matters into her own hands in order to solve this problem. She decides that Abraham should have a child by Hagar. Because Hagar is Sarah’s slave, according to customs of the Ancient Near East, Sarah could rightfully and legally claim Hagar’s child as her own. In this manner, Hagar is forced to conceive and bear a child that she will not be able to call her own. When Hagar becomes pregnant, Sarah becomes jealous. Even though it was Sarah’s idea, Sarah cannot stand that Hagar will be the biological mother of Abraham’s child. The text tells us that Sarah “deals harshly” with Hagar. We do not know what Sarah did to Hagar, but we do know that Sarah was so harsh in her treatment of Hagar that Hagar runs away.

This passage has always been one that bothers me. Hagar is the oppressed person in this story. She is marginalized in every way. The Ancient Near East was a very patriarchal society. Women were essentially the property of their fathers until they married at which time they became the property of their husbands. Woman did not have the same legal rights as men. But Hagar’s situation is worse than this. In addition to being a woman, she is a slave. A slave has no rights and is completely subject to the whims of her master. Hagar is treated horribly and she runs away.

Is this story consistent with what you know of God? Hagar, the Egyptian slave, is mistreated and flees into the wilderness. God sends Hagar back into her oppression and slavery. The text reads, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” When read this way, this text does not seem to represent the God I know. In Hagar’s story, God sends a marginalized person back to a life of oppression. Hagar is sent back to live with the master who beat her! This story confuses many people because most of us think of God as a God enacting justice on behalf of the oppressed. We understand God through the Exodus story. We think of how God delivered the Israelites from slavery Egypt. We understand God to be a God of deliverance from oppression, not a preserver of oppression.

However, this reading of Hagar’s story, although correct, misses some very important details. Hagar is the first person in the Bible to be visited by a divine messenger. She is also the only person in the Bible to dare give God a name. In all of the Bible the only person to name her God is a slave and a woman! In the Ancient Near East, naming something implies ownership. Hagar names this God she meets in the wilderness. Hagar claims this God as her God. The significance of this exchange between God and Hagar grows as God tells Hagar that her son will be named Ishmael. The name Ishmael means “God who hears.” God tells Hagar that Ishmael, “God who hears, “will be her son’s name because, “The Lord has given heed to your affliction. “And in response to her experience, Hagar gives God a name. She calls him “El-Roi,” “God who sees.” Hagar has suffered greatly. No person sees or hears her plight as she suffers alone in the wilderness. However, God hears her. God sees her.

I took a course in Pastoral Counseling last semester at Union. In this course, our professor told us over and over again that the most significant help we can offer someone in crises is to listen. Most of us want to give advice or try to solve the problems of those in pain. We may feel that listening is passive and not constructive. Our natural instinct is often to try to solve problems that we do not have the power or the wisdom to solve. In this world where life often is not fair and everyone experiences at one time or another the feeling of being helpless and kicked about by powers outside of our control. In this kind of a place and these seemingly helpless situations, often the greatest help all of us have to offer is to listen. All of us have a need to be heard and to feel understood. We have a need to know that the injustices we suffer are seen and heard by another. I had a need to know that someone understood my homesickness as I sat in the Junior High lunchroom crying at the smell of a tangerine. As adults, wee have a need to know that someone understands our depression as we struggle with the problems of adult life. This need to be heard is so great that millions of people pay counselors simply because they need someone to hear them. We need to be heard so badly that a whole profession has come about to fill this need. We need to be heard. We need to be seen.

As much as it may not seem like it from Hagar’s continuing situation of slavery and oppression, God heard Hagar. God saw her affliction. This experience was personal and real. Hagar’s experience is not a tame mental acknowledgement that God is with us. Hagar’s experience is a personal encounter with God. Hagar encountered God in her distress and she came to know a God who sees and hears her.

Kevin Arnold had to wait until he was a middle-aged man to explain his story as the voice of the narrator. Sometimes many of us feel that we have only one or two people who will listen to what we say. Or perhaps we feel that we are the only ones who truly understand and know our stories in a personal way. We may often feel misunderstood, ignored, unseen, or unheard. But, we cannot come back to our younger selves and narrate for others our story. Much of the time it seems that we are left alone to grapple with life’s affliction, as I felt while I was homesick in the school lunchroom in seventh grade. As I have felt in other points of my life. However, through the story of Hagar we can come to understand that we are not alone in our suffering. Our God is the God named “God who hears.” Our God is the God whom Hagar names “God who sees.” Our God is the God who witnesses us in our suffering and in our happiness. Like Hagar, we are seen. We are heard. It is a profound comfort to discover that we do not have to be alone. We do not have to search and wait for another to face us. A listener is never far. We may stand and face God as ourselves. We are known and understood by the God who promises to love us all.

Let us pray:

God, hear us.

El-Roi, see us.

Let not our tears or our joy be hidden beneath the sun, or the raindrops.

Our lives have lain open to you, O God, since the basement of time.

We pray that we may always be known, heard, and seen by you.

Amen