![\"Angel](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/764\/2017\/06\/Angel-with-Hagar-and-Ishmael.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Read: \u00a0Genesis 21:8-21<\/h2>\n
You\u2019ll recall that Abraham and Sarah were an elderly couple when God called them away from their comfortable retirements in the land of Ur. They undertook a long, perilous journey to a land God was promising them.\u00a0 Not only that, God promised that even though they had been childless all these years, they would be the forefather and foremother of so many generations of children, they would outnumber the stars.\u00a0 But as the two of them looked at each other\u2019s eighty-year-old bodies, gnarled and road-mapped with wrinkles and scars, and they doubted that God could make this happen.<\/p>\n
So they took matters into their own hands.\u00a0 And that\u2019s where the trouble began.<\/h2>\n
Sarah owned an Egyptian slave-girl named Hagar, and she decided to give this girl to her husband as a second wife, hoping to obtain a child through her.\u00a0 It was customary in those days for a man to have more than one wife.\u00a0 It was also a fact that slavery was an acceptable practice. \u00a0And, as is typical of slave-owners, Abraham and Sarah were brutal, cruel, and without mercy toward their chattel.<\/p>\n
This is not the portrait of the patriarch and matriarch we usually see.<\/h2>\n
We like to picture them as the laughing, loving elderly parents of little Isaac.\u00a0 But we need to hear this part of the story, too.\u00a0 We need to come to grips with the fact that the chosen ones of God were not paragons of virtue.\u00a0 They devised a scheme wherein a dark-skinned girl was forced into giving her body to her master, who impregnated her.\u00a0 When her belly bulged with the child Sarah believed she would never have, Hagar was treated with bitter, resentful cruelty.<\/p>\n
As the theologian Delores Williams notes in her book Sisters in the Wilderness<\/a> <\/em>(Orbis Books, NY, 1993), <\/em>this story bears uncanny resemblance to the experience of African women and girls enslaved on American soil over 200 years ago.\u00a0 Like Hagar, they were taken captive against their will, brutalized, and forced to work in a land far from their home.\u00a0 When they would try to run away, they were often sent back to their plantation prisons. Their bodies were raped by their masters.\u00a0 And when they bore white men\u2019s children, they were treated even more cruelly by the jealous wives of the masters, just as Hagar suffered under Sarah. \u00a0\u00a0After the Civil War, the women and children were often expelled from their homes with no resources for survival, sent out into the wilderness by cowardly Abrahams who would take no responsibility for the choices they had made and forced onto these innocent ones.<\/p>\n We know Hagar has been oppressed.\u00a0 When she runs away while pregnant, we know she is alone \u2014 no family, no true husband, no friends, completely isolated.\u00a0 We think of God as the liberator of the oppressed, so we would expect the angel of the Lord to come to Hagar and say, \u201cFollow me.\u00a0 I will lead you back to your people in Africa.\u00a0 I will lead you to freedom.\u201d \u00a0But that\u2019s not what he says.\u00a0 He tells her to go back and submit to her mistress<\/em>.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n Williams reminds us that infant mortality rates in that time were high.\u00a0 If Hagar tries to make this trek in the desert by herself, she and her unborn child will surely perish.\u00a0 And so she returns to the life of a slave once again.\u00a0 But not before the angel of God gives her a blessing:<\/p>\n \u201cNow you have conceived and shall bear a son;\u00a0 you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.\u00a0 Your son\u2019s life will be marked by conflict.\u00a0 But he will be his own man.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n She calls God El-roi<\/em>, \u201cEl\u201d meaning God, \u201croi\u201d meaning \u201cto see.\u201d Elroi can mean either \u201cGod sees\u201d or \u201cSeeing God.\u201d\u00a0 This is an incredible turn in the narrative.\u00a0 Hagar is the only person in the Bible who gives a name to God.\u00a0 It is always God who does the naming.\u00a0 Remember how God changed Abram to Abraham and Sarai to Sarah?\u00a0 Lots of other characters are named or renamed by God:\u00a0 Jacob is renamed Israel.\u00a0 Simon is renamed Peter.\u00a0 Saul is renamed Paul.<\/p>\n But this time it is God who receives a name.\u00a0 And look who does the naming:\u00a0 a pregnant African slave-girl, her body beaten and violated, alone in the desert with no hope and no future.\u00a0 The lowest of the low.\u00a0 But she<\/em> is the one who has the power to name God. \u00a0\u201cGod sees me.\u00a0 I see God.\u201d (Williams, pp. 20 \u2013 23).<\/p>\n Certainly, Sarah would have liked nothing more than for this slave girl to have disappeared.\u00a0 But Hagar came back.<\/p>\n She has been seen by God.\u00a0 She has seen God.<\/p>\n And she will not go quietly away to disintegrate into the desert.\u00a0 She comes back and demands to be seen.<\/p>\n As our screens replay the video of a police officer shooting a black man or woman, as their pictures look out as us from our glowing screens, we must realize . . . they demand to be seen. \u00a0They must be seen and acknowledged.<\/p>\n Kendra James\u2019 death demands to be seen. \u00a0Amadou Diallo. \u00a0Eric Garner. \u00a0Natasha McKenna. \u00a0And hundreds more black women and men who have died at the hands of police. \u00a0They have been seen by God. \u00a0They demand to be seen by us.<\/p>\n The world would like nothing more than for these troubling figures to disappear.\u00a0 We would like to ignore the 20-30 million women and children who are still traded as slaves on the black market today (http:\/\/endslaverynow.org\/learn<\/a>).\u00a0 In 2014, the world tried to ignore the dark-skinned men, women and children in the deserts of Africa dying of Ebola<\/a>, refusing to address the problem, hoping it would just go away.\u00a0 They are invisible to us, and we wish the problem would just go away.\u00a0 But Hagar assures us: they are seen by God.\u00a0 And God is calling us<\/em> to see them.<\/em>\u00a0 And to respond.<\/p>\n It appears that\u00a0the problem of problem of light-skinned privilege was as much an issue in the age of Genesis as it is for us today.\u00a0 Later, after she has given birth to Ishmael, and her mistress gives birth to Isaac, Hagar finds herself alone in the desert again.\u00a0 The two boys were just playing with each other, like children do.\u00a0 One with dark skin, one with lighter skin.\u00a0 And as it is for so many mothers and fathers today, the idea of her light-skinned child playing with a darker-skinned child is so repugnant to Sarah, it simply will not be tolerated.<\/p>\n Just ask the mothers of slaughtered black sons \u2013 Michael Brown, Trayvon Williams, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Dante Walker \u2013 \u00a0just to name a few black men recently shot to death in America by armed men.\u00a0\u00a0http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2014\/08\/3-unarmed-black-african-american-men-killed-police<\/a>\u00a0 Ask Diamond Reynolds, Philando\u2019s girlfriend, as she and her daughter watched the unprovoked slaughter of an innocent dark-skinned man.<\/p>\n As the columnist Leonard Pitts once wrote, \u201c[T]he fear of black men [by whites] is downright viral. That doesn\u2019t mean [we burn] crosses on the weekend. It means [we\u2019ve] watched television, seen a movie, used a computer, read a newspaper or magazine. It means [we live] in a nation where one is taught from birth that thug equals black, suspect equals black, danger equals black.\u201d\u00a0 http:\/\/www.miamiherald.com\/opinion\/opn-columns-blogs\/leonard-pitts-jr\/article2502069.html<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cCast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave shall not inherit along with my son!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The curse of Sarah reverberates across the ages:\u00a0 \u201cCast out those sub-human savages in Africa, those thugs on the streets in America.\u00a0 The sons and daughters of slaves shall not inherit along with our light-skinned sons and daughters!\u201d<\/p>\n The first time she was running away.\u00a0 This time she was dragged away.\u00a0 And that is the double meaning of Hagar\u2019s name \u2013 it can mean either \u201cfleeing,\u201d or \u201cdragged away.\u201d \u00a0Once again she is alone, without food or water. She is so deep in despair, with her son thirsting and starving to death, she cannot bear to watch or listen to his suffering.<\/p>\n God hears the cries of the boy Ishmael.\u00a0 For that is the meaning of his name:\u00a0 El means \u201cGod.\u201d\u00a0 Ishma mean \u201chear.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI hear God.\u00a0 God hears me.\u201d \u00a0God hears Ishmael and opens his mother\u2019s eyes to see the water in the desert.\u00a0 They will not perish from this earth.\u00a0 They will not go away.\u00a0 They will not be disappeared. \u00a0They will not be erased. \u00a0They will survive.\u00a0 They will be seen.\u00a0 They must be heard.<\/p>\n The Hagars and Ishmaels of this world must be seen and must be heard. \u00a0The thousands of grieving friends and family members of the dark-skinned slaughtered ones must be seen and must be heard. \u00a0The one million African-Americans imprisoned<\/a> in this country must be seen and heard.\u00a0 The 10 million African Americans living in the deserts of poverty<\/a> must be seen and heard.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The 1 billion Africans enslaved by drought, poverty, disease, and lack of access to medical care and education must be seen and heard.<\/p>\n At the very least, Christian pulpits must bear witness. \u00a0Our preaching must tell the story. \u00a0Our sermons must speak the truth.<\/p>\n They have so much to teach us about what it means to survive, to rely on God when all else has failed.\u00a0 And we have so much to learn from them about what it means to come to terms with the demons of racism and white privilege that still hold our country and our world in their grip.<\/p>\n God said to Hagar:\u00a0 \u201cDo not be afraid . . . come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.\u201d<\/p>\n God says to us:\u00a0 \u201cDo not be afraid . . . come, lift up the children of Ishmael, the descendants of Hagar, the dark-skinned ones, the ones trapped between the wilderness of oppression and the house of slavery.\u00a0 Hold them fast with your hand.\u00a0 For I will make a great nation of you, of all of you, together.\u201d<\/p>\n It is time to loosen our grip on hatred and fear. \u00a0It is past time to hold the hands of the ones whom God hears . . . and the ones whom God sees. \u00a0It is time to see, and hear, and respond.<\/p>\n Leah will be presenting at the Wild Goose Festival<\/a>\u00a0in Hot Spring, NC, July 14 and 15. \u00a0Her session info is available here: \u00a0http:\/\/wildgoosefestival.org\/sessions17-24\/<\/a>. \u00a0Enter the special code BEMYGUEST for a 25% discount on tickets<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Y<\/em>ou can follow Leah on Twitter at @LeahSchade<\/a>, and on Facebook at\u00a0 https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/LeahDSchade\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Photo information: \u00a0All photos are public domain images.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The story of Hagar and Ishmael holds up a mirror to ourselves while our screens display the shooting death of Philando Castile. How shall we preach? What do our sermons need to say?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2929,"featured_media":420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,31],"tags":[99,97,98,9],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racism-and-white-privilege","category-sermons","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-hagar-and-ishmael","tag-philando-castille","tag-sermons"],"yoast_head":"\nGod\u2019s treatment of Hagar is also troubling.<\/h2>\n
And how does Hagar respond?\u00a0 She names<\/em> God.<\/h2>\n
This is a critical moment for Hagar.<\/h2>\n
Philando Castille\u2019s death demands to be seen.<\/h2>\n
The problem of light-skinned privilege is not going away.<\/h2>\n
The hatred and fear of the black child, especially the black male<\/em> child, is alive and well.<\/h2>\n
![\"Hagar,](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/764\/2017\/06\/Hagar-Ishmael-Abraham.jpg\")
<\/h2>\nSarah\u2019s words to her husband echo like a horrible scream we can\u2019t get out of our ears:<\/h2>\n
And so, once again, Hagar finds herself in the desert, this time with her son Ishmael.<\/h2>\n
But God listens.\u00a0 God hears.<\/h2>\n
Hagar and Ishmael have so much to teach us. \u00a0We have so much to learn.<\/h2>\n
\n![\"Leah](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/764\/2017\/06\/wearing-red.jpg\")
Leah D. Schade is the Assistant Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary<\/a> (Kentucky) and author of the book <\/em>Creation-Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology, and the Pulpit<\/a> (Chalice Press, 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n
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