Abraham Part 6 - Hagar

A childless couple are beginning to worry if they’ll ever be able to have children together.

A man and a woman from different cultures and opposite ends of the social spectrum get married, and almost immediately she falls pregnant.

The childless woman looks on, worried for herself and envious of this other woman who’s carrying a new life in her womb.

 
No, it’s not Downton! It’s Genesis 16:1-16; but when you get into it, it’s every bit as dramatic as the ups and downs of the Crawleys and the Granthams on a Sunday evening.

One of the things that I hope you’re picking up as we make our way through the story of Abram and Sarai is that for all that they’re great heroes of the Biblical narrative, they were real people as well.

They had feelings to contend with; problems to solve; issues to work through. They sometimes got things right, and they sometimes made bad mistakes. In other words, they weren’t so different from you and me.

And for all the divine disclosure and mystery that’s woven through their story, what we’re reading about today is the kind of domestic that Jeremy Kyle would have a field day with.

So for a while at least, let’s put aside the rose-tinted spectacles with which we tend to view these venerable characters, and see them as they really are.

This incident in their story plays itself out in four acts, and once we’ve looked at each of them in turn, we’ll spend a little time reflecting on what we can learn from them.

Act 1 begins with the pregnant phrase that Abram’s wife Sarai had not borne him any children.

Ten years now in Canaan. Ten years since God’s first promise of land and family; and though they now had a place to stay, there was still no sign of a child.

And I wonder if Sarai’s mind was doing that thing where you put two and two together and instead of making 4 you make 9 or 10. You see, when you read back through all these promises God had made about family, they were all made to Abram and about Abram,

All the talk is about Abram’s seed, Abram’s descendants. Now we might assume that as his wife, Sarai’s implicit in that, but the fact of the matter is she hasn’t once been mentioned by name in the context of those promises.

And who could blame her if, after long years of trying for a child, she began to think that whatever God’s plans were for her and her husband, they didn’t involve her being the natural mother of his children.

It’s pretty logical really. God’s made these promises; they don’t seem to be coming true for us; maybe that means there’s some other solution.

But those of you with a good memory will remember that Abram and Sarai have been in this same kind of territory before. And they’re about to make exactly the same mistake as before.

Remember when there was famine in the Canaan a few chapters back. What did they do? Pray it over? Stick it out? No – they did the logical thing and they went down to Egypt where they found food, but also a shedload of trouble.

The way of logic and the way of faith are not always the same path, but once again, they’re choosing logic over faith in these circumstances. There seems to be no prayer or attempt to engage God on this issue; patience is wearing thin. Sarai’s decided it’s time to take matters into their own hands and move things on a little. And once again, fertile Egypt is the destination of choice, though this time it’s the fertile body of Sarai’s Egyptian maidservant Hagar which offers a solution.

“Why don’t you sleep with my slave” says Sarai – “Perhaps she can have a child for me”.

That suggestion sounds odd to our ears, but this was one of the socially acceptable ways a childless couple could start a family in the ancient world. And it was understood that when the baby was born, it would be the wife and not the biological mother who would have jurisdiction over the child.

So Abram sleeps with Hagar, whether reluctantly or contentedly we’re not sure, and as the curtain falls on Act 1, Hagar’s blooming and things seem to be progressing nicely with what we might think of as Plan B.

But that’s when it all starts to kick off

Act 2 has barely started before Hagar seems to be developing a rather unpleasant sneer anytime that Sarai’s around.

After years of subjugation, suddenly Hagar has a little power and boy does she enjoy it.

Does she take Abram’s hand and place it on her belly with a smile, from time to time, knowing full well that Sarai’s looking on? Does she start to get stroppy about duties she deems unfit for a woman who’s carrying her master’s unborn child? Do she and Abram share glances and words that cut Sarai to the quick because she never in a million years thought that she would have to share him with another woman, let alone a younger and more exotic one?

Finally, her rage and jealousy boil over and with absolutely no sense of irony she rounds on Abram and tells him this is all his fault, even though it was her idea in the first place.

It always so much easier to blame the other than take responsibility for your own poor choices.

But Abram doesn’t do much better. He’s supposed to be the head of the household, the father of nations. He’s the one to whom Kings answer and from whom Kings flee. What does he say? “You’re the boss, dear. You do whatever you like!”.  He abdicates responsibility.

And we reach the interval in our little drama with Hagar being chased off stage by Sarai, and the sounds of fighting in the wings.

Act 3 sees us far from Abram’s home in Mamre. Hagar has fled and she’s making her way back to Egypt. She’s drinking from what might be the last stream before a risky desert crossing, when an angel comes and speaks with her.

I wonder how they would have the angel dress, if this were a play. In dazzling white, maybe? Full set of wings?

Well the Greek word ‘angelos’ from which we get the word ‘angel’ simply means a messenger. Could an angel cloak his or her glory and seem like one of us? I guess if God could, it wouldn’t be beyond an angel either. Indeed, it seems from the text that this angelic being may have been God himself.

Whatever the truth of it, Hagar doesn’t seem too phased by the encounter. She speaks with this messenger and explains the situation before receiving a command – go back to your mistress and serve her – and also a strange, double edged promise.

“You will have a son, and you’re to call him Ishmael, which means God hears. You’ll be blessed with countless descendants.” So far so good. “But he’ll be a wild donkey of a man”  the angel adds. In other words, he’s going to turn out to be stubborn and untameable.

The messenger is flagging up that Hagar’s future with her new son isn’t necessarily going to be any more straightforward than her present.

But it’s enough for her. She knew that as a foreigner, a slave, a runaway and a woman she didn’t count for much in her world. But she counted with God. She had seen, and been seen by him. And in response she’d given God a name, the only person in Scripture who ever does so. She called him El Roi – “The God who Sees”.

And so she returns home. And the drama ends with Act 4 - a brief vignette, setting us up for the next part of the story. I imagine this part played out in silhouette. Hagar hauls herself up into a sitting position after giving birth and offers Abram his newborn son, who he receives as though made of porcelain. For all that anyone knows, this Ishmael is the child of the promise.

And Sarai is nowhere to be seen.

 

It’s a powerful episode in the story; and in closing I want to flag up three issues it raises which I think it’s worth our reflecting on.

The first is patience.

Twice, now, in Abram’s story, we’ve seen the problems that surface when patience begins to wear thin.

When nothing seems to be happening, or things don’t seem to be progressing as quickly as we’d like, the temptation is either to impose our own solution – we head off to Egypt or we sleep with a servant girl – or to give in to despair.

Neither is a good option to take; and thankfully there is a third way, described beautifully by Father Richard Rohr in a book of Advent readings I’m using just now.

Rohr is talking about one of the key phrases of Advent – “Come, Lord Jesus”, and he argues that those words can help us to live more patiently with incompleteness, because they remind us that God’s perfect fullness is always ahead of us.

“When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were “Why weren’t you this for me? Why didn’t life do that for me?” we are refusing to say “Come, Lord Jesus”. We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.

Hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content, and even happy, because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.”

Sarai had another option to giving into despair or trying to take the future into her own hands. She could have gone back to the Source. She could have owned the disappointment and the worry and prayed God into the very centre of it. “Come Lord God. Come, Lord Jesus.” Come into this place, where I am lost and worried and confused. What would you have me do here? What would you have me be? Help me be patient in the middle of all this and to wait until your wisdom shows me the way.

Maybe that’s a prayer you need to echo today if you find yourself in a place where your patience has worn thin. “Come, Lord God. Come Lord Jesus. Be here with me, in the middle of all this. Let this difficulty be my teacher. Show me the way through.”

Those are the kind of prayers that rarely go unanswered.

So there’s something to learn here about patience; but also about power.

The dynamics of power in this story are fascinating.

Sarai has power as Abram’s wife, but in the one area she really cares about, she’s powerless. She can’t have kids.

Hagar’s powerless ‘til she gets pregnant and then her newfound power begins to go to her head.

Abram’s weakness in the face of his wife’s anger leaves a power vacuum which Sarai fills with wrath towards Hagar.

And finally God enters the scene, using his power both to console and correct Hagar, and bring her back home.

We’re left with what seems like an uneasy truce where none of the power struggles have been resolved, but for a time they’ve been set aside with the arrival of this new baby.

Power.

It’s interesting to reflect on how many of our associations with that word are negative. We speak of power struggles; of people who are power mad or power hungry and some who struggle to give up power.

We’re familiar with Baron Acton’s much quoted observation that Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But the thing is, in and of itself, power is neutral. As neutral as electricity or magnetism. It’s how you use your power that counts.

Because all of us have power, to at least some degree.

Some acquire power because of their role, or their abilities; their experience or their wealth. But at it’s centre, power is really about our ability to influence relationships.

Put Bill Gates on a desert island without a mobile phone or any lackeys to do his bidding, and he’s as powerless as the rest of us. Maybe more powerless. For all his wealth, in that context he has no power because there’s no-one around to influence.

Go to the other extreme and imagine a newborn baby – completely helpless, but exercising immense power over the lives of mum and dad and siblings. Dominating their relationships and their sleep patterns for months and months to come.

So don’t ever kid yourself that you don’t have power. If you’re involved in a network of relationships - as we all are - you have influence, and that influence is power.

Someone once said that the key question is not “do I have power”, but “what kind power do I have?”

To that, I’d add the following – “and am I using my power the way Christ would want me to?” Am I using my power to manipulate and bully so that I get my way? Or am I using it wisely and collaboratively for the greater good?

In Jesus we follow a servant King who exercised power by washing his disciples’ feet, talking to children, telling stories and placing gentle hands on broken people.

Don’t ever mistake gentleness for weakness. Gentleness is simply power, that’s beautifully controlled.

Powerful men and women come and go and make their mark. But none have ever left the mark that Christ left.

I’ll end with some words from Napoleon Bonaparte who knew a thing or two about power.

"I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him."

We end this morning with Abram and Sarai in view - recognising the problems that we bring upon ourselves when we lose patience or abuse our power.

But we also end with our eyes fixed on Jesus, remembering that in the grace of God it doesn’t have to be that way.

May God enable us to be patient, and wait on him.

And to use the power he’s blessed us with wisely, for the greater good.