I wonder… What stood out to you in this story?

I wonder why the authors of Genesis choose to tell this story at all. Why did they put so much focus on Hagar and Ishmael? The way they are treated makes the chosen family, the heirs of God’s promise, look pretty bad. Wouldn’t it have been easier and safer to write Abraham’s other family out of the story entirely?

Clearly the storytellers want us to see Hagar. They want to show us how God looks through her eyes. Because they portray her doing something utterly unique in the Bible. Normally, God gives names to people. Or sometimes God shares God’s name with us. “I am who I am,” God said when the prophet Moses asked who are you? Hagar; however, named God. “You are El-Roi,” she told God, “the God who sees”. Today’s story from The Book of Belonging puts together two parts of Hagar’s story, the first found in Genesis chapter 16. While still pregnant, Hagar had run away because her master, Sarah treated her so harshly. God’s angel found her by a spring of water and told her to return to her enslavement, for the time being. And then God made the very same promise to Hagar that God had made to Abraham and Sarah, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” The angel told Hagar to call the child about to be born “Ishmael” which means “God hears” (Genesis 16:9–12).

Ancient near eastern law permitted Sarah to use Hagar as a surrogate; she had the legal right to raise Ishmael as her own child. Of course, that was no longer what Sarah wanted once she gave birth to her own biological child, Isaac. Chapter 21 of Genesis notes that Isaac was weaned, meaning he had survived infancy and was old enough to be Abraham’s heir. Since Ishmael was already fourteen when Isaac was born, he would have now been an older teenager approaching adulthood. Sarah urged Abraham to throw Ishmael and his mother out of their household, since otherwise, he would receive a double share of his father’s inheritance, as the oldest son. Strangely the biblical text portrays him as a much younger child with Hagar carrying him in her arms and laying him in the shade—maybe it’s a storytelling device to emphasize their vulnerability?

When Sarah and Abraham treated Hagar and Ishamel with such brutal inhumanity, God noticed and God cared, and so Hagar named God, “the God who sees”. God saw Hagar when she was enslaved, forced into parenthood, and abandoned to die. God saw that her life and that of her child was sacred and worthy of protection. And God saw that with the help of divine compassion and strength she and her family would survive.

The story of Hagar reminds me of the “God’s eyes” crafts I made in childhood. Any else make them? Two sticks crossed, colorful yarn wound around and around to make a bright pattern. It was a favorite activity to keep kids happy and busy at summer bible school, along with seed art (which wasn’t nearly as trendy back then). I don’t ever remember learning about the origin of god’s eyes among the indigenous people of western Mexico. No one ever explained that the god’s eye can represent the all-seeing presence of the god. Or that a god’s eye can give the ability to see and understand things not visible to the physical eye. Or that the god’s eye can be tool of protection for people praying or working, people journeying on foot. Or that when a child is born in some cultures, the father begins weaving a god’s eye, adding one new color for each year until the child turns 5. I find it fascinating and disturbing that my upbringing tamed and whitewashed this powerful spiritual object so successfully that I never thought to wonder if there was more to it. It’s a reminder to me about the limits of my vision and understanding. There is so much I simply do not see as I move through the world.

In contemporary times, Hagar has become an icon for black female theologians known as “womanists”. “Womanist” is a term first coined by Alice Walker. Womanists center the experiences of black women systematically overlooked and devalued by white feminists and black male activists alike. In 1993, Presbyterian theologian and professor Delores Williams published a ground-breaking book called Sisters in the Wilderness which was key in establishing the field of womanist theology. In this book, Williams compares the exploitation of Hagar to the ways Black women were forced to produce and raise their master’s children during slavery and later to work as low wage laborers in white people’s homes.

Williams wrote [in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk]: “For both Hagar and the African-American women, the wilderness experience meant standing utterly alone, in the midst of serious trouble, with only God’s support to rely upon. […] As the result of these hard-time experiences and the encounters with God, Hagar and many African-American women manifested a risk-taking faith. Though she obeyed God’s mandate for her life, Hagar dared to give a name to the God she met in the wilderness. In a sense, this God is her God, and possibly not the God of her slave holders [Abraham and Sarah].”

I’m intrigued by this comment—that Hagar’s God is possibly not the God of her enslavers. It says to me that the habit of exploiting others distorts our view of God, creates false gods, gods whose images are used to bless things that cannot be justified. Because of who I am there will always be limits to my vision, my ability to see God through the eyes of Hagar and her sisters. The ways we each experience oppression and privilege are complicated and multi-layered. Most of us have things in common with both Hagar and her enslavers. We can all learn from womanists who have refused to let racism and sexism shatter their selfhood. Rather than accept the choice offered to them, which was to discard one part of themselves in order to protect the other, they claimed their full selves as worthy, and all their experiences as holy. They teach us that binaries in competition are false gods. There is room for all of us to tend to all our identities, our marginalization and our privilege, our sight and our blindness.

Hagar helps me to see God and the world differently, and I am grateful. I do believe that God, the true God, is on Hagar’s side. And I believe that Jesus, who teaches us the way of solidarity and justice, integrates Hagar and Ishmael into his family tree as a corrective to the legacy of his biological and cultural ancestors. And at the very same time, I believe that God shows compassion and seeks liberation for Sarah and Abraham too. God loves those lured by scarcity and entitlement, those who cling to privileges that rest on the abuse of others. God want us to feel secure even in an insecure world. If the descendants of colonizers and enslavers keep hoarding their money, privilege and power and handing it down from one generation to the next, then security will elude all of us. True safety and well-being comes a community of sharing, sharing the wealth and sharing the risk.

Friends, Hagar and her sisters teach us that we can be “both/and” people. Good people can be limited in our vision. Good people can embody the evil behaviors and patterns of thought we were taught. Good people can wrestle with an inheritance of injustice. The question is, how will you, whoever you are, grow in your ability to see? How will you expand the scope of your vision? What oppressive viewpoints do you need to say “no” to in order to move through the world as one who shares in the compassion and the liberating power of the God who sees?