HAGAR IN THE WILDERNESS

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with the word of hope.

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Hagar in the wilderness, the God who sees. And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her. Thou God seeest me.

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For she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me seen by God in exile.

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She was a slave with no name of her own in her master's house, running into a desert that could kill her. She was carrying a child, a pregnancy, and a grief she could not put into words. Hagar was in a desperate situation. She was an Egyptian, likely acquired by Abraham and Sarai during their sojourn in Egypt, and in the household economy of the ancient Near East, she existed as property, a womb Sarai couldn't use to secure an ear when her own body would not cooperate. When the plan worked and Hagar conceived, the fragile arrangement collapsed into contempt, jealousy and harsh, harsh treatment. The Hebrew word describing Sarah is dealing with her from the root Anna is the same word later used for Egypt's oppression of Israel. Hagar tasted the very cruelty her people would one day inflict, and she fled south toward Shore on the road back to Egypt, back to the only home she had known. The wilderness of Shore was no gentle countryside. It was a sunscorched expanse of rock and thorn scrub, where a lone pregnant woman without provisions was realistically walking toward her death. She had no legal standing, no husband to defend her, no clan to receive her, and a child she could not feed. This is the picture of abandonment. A person the world had used and discarded, sitting beside a spring of water in a place named for a road that led nowhere good. No one in Abraham's tent was looking for her. As far as human society was concerned, Hagar had simply vanished. But God came through. It is precisely here, unsought, unnamed by anyone else, that the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness. Scholars such as Victor Hamilton note the striking dignity of this encounter. God addresses her by name Hagar, servant of Sarai, the first time anyone in the narrative has spoken her name aloud. Nahum Sarna observes that Hagar becomes the first person in scripture to receive an annunciation, an annunciation of a birth, and remarkably the only person in the entire Bible who dares to give God a name. Out of her desperation she coins a title Elroy, the God who sees me. The Hebrew wordplay is rich. Hagar marvels. Have I really seen him who looks after me? The same word, the same root for seeing Ra tumbling over itself. Derek Kidna draws out the tender irony that a foreign slave woman, the lowest figure in the household, perceives something about God that the patriarch and his wife had missed. That the Almighty is not only the God of covenants and promises, but a God who bends down to notice the overlooked. God does not immediately change her circumstances. He sends her back, but he changes everything by seeing her and giving her a future she could name. There is a particular loneliness in being unseen. You can be surrounded by people at work, at church, even at home, and still feel like the one whose pain no one has bothered to notice. Maybe you have been used and then set aside. Maybe you have run out into the into a wilderness of your own, a diagnosis, a divorce, a silence where a relationship used to be, convinced that no one came looking. The God of Hagar found a slave woman by a desert spring and called her by name. He knows exactly where you are. He knows where you are sitting right now, and he knows the road you are tempted to walk down. You are not invisible to him. Before you clean yourself up, before your situation improves, before anyone else notices, Elroy already sees you. Let that truth comfort you today. The God who runs the universe is also the God who counts your tears. O God, thank you for being El Roy, the God who sees me, the God who sees us. Thank you that we are not invisible to you to you, even when we feel forgotten by everyone else. Please meet us in our wilderness. Call us by name and give us a future that we can hope in. We thank you. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.