Our Unexpected God: The God Who Sees the Invisible *Sorry the Audio is Bad*

The story of Hagar reveals a God who sees those pushed to society's margins. When Abraham and Sarah's impatience led them to use Hagar as a surrogate, she became caught in a cycle of abuse and abandonment. Fleeing to the wilderness, Hagar encountered God who called her by name and promised her descendants. She became the first person in Scripture to name God - El Roi, the God who sees. Though God didn't immediately fix her circumstances, He provided dignity, sustenance, and hope. Hagar's story reminds us that God sees the invisible and calls us to refuse creating new systems of oppression.

Transcript

I don't know why technology doesn't work, but sometimes it just doesn't. Hey, friends, if you have a Bible, I'm going to invite you to open up to the book of Genesis. If you don't know this, it is at the very beginning of your Bible. We're going to start in Genesis 16 with verse one, and we're going to read through 16 and keep your Bible handy because we're going to open it up again later to Genesis 21. So 16, verse 21 here in a couple of minutes.

So be prepared if you don't have your Bible reading this morning. I highly encourage it. But if you don't have it, you can follow along on the screen. Hear now the word of the Lord for us this morning. Genesis 16:1 says this.

Now, Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar. So she said to Abram, the Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her. Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

So after Abram had been living in Canaan 10 years, Sarai, his wife, took her different slaves, Hagar, and gave her to her husband to be his wife. She slept with Hagar and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, you are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave into your arms, and now that she knows he is pregnant, she despises me.

May the Lord judge between you and I. Your slave is in your hands. Hagar said, do with her whatever you think best. Then Sarai mistreated Hagar, so she fled from her. The angel of the lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert.

It was a spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? I am running away from my mistress, Sarai, she answered. Then the angel of the Lord told her, go back to your mistress and submit to her. The angel added, I will increase your descendants so much that they will be feeding Earth's account.

The angel of the Lord also said to her, you are now pregnant, and you shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey among you. His hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him. And he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. She gave this name to the Lord who spoke with him.

You are the God who sees she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. This is why the well was called Deer Raphai Roi. It is still there between Kadesh and Berez. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave him the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

We have talked about this story before, and I have talked about it in the perspective of man. This really we hear when your wife tells you to flee to the middle right men. Anybody ever had that happen to them? No. It's a good thing.

That gets all confusing and weird and it's wrong. Don't do it. But today we're going to be looking at the story from a different perspective. We're going to be looking at it from Hagar's perspective. And I don't think that we ever really spend much time looking at the stories that we hear biblically through the eyes of those who are in the march today.

We're going to look at it from a different perspective. There are moments in our lives, I think, that many of us have felt where we have slipped off the map. You ever felt like that? Like you've gone to a place in your life where everything just. Maybe you don't feel seen.

Maybe not just moments where you feel unnoticed, but your whole life makes you feel like you're unnoticeable. Times in life where you think no one could ever see what it's going on in your life or what you're going through. Moments where you wonder, does God even recognize me? And where I am in the midst of all this strife that I'm dealing with.

If we're honest, sometimes the people who should see us, they don't. Sometimes the people who should protect us sometimes also don't. We're going to talk more about that later.

Even worse is when sometimes that the people who claim to know God the most act in ways that look nothing to God.

That's why we need to hear stories like Hagar's story. Nobody ever calls this Hagar story, right? Who are we talking about here? Abram and Sarah? Right.

Abraham and Sarah, who they become. But one of the things I think we've forgotten about the Bible and an aspect of God's word that makes this particular story so important, that the Bible is not just a book about heroes. As much as we would love it to be a book about heroes, it's a book about the people that the heroes sometimes fail. The Bible who read it correctly is a book about the people in God's stories who end up getting pushed to the margin.

About the ones who took off the map in a book about a God who goes off the map looking for them too. We need these quote unquote minor characters as a part of the big picture because they tell truth about major characters that sometimes they can't tell themselves. Characters like Hagar reveal the cracks in the story that we tend to patch over and cover up and not really spend a whole lot of time thinking these stories. When you read them in scripture with fresh eyes, they also reveal to us God who's refusing to let the forgotten stay forgotten.

Today we meet a woman in scripture who just changes us. If we hear her story, she becomes the very first person in scripture to actually give her name to God.

It's hard to think about it like that, right? It wasn't Abraham that did it. It wasn't a prophet or a preacher. It was an Egyptian woman. It was a slave who was escaping from hardship in the moment of healing the least pain she's ever felt named God.

The story reveals some pretty amazing things about. So when we open up in Genesis 16, the story begins with hinging in the previous chapters of Genesis that we didn't have a chance to read. God has promised Abram and Sarai not just a child, but more descendants than the number of hand grains on the feature. More descendants than the number of stars in the sky. God has made a very big promise.

And here it is years and years later and there's been no development. There's no pregnancy, there's no children and women. Sorry. And Sarai and Abram are really starting to question God. Are you serious?

Because it doesn't feel like you're being honest.

And when the waiting becomes unbearable for Adriel and Feri, they begin to improvise a little bit in the plan. I think improvise is a sweet word, diplomacy in the midst of, hey, go sleep with another woman. But sometimes we become so impatient too that we begin to force outcomes in our own also, right? We start to begin to solve spiritual problems with human strategy. And when we start interfering with a plan that we don't really know how it's going to work out, we sometimes tend to be the wrong.

Sarah begins to take matters into her own. She gives Hagar her Egyptian slaves to Abraham as a surrogate. In the ancient world, the crazy thing is totally legal. You can have multiple wives. It literally says she gave him to her as a wife.

It wasn't just legal, it was normal. It was Totally fine. Women's bodies, especially those of women who were enslaved, didn't belong to them. Their bodies could be weakened any way that their masters thought. But Church, I want to take a second and remind us that just because something is normal or legal doesn't necessarily mean it's holy.

Just because something is legal or people have done it, it doesn't make it. Just because something is totally acceptable doesn't mean that God blesses that thing. Okay? After Hagar lies with Abraham, Hagar becomes pregnant. And after that, suddenly the power dynamics begin to shift, right?

Sarah feels threatened. So Hagar becomes the target of Sarai's jealous anger. In that moment, rather than becoming a protector of the innocent, Abraham says, if she is your slave, he would do whatever you want. Then Sarah, the slaveholder, becomes abusive. Here's the part that we skip over.

I think in this story, the people who supposedly know God best sometimes act like God the least. And we can see that in this story, Abraham and Sarah, the heroes of our case, the heroes of this story, become the source of somebody else's pain. These characters in the Bible that we've all sung songs about and read about for thousands of years have become white, blocked representatives of God's expectations of each of us while we swept the suffering of Hagar under the rug. Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons have died away, but never really thought about.

Women.

I don't want to go deep into it at this point, it's a whole different sermon. But nowhere in that song are any of the women in the story mentioned. Nowhere is a mention of a slave woman who was forced to sleep with her husband.

And then they begin to interfere with God's plan. And through that interference, Abraham and Sarah don't just make a mistake in that moment, they create a system that we conveniently ignore. Church We've got to read deeper into the stories and wrestle with the wrongs that have been committed in the name of God. And I don't think we do that enough. We as a church have to begin to address the things that we have left unintressed for thousands of years so that we can recognize the story.

No matter how heroic we sometimes make people out to be. Everyone in Scripture is a flawed character. Everything is flawed with the exception of Jesus, right? If we've conveniently forgotten about the mistakes of those who come before us, we will also forget that we have a tendency to want to make those same mistakes. We have to know our path so we don't recreate the same mistakes of our past.

But in verse 6 the text says Sarah dealt harshly with agar. The Hebrew word here is the same word. It's the same root word. It's anah, which means to hurt somebody or to abuse them. It's the same word that's used in how the Pharaoh treats all of the Israelite people in the story of the Exodus, defiling them, afflicting them.

The same root word talks about this terrible state of slavery that deceiving people experience. So in this moment, way before the Exodus, Hagar becomes a living example of Israel's future oppression in Egypt, long before the state of Israel even existed.

Hagar here, Jesus as a foreshadowing, as a representation of what will happen to God's people.

The Abraham and Sarah narrative. Hagar is being treated brutally by God's people. Weird reversal of roles. There is no lack of irony here in this story. One of the painful things that we have to realize is that sometimes the people we hurt the most are also the ones who would carry our people forward.

Right, Take our duel. She's mistreated by Sarah. She runs, she flees into the wilderness. She's alone, she's pregnant, she's exhausted. She's got to be terrified out there in the wilderness.

And this is where the story begins to take a turn. Because scripture says the angel of the Lord found her there by a spring of water. Hagar doesn't go to the temple. She's not found in a church somewhere or a holy place. She's not worshipping out in the wilderness.

She's literally scared for her life. She feels like she's got no hope at home since she runs into the wilderness with assured death, because it's better for her to die alone in the wilderness than at the hands of Sarah and Abraham, whom we have raised as heroes. Could you think about that for a second?

God finds her alone and scared there in the wilderness when it says the angel of the Lord. And I did a class on Genesis last year for seminary. And one of the things that the rabbi taught us is that when you hear the praise and angel of the Lord, that's often godfold, right? So sometimes you can use them interchangeably, and sometimes sister does that by herself too. So an angel of the Lord calls her by name.

God's voice says, take it. And if you read the story for the first time, she's not referred to as a slave woman or the Egyptian slave. She's got a name. We know because the narrative says that her name is Hagar. But we don't find it out officially until this Moment, her master of the culture, Hagar, her master's husband, doesn't call her Hagar.

God speaks to Hagar and says, hagar, where are you going? Where have you come from? What are you doing?

But he doesn't just call her Hagar. He says, hagar, slave of Sarai. And I don't think that God does this to shame Hagar, calling her a slave, like knocking her down a peg. This is God locating her story. This is God saying, I see you.

I see the situation that you've come out of. I see what's happening to you. I know who you are. We've talked to her a number of times about how important naming is, right? We talked about the importance of what names mean.

And we talked about Isaac, Jacob and Abram turning to Abraham, and Jacob becoming Israel. And here in this moment, God becomes the first to address Chezon by her full name.

And fear and disgrace, pregnancy and the abuse.

I love you enough to show up in the wilderness besides you.

God begins to speak to her. He says, I will greatly multiply your offspring. And remember, that's the same promise that he gives to Abraham. It's a beautiful promise of hopeful woman who has no husband, really, right? The woman who's run away.

And this is where the story gets more complicated. Because before God gives her that promise, God gives her a command. Go back.

Did you just say you want me to go back and continue in my slavery?

And we just read that friends like, hey, go back and be faithful. Go back and endure the punishment and the hardships and. And everything will be fine. And when we're reading it through the eyes of the abused, that is awful.

No, go back and submit is even worse. Go back and accept it, right? Go back and do what they're telling you to do. Go do, right? It's an awful situation.

I want God to say, hallelujah, you're healed. Bring you out of the situation of slavery. That's the God that I want in this moment. That's not the God that we get. Go back to the situation you came from.

Go back to the system that saw you as somebody else's property.

Why didn't God then confess Abraham and Sarah? All right, guys, listen, I heard from Hagar you've not been knighted.

Why doesn't God liberate the slave in the home of God? Why not change her future forever with the freedom that we've equated with God, Right? We hear and we sing about the freedom that God provides, but not for Hagar in this moment.

But Hagar's story tells us the truth that sometimes we even want to admit God doesn't always rescue us from the systems that harm us. But I promise you this church, God never abandons us in those situations. Sometimes we, the people who believe in a loving God, sometimes we have to be the ones to rescue others from those situations. And we can only do that at this strength of time.

So Hagar is still a slave. She's still vulnerable, she's still mistreated in the midst of that complicated history, God sees her, speaks to her, calls her by name, and then she is the one who names God first.

It's not the rescue we want, but in that moment it becomes for Hagar the hope that she needed friends. I believe that God's compassion is always immediate. It's not justice, though, sometimes is slow and steady and works in ways that we don't quite understand. God's justice is layered and complicated. We want a system of justice, of its immediate.

That looks like immediate rescue. It looks like systemic overthrow. It looks like right out being wrong every time. And sometimes that's just not how it works.

But in the midst of God's slow and steady move toward justice, we have to be people who stand with God. We partner with God to bring about changes and systems that harm our brothers and sisters today.

How can justice ever look like sending a slave back to a heathen house? That's the hardest question of the story and I don't want to dodge it this morning. So here's the this story doesn't look like our understanding of justice. It looks like survival. While this might sound terrible, sometimes survival is the only justice available in a broken world in that specific moment.

I want to remind you of a couple things here. When we read through this story, I have to say it. Just because God sent back to Abram and Sarai doesn't mean that God endorses church. Hear me when I say this. There is nothing about our God that I believe would ever lead me to think that God will approve of slavery.

Ever. I guarantee that God does not bless your abuse. What's happening in those moments? The reality of Hagar's story is that God refuses to abandon his device. God gives Hagar in this moment, God gives her dignity by calling her by name for the first time in the story, God gives her a promise that is equal and on par to the same promise he gave Abram, the father of our faith.

In that moment, he gives her a future and a voice begins her well in the desert and a nation.

God doesn't Fix the system in this moment, even though I bet all of us wanted to. But in this moment, God refuses to let the system define who Hagar is.

What does this mean when we look at justice issues in our own time, right? It means that if we are not being delivered from our slavery, our addictions, our depressions, our traumas, our family history, the systems that oppress us, our grief, our loneliness, if we're not done with all those things right in this moment, it doesn't mean that God is absent.

It means that God might be working behind the scenes to do for us the same thing that God did. For God sees us. God is naming us. God is giving us dignity. God is sustaining us in the midst of some of the hardest journey we've ever walked through.

God is promising us a future just like he did for Abon, walking with us through the wilderness. Even the moment we don't see that movement church, there are going to be moments in our hurt where we don't feel like we are free yet. But in those moments where we don't feel free, we have to remember that we're not forgotten. Sometimes this is a type of mood toward justice that keeps us alive long enough to keep that the true and everlasting justice is coming.

And then comes a moment in the story that changes everything we think and understand about that story. In verse 13, he says, you are the God who sees me. The Hebrew word here is el roi. If you've ever heard somebody named Elroy, right, they are named after the God who saved him in that moment. She calls God the God who sees me.

She isn't just making a one time statement. She's not just declaring God sees me. She is naming God after one of God's attributes. God who sees her is a God who sees those that others receive. She defines God's character.

She becomes a theologian there in the wilderness, connecting with experience with the God in her own story. This isn't just a small detail. This is not the footnote that we turned it into. After generations and generations and generations of hearing about Abraham and Paris group the first time that anybody gives God a name and God allows it, God receives it and God honors it. Why does God do that?

Because the people at the center of the story, who we know are Abraham and Sarah. They have failed to see the circumstances. They neglect to see this woman at the margins of society. And God honors it because the one the promise has forgotten, the one who carries part of the promise inside of them. Their plan, let's fix it.

God's Going to give us all these offspring and children. Let's help God along a little bit. Hagar, go be with me. She is bearing part of the promise were Abraham's.

God allows Hagar to name him. Because the ones who know God best have acted in this moment as God believed. She says, I have now seen the one who sees me in that moment. God enslaved woman, the one that they had overlooked and mistreated become the one who defines the character of God forever. The truth here in the story is that sometimes God lets the effect become realism for us.

Sometimes God lets the wounded become the truth tellers to speak against the situations they find themselves in. Sometimes they need to get to be the people that God has created to be godless, the forgotten. To become the ones who really reveal who God is for the rest of the and we don't just see that in the Bible, we see that in human history too. Martin Luther King Jr. An oppressed black man, becomes a theologian that reminds the oppressed African American brothers and sisters of God's lawful freedom for all people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a priest imprisoned by the Nazis for speaking truth to power.

He was eventually executed for resisting the evil of the Nazi party. From his prison cell he wrote papers and letters that still bear theological resonance for us today. You've all probably heard the name Malala Yousafzai. She was a young woman who was shot in the head for just wanting an education in a country that oppressed women and didn't want women to be smart. When she survived that gunshot, she became a powerful voice for justice and equality and dignity of girls and women all around the world.

Her wound became her witness. He put the name Nelson Mandela. He was in prison for 27 years because he just wanted to bring freedom to South Africa from the oppressive system of apartheid. It was forcing black South Africans to be subjugated. They were second class citizens under white rule and oppression.

He was beaten and silenced and forgotten in jail. He was finally released himself. Impeachment League with Vengeance in the park he had a better vision of what the world could be without racism, without violence. It's clear to me that God doesn't always immediately fix the outward visible problem, but instead uses the voices of those who are on the margin to bring to us a better version of society that's more inclusive and more like us and his kingdom. For us, we overlook.

God sees the overlookers, doesn't just notice them. God doesn't just acknowledge them. God sees them. He sees the pain, the injustices, the fear. Here's the part that you can always hit home for us.

God sees you even when others don't.

Here we go. Here's the perfect, wonderful ending of the story. You ready? God fixes it all. And everything is going at the very end.

Oh, wait, that. Oh, no. Oh, no, there's more. Okay, yeah. So the story doesn't end with everything getting fixed in the way that we want it to.

If we open up to Genesis 21, Hagar goes away again. This time she's got her son Ishmael by her side. Let's read together. The story picks up again. After Abraham and Sarah have conceived their own child, Isaac is born.

Their only son is born to them, the male child. And here's what happens Next. In Genesis 21:8, 21, it says the child grew and was weaned. They're talking about Isaac here. And on the day that Isaac was weaned, Abraham held a great peak.

But Sarah saw that the son who Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abram was mocking. And she said to Abraham, get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman's son will never share in the inheritance of my son Isaac. The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it inflamed her son. Now it didn't matter. Remember when she had said the same thing earlier, when she was pregnant and hadn't had a son yet?

Now that the son is around, it kind of makes a difference for Abraham. But God says, hey, Abraham, it's fine. He said, do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Now God doesn't even use her name. Here.

Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave into a nation also because he is your offspring. Early the next morning, Abraham and all of his goodness, his belief in God and his wonderful dignity and his aptitude and his great behavior, took some food and a skin of water and gave them to agal. He set them out on her shoulders and then sent her off with a boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Moshe.

When the water and skin was gone, she took the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bow shot away, for she thought I could not.

As she sat there, she began to sob. I didn't think any of us would.

God heard the voice from him, the angel. God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, what is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies There. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand.

For I will make him into a great nation. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled with skin with water and gave his way for him. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer.

While he was living in the desert of Haran, his mother got a wife with him from Egypt.

He and wife Hagar and Ismail again kicked out of their home and sent in the desert. And what does it say? They were sent with some food. I wonder what that looks like. What is some food for you.

Is that a lunch? Right. And the paved tin of water for the pool?

Where are they located? You know, Abraham, God's faithful servant is sending out the mother of his first child along with that child into the wilderness with just enough supplies so they can get far enough away from the camp that they can die. But it doesn't bother me, right? Come through. Here's some water.

Have a nice life. That again seems awful, doesn't it? When they run out of water, out of desperation, Hagar places Ishmael under a bush. Walked away because she just can't guarantee them die in the wilderness in the heat of the desert alone. The scripture said God heard the boy crying.

It wasn't Abraham's prayer that he could cover them in protection. It wasn't Sarah's worship. It wasn't an intercession by a priest acting on their behalf. God hears the voice of those crying in the wilderness alone.

This child was outside the covenant of Abraham. Remember, this is a child that the religious people at the center of the story would never.

God hears when God sees them both. And when God in that moment acts, he saves them both. Church Even when we are not delivered from our slavery, God gives us hope that someday all things will be made right. I don't like living in that. I want things to be right now.

It is hard reality to be human in the world that we don't have as much control over as we'd like to. Hagar's story is not a story about instant liberation. The story of sustaining presence. The story of God's solidarity with those who are the outcasts of society. With the slaves and the ones on the margins.

Hagar's story is one of hope that refuses to dying Liver So I hope you've heard a different version of the story today. And I hope that you guys. We begin to see what a retelling of Abraham and his story looks like when we retell it with Hagar at the center. The story means that God sees the in his miracle field invisible, even though it feels like hope is too far away. This story means that God sees the immigrants of fields out of place in the world that just wants them out of sight.

This is what it means for us. That God sees a teenager who heals that day of the law means that God sees a person sitting in church wondering if anybody would notice that they just disappeared someday.

Church. I want to remind you that the wilderness is not evidence of God being asked to come alive. The wilderness is often a place where God's presence is becomes recognizable and undeniable for us. The story also calls us something deeper. If we follow the gods who do Hagars, we happen people who refuse to create new Hagars.

Today, we can never use people to solve our problems. And we get to the face of the story. That's what happens. We cannot ignore the suffering of our systems that we have helped. We can never hide behind religious language while somebody else pays the price.

Following Jesus means seeing people that we'd rather overlook.

It means protecting the people we'd rather ignore. Following Jesus means making sure that no one else lives off the natural. No one goes unnoticed or unseen.

That's kind of a small part of what we got to experience.

I hope that we're connecting these things right. Barbecue isn't just about a good time where we get to just have a bunch of meat together. Barbecue for us was an opportunity where we finally got to learn the names of some more homeless nature who I've seen around here and not been able to have a conversation. That means we are giving dignity to people who would never walk into a barbecue restaurant and get that kind of food for free.

Last week we had an opportunity for our church to let people know that even though they feel unseen, they should live.

How do we live with a story that doesn't end the way we want it to?

How do we make peace with a God in this moment who doesn't immediately or always fix the things that have broken?

Hagar does. That means we have to see our pain. We have to tell what's going on. We have to cling to a God who sees us in the midst of the hurt. And we have to trust that the story isn't over.

No matter how much we want to interfere, no matter how. As much as we want to make it right, we have to let God work. It means that in this moment we believe that God's justice is still unfolding in ways that we might not understand children is truth. You can be okay with a story because God is not done writing your story.

Chaos story doesn't end with freedom, but it does with teacher.

Church of God. See that we can never really be lost. We can never really be stuck.