Abraham, Hagar, and the God who sees me.

Il Guercino, Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael

Few stories in the Old Testament are as dramatic as Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac. The story is troubling, moving, confusing, and compelling. We can't help but imagine ourselves in Abraham's place — or in Isaac's. We can't help wondering how God could require such a thing, and how Abraham could dare to tie his son to the altar and raise the knife. We feel immense relief and release when the ram in the thicket takes Isaac's place. And the sense of relief is real: we too have been spared by a Lamb that God has provided.

When that lesson comes up every four years in the curriculum cycle, it makes for a rich discussion in Sunday School. Some class members are genuinely inspired by Abraham's faith and subsequent deliverance; some draw from Abraham's example the courage they need for their own tests of faith. I appreciate hearing how others find meaning, but I always seem to come to the story in a state of emotional conflict, a state of protest. I am reluctant to celebrate it as a great example of obedience and sacrifice. It's just too disturbing. Does God really test people by telling them to murder their own children? That question looms large for me, and pretending that everything makes perfect sense is not helpful. In fact, it's impossible. Hearing from other members of my faith, those with different viewpoints, gives me balance. Our collective grappling with the story adds depth and perspective to my private struggles.

As showstopping as the near-sacrifice of Isaac is, this time through I found myself focusing on a part of the lesson that is usually not given much attention: the story of Hagar and Ishmael. Maybe it's because I have two boys of my own now, maybe it's because oppression is on my mind, or maybe it's just that I'm paying closer attention this year. Whatever the reason, Hagar's and Ishmael's story wrapped itself around my mind.

Hagar is Sarah's Egyptian bondwoman. She is owned by Sarah¹, and when Sarah can't conceive, she gives Hagar to Abraham as a second wife or concubine. When Hagar gets pregnant, "her mistress [is] despised in her eyes." Sarah, blistering at Hagar's disrespect, responds so harshly that the pregnant Hagar runs away. But Hagar sees an angel who tells her to turn back and reassures her that she will have many descendants through the son that she is carrying.

Years later, when Ishmael is probably in his teens, Sarah bears Isaac, the promised child of the covenant. And then comes the abandonment. This is the first time I've pondered the story of Ishmael since having children of my own, and I almost can't bear the sadness of it. Sarah sees Ishmael "mocking²." She tells Abraham to banish his own child, saying, "the son of this bondwoman will not be heir with my son." Incredibly, God commands Abraham to go along with it. Hagar has to leave her home. Ishmael has to leave his father. Abraham loses his son.

With all of the drama of the sacrifice of Isaac, this earlier sacrifice of Ishmael is understandably overshadowed. But this time, Abraham and Ishmael are not spared. There is no ram in the thicket. Ishmael is gone.

We know that Abraham loves Ishmael. After God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a son and become the mother of nations, his joy is mixed with concern for his first son. He cries, "Oh, that Ishmael might live before thee!" I imagine that Abraham is saying, "But what about Ishmael? Can't he be a covenant child too?" Indeed, it is a mystery to me why Ishmael and Isaac can't both be part of the covenant. Maybe Ishmael and Hagar are not willing to follow God's laws. They are both depicted in the Biblical account as lacking respect, at least on occasion, either for Sarah or for her son. We might describe them today as having "bad attitudes." Given the family structure that they are part of, I can hardly blame them.

So Ishmael and Hagar are cast out from the household and left to wander in the desert with bread and a bottle of water. When the supplies run out, they almost die, but Hagar again sees an angel, and this one saves her life. He shows her a well of water and tells her that Ishmael will become a great nation. We can take some solace in the statement that God is with the lad as he grows up, and perhaps in the fact that much later, when Abraham dies, he is buried by both Isaac and Ishmael. (I wish we knew more about what must have been a poignant burial and family reunion of sorts.)

In this deeply disturbing story of family dysfunction and cultural oppression, there is one passage that particularly touches me and offers a glimmer of hope. When Hagar runs away from Sarah, the angel of the Lord appears to her in the desert. Before giving her instruction about her future, the angel address her: "Hagar, Sarai’s maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?" I find it significant that Abraham and Sarah refer to Hagar as "my maid," or "thy maid," or "this bondwoman," but that the angel of the Lord calls her by name³.

Hagar is evidently moved by this encounter, and I am moved by her words:

And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me? Genesis 3:16

I find it striking that Hagar calls the name of the Lord, "Thou God seest me." Other translations give her these words: "You are the God who sees me."

You are the God who sees me.

The concubine, the runaway bondwoman, the person with the least social standing in the family, living under the weight of oppressive cultural traditions that rob her of her dignity, is twice visited by an angel.

She is seen by God. And in the end it is God who saves her.




____________________________________________________________________________
¹For simplicity, I am using the names Sarah and Abraham here even though at this point in the story, their names are actually Sarai and Abram.
²An interesting detail of this story is that the name Hagar means "flight," giving rise to speculation that this was not her personal name, but a descriptive name used later when the story was recorded. Read more about the name here.
³The word "mocking" is loaded with connotation, including possible sexual overtones. Click here and scroll down to the comments to read my questions and discussion about the word with the author of the blog Benjamin the Scribe.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Bonus Material:

If you stuck to the assigned reading, you skipped Chapter 20, which wasn't included in the lesson. Here, Abraham's story takes on an almost goofy absurdity. To my weary mind, it was a welcome change from the gravity of the other chapters. Here is a summary:

When they journey to Gerar, Abraham tells everyone that Sarah is his sister so that King Abimelech won't challenge Abraham to a duel (or whatever they did in those days) in order to win Sarah for himself. This is the second time Abraham has pulled that trick (see Genesis 12 where the same thing happens in Egypt), and sure enough, Abimelech takes Sarah into his household. As a punishment, God makes the women of Abimelech's house infertile. Luckily, before Abimelech gets a chance to have his way with Sarah, the Lord explains the situation to him in a dream. So he returns Sarah to Abraham, along with a bunch of extra servants and livestock and stuff, to make up for taking his wife. Abraham explains that he technically wasn't lying, because Sarah actually is his sister — same father, different mother! The story ends happily with Abraham healing Abimelech's household.

If we read these chapters chronologically, this episode happens when Sarah is pretty old. It comes after Ishmael's birth, and after Abraham is promised a son through Sarah and responds, "Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?" This is probably a good example of the need to take Bible chronology with a grain of salt. On the other hand, I kind of like the idea of an ancient, white-haired Sarah being totally irresistible to Abimelech, king of Gerar.  

Paul and Phoebe

This is a guest post by my sister Rosemary. It also appears on her blog dearmessyroom.wordpress.com

I often read the Bible on my morning subway commute. If I can get a seat early on, then I have enough time to read a couple of chapters before I have to worry about transferring trains and getting back into the jostle of hurrying commuters. I've gotten into the habit of bringing my French Bible, partly because it gives me an excuse to practice my French, partly because some of my fellow Crown Heights commuters are Caribbean francophones and I like to feel that we have a point of connection, and partly because my French Bible is lightweight with a sturdy spine—well-suited to being slung into a backpack and carried around all day.

Anyway, the other day I was finishing Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and I came across a mind-opening section: Chapter 16. This chapter doesn't have much doctrine in it; it's instead Paul's sign-off to a long-ish list of Roman church members. Although I had read them in English, the first two verses in French left me amazed. 

"Je vous recommande Phoebé, notre soeur, qui est diaconesse de l'Église de Cenchrées, afin que vous la receviez en notre Seigneur d'une manière digne des saints, et que vous l'assistiez dans les choses où elle aurait besoin de vous, car elle en a donné aide à plusieurs et à moi-même." 

My own translation is this: "I commend to you Phoebe, our sister, who is deacon of the Church in Kekhries, that you receive her in our Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you assist her in the things that she may require of you, for she has helped myself and many." The word "diaconesse" was the bombshell. How had I missed the fact that there was a female deacon in the early church? Was this a priestly calling? I wondered why Phoebe hadn't come up as an example of female leadership before, until I went home and found that the KJV names her as a 'servant' rather than 'deacon,' — a word that disguises the attention Paul gives to her with the same kind of submissive roles that I'm used to seeing assigned to women. Ever the curious etymologist, I looked in my Greek New Testament. The word was 'diakonos', a word that is the root of our present day 'deacon' and can also be translated as 'servant' or 'minister'.

After my re-reading the verse in English and then in Greek, I realized that Phoebe may not have been blessing the holy communion or performing the kind of priesthood ordinances that we moderns might think of as a 'deacon's' job. And while I am excited by the possibility of Phoebe as a priesthood holder, my excitement doesn't depend on that. Maybe to explain it I'll share another story. When I was getting ready to enter the Missionary Training Center, I got a packet in the mail with visa information, including a "minister's license." It was in Italian, and standing in the kitchen my father and I excitedly pieced together a translation of it. This is a vivid memory for me as my first stab at the Italian language, but it was also the first time I realized that in the eyes of the Italian government, I would hold the same title as the young men missionaries. I wasn't just a "sister," I was a minister. 
 
So now let me relate this back to the excitement of Phoebe's role. What is thrilling here is that she seems to have a distinct calling of administration and specific authority that is recognized and relied upon by Paul. So often, I feel that women are left in a mushy area of following their own spiritual promptings for the good of individual people, while their role as church officers (their callings) is downplayed. Thus their capacity to work and receive inspiration on behalf of a group is not given the chance to flourish. Even in callings that require women to work in an organizational and administrative capacity (and that's a lot of callings), I think women often feel like they're coming in the back door on inspiration — that it's not their right and responsibility to be leaders, or that because the buck always stops with the bishop (or EQ president, or stake president), their leadership doesn't really affect men at all (unless they're little boys in Primary, I guess). 

So, to sum up, I love the Phoebe story because it gives two remedies for this obstacle to women's spiritual growth: First, it names Phoebe's calling. Whether we call her a minister or a deacon, she is something. She's not just a nice lady with a soft heart who follows her instincts of goodness; she has an identifiable role. Second, Paul, as a male leader, is pointed in his recognition of her influence on both the group ('plusieurs') and himself ('moi-meme'). She's not his mother or any kind of biological or legal family member. Sometimes I think men in our church are embarrassed or feel that it's not quite proper to praise the capacities of females outside their own families. Paul has no such qualms. Paul is unashamed to point out that the woman Phoebe has succored him — he feels no need to qualify her leadership role.

So, Phoebe's role is what I want for the women of the Church. I want women to know that they have specific and needed roles to fulfill, in addition to their roles within families. I also want them to recognize that they are leaders of men, not just of other women or children (whether in an official capacity in a particular church calling or simply in personal interactions). And finally, I want men to be as clearly supportive as Paul is — giving credit to women as leaders in their words and in practice. 

Fellow citizens of the household of God.

          

          
             Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with 
             the saints, and of the household of God.    Ephesians 2:19

Years ago, when I was still teaching high school, one of the boys on the quiz bowl team that I coached lost his father to cancer. I went to the funeral, and I brought with me several members of the team, all of them teenagers, all of them somewhere on the social fringe of their high school peers¹. I felt a kinship with these young men and women. I enjoyed their enthusiasm for obscure trivia, their out-of-the-mainstream interests, and their quirky brand of academic achievement.

Our best player was a kid I'll call Steven. He had a vast expanse of knowledge, and his buzzer finger was like lightning. But he was difficult to manage: Smarter than most people he knew, he was socially awkward and sometimes abrasive or even obnoxious. On more than one occasion, I had to apologize on his behalf to the other coaches at competitions.

Steven came from an evangelical Christian family who attended a mega-church just down the road from the high school. When we walked into the Presbyterian church where the funeral was held, he commented on how much he liked hearing the organ that was playing. In his church, he told me, they were accompanied by a worship band instead.

The funeral service was lovely, filled with sorrow, hope, and with the joy of Christ. I was pleased to be there with these teenagers, who were respectful and uncharacteristically solemn as they showed support for their friend.

Then came the moment when something barely perceptible happened, something that was almost nothing and yet left an indelible imprint on my mind. The congregation stood to sing "Amazing Grace," a song I love and usually sing with as much gusto as is appropriate for the given situation. The other members of the team sang inaudibly or not at all, but Steven knew the words, and he sang the melody in a clear, thin voice. This was my song, and this was his song too. We stood shoulder to shoulder, an Evangelical teenager and his Mormon quiz bowl coach, singing a song about Jesus, singing about sin, redemption, hope, grace. There was no trace of abrasiveness in the boy standing next to me. In that fleeting moment, I felt that we were spiritually linked as brother and sister.

Certainly, I have sung hymns of praise with non-Mormons many times before and since, and I don't quite know why this particular moment seemed so significant. But years later, the memory is still something of a reference point for me. In the intervening years, I made a conscious decision to interpret the Biblical phrase "body of Christ" as including all of Christ's followers, not just members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have tried to be open to further divine glimpses of spiritual unity. My efforts are modest. Once, when I had moved to a new neighborhood, my Baptist neighbor invited me to join a non-denominational prayer group held in her home. I was too shy to try it; Mormons don't really do that kind of thing. Only much later did I fully appreciate the kindness of that inclusive gesture, coming from someone who probably found my beliefs strange, at the very least.

But there have been small successes. Reading personal stories of faith from those outside my church  have helped me appreciate the varied realities of lived religion. Reading Bible commentary from non-LDS sources has deepened my understanding of the scriptures. The last time I prepared a sacrament meeting talk, I sent a facebook message to an old college friend of my husband's, now an Episcopal priest, asking him if he had any thoughts that I might use in my Easter Sunday sermon. I was enriched by his insights, and I was touched by his readiness to help me contribute to my Mormon meeting. Another time, also around Easter, I made a silent and heartfelt effort to invite the Holy Spirit as the Jehovah's Witnesses testified on my doorstep of Jesus Christ and His resurrection. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought that as we shook hands before they left, I sensed an extra measure of warmth in their hands and faces.

As I discover my Christian brothers and sisters, I feel almost as though I am being being reunited with family members separated from me at birth, family members I didn't know I had. We have different traditions, different vocabularies, and different ideas. Yet looking at their faces, I see that we are of the same family, the same parents.

I am occasionally taken aback by the barrage of criticism — sometimes false, sometimes devastatingly accurate — directed at my faith by other Christians. I am well-versed in the various theories on whether Mormons are saved², and I have heard all the arguments for why we are not Christians. But they still sting. In fairness, I have also heard plenty of cringe-inducing remarks made by Mormons about other Christian churches. I hope that my church will continue to soften its rhetoric about other religious traditions.

A recent criticism of Mormonism from one segment of the Christian community has prompted me to reexamine that longing for unity that I recognized in myself years ago. Given the criticism from other Christians that will probably never go away and our substantive theological differences, what kind of unity am I really seeking? What sort of oneness can I hope to achieve?

I have come to see that I am not interested in solidarity for political causes. Nor do I want to smooth over doctrinal differences. And though it would be gratifying, what I want most is not validation from the religious community of my credentials as a genuine Christian. What do I want? I want to learn from followers of Christ of all denominations, from their devotion, their charity, and their scholarship. And I want to stand with them, mutually rejoicing in something that we share in the deepest recesses of our souls.

Surely, the household of God has room enough for that.



__________________________________________________________________________________

¹In later years, things changed. At one point, we had the homecoming king on our team, along with a soccer player and an aspiring fashionista. Go figure.

²Once, I stumbled upon an internet treatise on whether Glenn Beck was "saved." The basic argument went as follows: Glenn Beck had a wonderful understanding of the atonement. Therefore, he is probably not a true-believing Mormon. Therefore, he might be saved. (Salvation is not possible for fully believing Mormons.)