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Genesis 16:1-16
Good morning. This morning's reading is from Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 to 16, and can be found on page 21 if you have the Red Pew Bibles.
Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. 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 do what Sarai said.
Though Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to a husband to be his wife. He 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 in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.
Your slave is in your hands, Abram 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 the 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'm 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 too numerous to count.
The angel of the Lord also said to her, you are now pregnant, and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man. 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 to her. You are the God who sees me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi, it is there between Kadesh and Bered.
So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had born. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.
The God Who Sees the Unseen
Good morning, everyone. My name is Phil. I'm a member of this congregation and married to Megan, our senior minister.
But today I'm also here on behalf of a Christian organisation called Hagar, who work in the field of modern slavery.
But I did also want to say happy Mother's Day. I hope you've had a lovely day so far with breakfast in bed and being showered with flowers and puppies and lace doilies and kittens and cups of tea falling from the sky. All those things that mothers love.
I too have a mother. She watches this service online from Eden in New South Wales. So happy Mother's Day to my mum.
I got you a very classy, very expensive present. So keep an eye out for that brown paper bag being dropped off by the Coles delivery guy. It'll be between 1 and 7pm today. I'm not joking. Sorry.
It's very hard to get presents to Eden in New South Wales. There's not even a florist there. The Coles guy, he's a good dude.
But yes, I do hope you have a lovely Mother's Day.
And we know, as Preetha mentioned, that not everyone experiences Mother's Day in the same way. For some people it's a sad day, reminding them of loss and grief. And the passage we're looking at today tells us about a woman, a mother, who may not have had an idyllic Mother's Day experience. As Megan said, it was going to be MA15+. It is a serious topic, and yeah, I apologise if it's not the right fit for Mother's Day or Day of Baptism, but it's an important thing for us to talk about.
So I want to introduce you a little more to this woman, a mother, whose name has been recorded and passed down to us from more than 4,000 years ago. Her name is Hagar.
And it's really quite astonishing, given the context of those times, that we know about her at all, that we know her name. She was not a queen or a prophetess. She didn't part the seas or defeat armies.
She was a slave, an Egyptian woman living in a tribal group in the household of Abraham and Sarah. And she had no choice in that. She was property.
The people in this passage, they all lived around 4,000 years ago. It was the mid to late Bronze Age, which is after the Stone Age and before the Iron Age.
So you can picture, it was a long time ago, and things were quite different. The weapons and tools were made of bronze, iron hadn't been discovered at that point.
And around this time, there was also a really significant period of weather. If you were there, you would have said, quite the weather we're having lately.
And by that, you would have meant it's very hot, and it hasn't rained for a long time. Good for a beach day, but bad if you want to grow crops and feed and water animals and not starve.
This extended weather event actually has a name now. It's called the 4.2-kiloyear BP Aridification Event. And it really changed that whole area to what we see today, a very arid area. Before that, it was less so. And it really pushed humans in the Mediterranean, the West and South Asia, to come to terms with things like irrigation and figuring out how to move water around. And it forced them into much more interrelated urban environments in order to survive in smaller areas and to be closer together.
And if you love history like me, it's at this point where a lot of the traditionally large empires that were around started to fall apart and shrink.
So the Indus Valley, the Mesopotamian, and the Egyptian empires all shrunk significantly at this point in history due to this mega drought. And they really just had to focus on smaller areas. They couldn't control big areas.
And these smaller city-states started to appear a significant part of that social and political landscape. And there were these kind of tribal groups and warlords and, yeah, these smaller city-states around.
It was also when they first invented the spoked wheel. That's fun.
Abraham and his group, his tribal group, were nomadic pastoralists, doesn't mean they were pastors who wandered around door to door. They lived in tents and they traveled from place to place.
And at this point, that was around Canaan, which is Israel, Jordan, Syria, that area. And they traveled around in search of grass and water for their flocks of sheep and goats and camels.
And there was likely about 1,200 people in Abraham's tribal group. You can picture that, quite a tense city that they had to set up every few months.
Then they packed up and moved on to look for more food and water.
Abraham wasn't originally from this area. He was from Ur, which was in modern-day Iraq.
We don't really know specifically how Hagar was treated as a slave in this large tribal group, but we see in this passage that something happened that made her situation become even more difficult than it would have already been.
Sarah, Abraham's wife, who'd been unable to have children, and she came up with a plan. She gave Hagar, her personal slave, to Abraham as a surrogate.
That wasn't uncommon at the time, but make no mistake about what it meant for Hagar. She had no say in it. She was used to solve someone else's problem, and she became pregnant.
When she did, the dynamics in that household became unbearable. Hagar, pregnant, and for the first time having a little bit of power in her situation, was not gentle about it.
Sarah then, who felt humiliated and bitter, purposefully treated her very harshly, and so Hagar ran away, pregnant and alone, into the desert. In this time period, not being part of a tribe or a group of people, it was possibly worse than being a slave, because really it just meant that you would die.
You couldn't survive as a single individual person. There was no social system to help, and a pregnant woman, a slave, fleeing into the wilderness in the middle of the biggest drought in history with no rights, no protection, no one looking for her.
No one apart from Sarah would even notice she was gone, probably. No one except God.
In this chapter, in Genesis 16, we see Sarah had mistreated Hagar, so she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.
He said, Hagar, slave of Sarah, where have you come from, and where are you going? God found her, not Abraham, not Sarah, God, and he asked a question, not to judge her, but to see her, to draw her out, and to say, I know you are here.
God actually tells Hagar to go back to Abraham and Sarah, but he promises her some things about her son and her future and the future of her descendants. The things she promised might seem a little strange to us, like it says, he will be a wild donkey of a man.
Not sure that's a positive thing, but for Hagar, it showed that she had a future for her child, and that there would be descendants, and that was a promise that really spoke to her needs and her longing, and it shows that God knew her, and that she was part of something bigger.
Then we see that Hagar does something quite extraordinary. She gives God a name, and she's generally recognized as the only person in the Bible to explicitly give God a new, distinct name. In Genesis 16, 13, it says, she gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her, you are El Roi, the God who sees me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. El Roi, the God who sees, spoken by a slave woman in the desert who had every reason to believe that she was invisible.
When the Desert Becomes a Place of Encounter
Now there's more to Hagar's story. She did return to that group, to Abraham and Sarah. A son and named him Ishmael and years later, Sarah also had a son miraculously and the tensions in the household became unbearable all over again as the two sons also didn't treat each other well.
And this time, Abraham sent Hagar away for good. He sent her out into the desert with her son and a skin of water. He basically excommunicated them from that community. And we read about it in Genesis chapter 21.
Genesis 21:14-19
So early the next morning, Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba.
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes and she went off and sat down about a bow shot away for she thought, I cannot watch the boy die. And as she sat there, she began to sob.
It's a devastating image, a mother who has reached the absolute end of her resources, placing her child under a bush because she cannot watch him die and weeping alone, she has nothing left. But again, God saw her and called Hagar from heaven.
God heard the boy crying and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said, what is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up, 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 the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
God's Heart for the Unseen and Exploited
So Hagar and her son did then survive and make a life for themselves in the wilderness and Ishmael became a great hunter and the father of many sons and great nations. It's really, I find a fascinating story and one that a lot of people don't talk about too much because we don't like to think of our Christian heroes doing terrible things like impregnating women against their will and sending them out to die. We did a sermon series a year or two ago called No More Heroes. And this is another example of why some of the heroes in the Bible, well, all of them, shouldn't be considered heroes in that way. Abraham's story is really important, but we don't look to him as the perfect hero or the perfect guide to how we should live. We only look to Jesus.
Abraham's often used as an example of someone with great faith in God because he did hear God's voice and he obeyed. But when you look through it, it's really only about 50 to 60% of the time.
There was one big one. He was living in Iraq, in Ur, and God spoke to him and told him to leave this place and to travel in a certain direction to a completely unknown destination and that God would provide him with a new home there. And he did it, so that's amazing.
But then we see lots of other examples where he starts to doubt God's promises and doubt what God has said and to take things into his own hands. Particularly, God had promised to make him into a great nation, but at this point he was quite old and he'd never had any children.
So he started to doubt God and started taking things into his own hands. And that is what we are reading about today, how they went about doing that with Hagar.
The name that Hagar gave God, El Roi, the God who sees me. I'd love for you to kind of let that sink in. To the mother whose heart is full today, who feels blessed and grateful and happy, God sees you. Your joy is not trivial to him, he delights in it. He made you for love and watching you give and receive it today brings him pleasure. God sees you and he's glad.
And to the person whose heart is aching today, who's missing someone or struggling with a child who's walked away or carrying a weight that no one else in this room might understand, God sees you. He does not ask you to perform happiness today. He meets you as he met Hagar, right where you are, even in the desert.
To those who might have longed to be a parent and are not for whatever reason, God sees you. Your longing is not invisible. Your grief on a day like today is known. You are not less and you are not forgotten. God sees you.
To those whose parents were not safe or are gone or are complicated in ways that make today feel more like a wound than a celebration, God sees you and he wants to heal your wounds. El Roi, he is the God who sees the ones who are unseen. He is the God who goes into the desert to find us, who speaks to us, who opens our eyes to the wells of water when we are too exhausted to see them clearly.
Hope for the Unseen in Our World Today
As I said today, I'm also representing an organization called Hagar who works in the area of modern slavery. And we have this name deliberately because the story of Hagar is not just ancient history. It is happening today. There are currently 50 million people living in slavery today. Roughly 28 million people in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriages with women, girls, and children obviously disproportionately affected by that.
So Hagar International, the organization I've been helping and working with over the last year now, works with some of the most vulnerable people in our world. Survivors of human trafficking, modern slavery, and severe abuse. Mostly women and children who've been treated as less than human and used and discarded. I wanted to share a very generalized story, the most common story we see of the people that we help. And it is a pretty terrible story. I won't go into too many details, but I'm sure you'll get the picture.
But I guess imagine, if you will, a village in somewhere like Cambodia. And the village is suffering from poverty. The people are reasonably desperate.
Some visitors will come into the village and they will tell the families that they have some great jobs in the city, that their daughter could come with them and they would look after them and find a place for them to live. And then they could do this job and they can work there in the city and send money back to the village.
And often they'll have an older woman with them to make it seem more trustworthy. And the family will generally agree and say, yeah, that's a great idea. And they would encourage their daughter to go with them and to do this job and to send money back to the village.
And these traffickers specifically target people in need, people with no one to protect them, people who if they go missing, no one will even notice. Or if they do, they don't have the resources to do anything about it. And they exploit those vulnerabilities.
The young woman is then taken away and smuggled into another country like China or India or the Middle East where she's sold to an unmarried man who wants to have a child or hasn't been able to find a wife. And he'll hold her there against her will and she will become pregnant.
And when the baby is born, it'll generally be taken away from her and often the man's mother will then raise the child. The young woman is then sold on to another man for that same purpose.
Sometimes they manage to escape. Well, quite often they manage to escape at some point when people stop really paying attention to them.
But the majority of the time that means leaving their child behind. And if they escape, they find that they're in another country with no passport, no rights, no understanding of the language.
And usually, eventually the police will come across them and then the government will send them back to where they came from, like a place like Cambodia. And the Cambodian government, for example, doesn't have programs to help these people.
So they will call Hagar and our staff will meet the young woman at the airport and really just take care of everything from there on.
So Hagar provides medical help, accommodation, counseling, training. They'll place them into a community where they can start to regain their life and dignity. Often they can't return to their village or their family because of the stigma attached to what has happened to them. They're not wanted. So Hagar will help them find work that they're interested in and training and a community to live in. And we'll work with them over a really long period of time, many, many years, to provide trauma-informed care, which is care that recognizes the impact and symptoms of trauma and keeps them safe from being re-traumatized.
Hagar also works with the government providing legal and forensic services to find and punish traffickers and they provide training and empowerment to villages and people groups to recognize and stop this kind of trafficking happening again. And many of the survivors of this will actually continue to work with Hagar as leaders and working towards ending modern slavery and exploitation. Our goal is to provide hope for the unseen and exploited people of the world through care and justice and prevention.
And there are many other stories and reasons why people are trafficked. And it doesn't just happen overseas. Australia's actually a hub for some of the worst kinds of online exploitation.
So there is some serious work to be done in our country as well. If you are interested, if you'd like to know more about Hagar's work, please feel free to come and speak to me after the service or visit our website.
I'm not sure where I got up to in my slides, but there we go, there's the website. Every prayer and every donation and every person who supports this mission makes a real difference in the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.
El Roi: The God Who Sees and Acts
But beyond these practical things that Hagar does and provides, there's actually even more hope to be found, which is also part of our mission. El Roi, the God who sees us, he doesn't just see our physical and emotional needs, he also sees our spiritual and eternal needs and provides us with hope for them as well. The God who saw Hagar did not just observe her, he sought her out, he found her, he spoke to her, he gave her water and he promised her a future. That is the character of our God, revealed not just in a story of one slave woman in the desert in ancient times, but for all people and for all time. In Jesus, God sees us.
Seeks us out, and acts to provide for us everything we need for eternal life, joy, and dignity. Hagar's story shows us that God sees the unseen, and the cross of Jesus shows us what God was willing to do about it. Jesus is God himself, stepping into human flesh, into our desert. He did not just come for the people who have it all together, he came for the lost, and the least, and the unseen.
If you think about Jesus' life and what we know about him, you might have heard lots of stories and maybe even become a little numb to them, but Jesus was incredibly revolutionary. The things that he did were just shocking at the time. Jesus cared for children, that seems normal now, but it was not normal back then. They were seen as unimportant, basically invisible in public life, and Jesus stopped everything and spoke to the children and said, the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
Jesus welcomed a sinful woman, everyone in the room knew her reputation, the host of the party was horrified that she was there and touching Jesus, but Jesus looked past all of that and said, your sins are forgiven. Jesus ate with a tax collector, who were despised, basically traitors who got rich ripping off their own people. Jesus walked into Levi's house and sat down and had dinner with him.
Jesus touched a bleeding woman, 12 years of bleeding made her ritually unclean and untouchable under Jewish law, and anyone she touched became unclean too, but Jesus didn't recoil from that. He stopped, he turned to her and responded with complete kindness. He spoke to a demon-possessed man, someone who was terrifying the whole community and people had given up on. Jesus walked up to him and spoke to him and healed him and sent him home to his family.
Jesus spoke to the woman at the well. Jews and Samaritans at that time didn't mix, they wouldn't even share cups. Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink from her cup and offered her living water and broke three or four serious social and religious rules in just one conversation. Jesus gave hope to these unseen people. He took all the weight of our lostness, our suffering and our sin, all the ways we have been abandoned and the ways that we have abandoned others and he carried it to the cross. Not because we did anything, but because he saw us, we were lost and he came to find us.
It's a well-known verse, but it's good to remind. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. El Roi went looking for Hagar in the desert and that very same God came into the world to find us.
I want to close with just three more points. First, if you're here this morning and you've never truly believed that God sees you, I want to invite you to consider Hagar, a foreign slave woman with no social standing, no voice, no power and God knew her name, found her in the desert and gave her a future. If he saw her, he sees you. It's not just a religious sentiment. That's the character of the living God.
Second, wherever this Mother's Day finds you emotionally, I hope you leave carrying this one idea, El Roi, the God who sees, you do not have to perform for him. You do not have to have it all together. He meets you where you are and if it's a good day, then he is smiling along with you.
Third, I want to challenge you to let that spill over. Hagar was the unseen. There are Hagars all around us, people who have been trafficked and exploited, but also people who live in invisible suffering, people right in our own communities who feel like no one cares or sees them. One of the most powerful things we can do as people who have been found by El Roi is to become people who notice others, who look and who see those in need.
I would ask you to pray for the work of Hagar International, pray for those who are right now in a desert place, running out of water and unable to see the well. Pray that God would open people's eyes and ask him if he is calling you to do something, to be part of that. And wherever you're at today, please believe this, you are seen, you are known and you are loved by a God who came looking for you, who gave everything for you and has promised never to leave you. He's El Roi, the God who sees you.
Amen.
