‘Hagar and Ishmael’, Jakob Steinhardt
You can LISTEN to this week's readings and reflections here.
Genesis
21:8-21
8 The child [Isaac] grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great
feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah
saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with
her son Isaac. 10 So she said to Abraham, “Cast out
this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not
inherit along with my son Isaac.” 11 The matter was
very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. 12 But
God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of
your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is
through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. 13 As
for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is
your offspring.” 14 So Abraham rose early in the
morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it
on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and
wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.
15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one
of the bushes. 16 Then she went and sat down
opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do
not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she
lifted up her voice and wept. 17 And God heard the
voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to
her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice
of the boy where he is. 18 Come, lift up the boy
and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19 Then
God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin
with water, and gave the boy a drink.
20 God
was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an
expert with the bow. 21 He lived in the wilderness
of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Genesis 32:22-32
22 The same night [Jacob] got up and took his two wives, his two
maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 He
took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he
had. 24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled
with him until daybreak. 25 When the man saw that
he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s
hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then
he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let
you go, unless you bless me.” 27 So he said to him,
“What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then
the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for
you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” 29 Then
Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you
ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30 So Jacob
called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and
yet my life is preserved.” 31 The sun rose upon him
as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
A ‘cutting’ of tree wisdom: the value of thorny scrub (Genny Tunbridge)
The desperate Hagar finds shelter in
the wilderness for Ishmael under a bush, and comes to see this wild, apparently
inhospitable place as home. In our own country we have ‘wasteland’ as seemingly
inhospitable as Hagar’s wilderness – characterised by dense thickets of thorny
scrub, full of brambles, gorse, hawthorn and blackthorn. There are edible gifts
hidden here – blackberries ripe for the picking, and sloes on the blackthorn
waiting to be turned into sloe gin – but we are rightly wary of the prickles
and thorns.
Yet the very thorns which deter us
offer protection to other species. The safest nursery for young oak saplings is
in the middle of thorny scrub, shielded from nibbling by rabbits or deer until
grown large enough to survive – thus an old forestry saying ‘The thorn is the
mother of the oak’.[1]
Perceived as ‘messy, unproductive
wasteland’, much scrub has been cleared in recent decades – one reason for the
dramatic decline of the UK nightingale population (down 90% in the since
1960s). Arriving in spring, these West African migrants need thickets of
blackthorn and bramble to sing, mate and build their nests, safe from predators
behind impenetrable thorns, as described in John Clare’s poem ‘The
Nightingale’s Nest’[2]:
Aye, as I live! her secret nest is
here,
Upon this white-thorn stump! I’ve searched about
For hours in vain. There! put that bramble by …
Snug lie her curious eggs in number
five…
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.
So here we’ll leave them ….
Nature is the builder, and contrives
Homes for her children’s comfort, even here.
Introduction
to the theme (Al Barrett)
Last week, we began thinking about the kinds of ‘holy ground’
where we encounter God, and some of the ways that God calls us. With Abraham
and Sarah, we heard God’s call to ‘go’, to leave behind what is familiar, and
to set out on a journey, trusting God’s promises to go with us and to bless us.
This is the story of the beginnings of the people of Israel: a people through
whom God would bring blessing to the whole world.
This week, we go a little bit further with Abraham and Sarah,
but turn our attention to two of their descendants. And we think a bit more about
where and how we encounter God.
Hagar and Ishmael
God had promised a child to Abraham and Sarah, but that child
was slow to appear. Rather than waiting for God’s promise to come in its own
good time, Abraham and Sarah tried other options! Abraham had a son with
Sarah’s ‘slave-girl’, Hagar – Ishmael, they called him. And then, 14 years
later, Sarah had a son too – Isaac. In Genesis chapter 21, Sarah is jealous of
Ishmael, and gets Abraham to get rid of both Ishmael and his mother Hagar. And
it’s wandering in the wilderness, at the point of despair, that Hagar and
Ishmael meet with God.
In fact, it’s the second time that Hagar has met God in the
wilderness. She had already run away from Sarah’s anger once before – and that
time God had promised her a son, and given him the name Ishmael, which means
‘God hears’. And Hagar had given God a name too: ‘El-roi’, which means ‘God who
sees’ (Genesis 16, v.13). Twice, then, Hagar has met God in the wilderness: a
God who sees her, and hears her.
Jacob / Israel
That second encounter in the desert is the last we hear of Hagar
and Ishmael. Isaac becomes the centre of the story. When he grows up, and not
long after Sarah’s death, Abraham commissions his head servant ‘back home’ (to
the land Abraham had left, at the beginning of this journey) to find Isaac a
wife. The servant goes, and he meets a woman at a well (familiar?!): Rebekah.
Rebekah goes with the servant to meet Isaac, and the two of them get married.
They have twin sons, Esau and Jacob, and the first thing we hear about Jacob
(Genesis 25) is that he tricks his older brother out of his birthright – as the
price for a helping of stew! The next thing we hear about Jacob (Genesis
27) is that he tricks his blind, dying father into giving his blessing to Jacob
rather than Esau. Unsurprisingly, Esau is furious, and Jacob runs away. When we
meet Jacob in chapter 32, he is on his way to meet Esau. He has heard that Esau
is coming to meet him with 400 men, which doesn’t sound promising, and so Jacob
sends an advance party ahead with a present for his brother: goats, sheep, camels,
cows and donkeys. Jacob is worried, and he’s not taking any chances. And that’s
when he finds himself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a stream,
wrestling with none other than God.
Where Hagar in the wilderness gets to give God a new name, in
this night-time struggle in the stream God refuses to give away her name and it
is Jacob who is re-named: he is no longer Jacob ‘the trickster’, but
Israel, the one who has ‘struggled with God’. Jacob-who-is-now-Israel goes away
blessed, and wounded, but nevertheless, like Hagar, he has seen God face to
face.
Reflection (Ruth Harley)
In today’s
texts we have the stories of two quite different encounters with God: Hagar in
the wilderness at the point of despair, receiving the water she needs to keep
her son and herself alive; and Jacob, wrestling for a blessing, which he does
receive, but only alongside an injury. Neither of these are, perhaps, typical
of what we might think of when we think about meeting God. But one thing the
many and varied stories of scripture teach us is that there is no ‘one size
fits all’ model of encounter with the divine.
When I was
a little girl, I went to a Church of England primary school. This is where I
first heard about God, and first encountered the idea that God is someone you
could have a relationship with, could communicate with. It was where I first came
across the idea of prayer. At my primary school, we were given a very clear
idea of how prayer should happen. Prayers were to begin “Dear God”, they were
to end “Amen.”, and – and this was very thoroughly impressed upon us – they
were to include the words “thank you” and/or “please”. This is how I was taught
to approach God – it was important to get it right, and important to be polite.
And, of
course, those please and thank you prayers have a place in my prayer life
still, although perhaps not in such rigid forms. But they are not the be all
and end all of the life of faith. Certainly they are a far cry from the sort of
encounter with God which we see in today’s stories. These are not nice, polite,
scripted interactions between God and God’s people. They are desperate, raw,
real encounters between the awesome and merciful power of God and the frailty
of human lives. And they can teach us something about our own encounters with
God.
Let’s look
at Hagar first. She is desperate at this point in the story – really desperate.
Driven out of her home, and now with her son at the point of death, she has
nobody to turn to. So what does she do? She does not compose a nice “Dear God…
please… Amen” prayer. It is not clear that the words she does speak – “Do not
let me look on the death of my child” – are addressed to God at all, or indeed
to anyone. They are the distressed cry of a desperate woman. Watching the news
recently, of refugees making dangerous sea crossings, of the explosion in
Beirut, of the continuing devastation caused by Covid-19 around the world – I
wonder how many parents might be uttering those same words. Hagar does not ask
God for anything. And yet God acts, and acts in a way which she could never
have expected, providing the lifesaving resource of water, or perhaps opening
Hagar’s eyes to a resource that was already there – the text is unclear on this
point.
And then
there is Jacob, wrestling all night with this mysterious stranger, who is
perhaps an angel, a messenger from God, or perhaps is God. Either way, as Jacob
wrestles, this strange dialogue takes place. There are no ‘please’ and ‘thank
you’s here either, although there are certainly demands. Jacob asks for a
blessing and the stranger replies by asking his name, and giving him a new one:
Israel. Jacob asks the stranger’s name, and instead of answering he gives Jacob
the blessing he had asked for before. It’s a curious conversation, and
certainly a long way from how we might have been taught as children to think
about “talking to God”.
But the God
we see in these stories, and throughout much of scripture, is altogether more
complicated than the God of the children’s prayer book who awaits our polite
requests and grants them. And our relationship with God is, or has the
potential to be, far more complex too – richer and deeper, encompassing every
aspect of life.
In the
story of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, we see a God who does not wait to
be asked, a God whose saving action does not rely on politely phrased requests.
This is the God who hears our despair even when we can’t put it into words, and
who is still present and active when the situation seems to us to be too far
beyond hope even to pray about it.
In the
story of Jacob wrestling, we see a God who does not give us easy answers, but
who allows us to grapple and wrestle with who God is and who we are in relation
to God. This is the God who has room for
the difficult questions, space for us to bring all our doubts and wonderings.
This is the God who responds to our demands – but not in the ways we expect.
This too is the God who does not allow us to remain unchanged.
There is a
strand of Christian thought that wants to iron out the difficult parts of life,
to package faith – and by extension God – into a nice neat framework. But I
don’t think God is like that. I don’t think life is like that. And I don’t
think the life of faith can, or needs to, duck the tough questions like that.
We live in a complex world, and we lead complex lives, and God is big enough to
deal with it all.
When we
find ourselves pushed beyond our capacity to cope, when we reach a point of
desperation, God will meet us there in unexpected ways. Not to solve our
problems or make it all ok, but perhaps just to nudge us towards what we need
for the next step, the next breath, the next moment. When we find ourselves
wrestling with big decisions or difficult questions, problems that seem
unsolvable, God will be right there wrestling with us, and even as we wrestle,
we will be blessed in strange and unexpected ways which change us forever.
When we
think of meeting God, it is tempting to think of drawing apart from our
everyday lives, in search of beauty, peace or inspiration. And there is a time
and a place for that. But these stories, and so many others like them, inspire
us to keep alert to the presence of God in the ordinary, God in the tough
stuff, God in the uncertainty. God does not wait for our polite requests or our
set-aside times, but comes to meet us, to bless us, and to transform us in all
the difficult, glorious, grace infused, human mess of our lives.
Reflection (Jeannie Lynch)
If
God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him in all his glory?
What would you ask if you had just one question?
What
if God was one of us,
Just like a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on a bus,
Trying to make his way home.
If
God had a face, what would it look like?
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
in things like heaven and Jesus and the Saints
And all the Prophets
God is love and his face shines brightly like
the sun and we cannot look upon it. But
what if we could see God; in our every day, what if when we are out and about,
on the bus, in our cars, sitting on our sofas; we could see God. What would you say? As Alanis Morrissette, sings in her beautiful
song? What one question would you ask?
What would his answer be?
One thing for sure is that God loves us his
people, he loves our world and is often out and about in it especially during
ancient times as our bible reading shows us today. Poor Hagar, she has already run away from
Abraham and Sarah and now she is forced to leave with her child and very little
to sustain them both. She journeys into
the desert and expects first her child to die and then her. What she does not expect is to find God
waiting to save them both and she is given a second chance at life. What Hagar
has discovered is that the way someone who loves you says your name, it is
different. She knew that her name and
identity, all she was, was enough for God.
Not for Sarah but enough for God, her name was safe when he said it.
If you were Hagar, faced with the unexpected
God, what would you do? Would you be
angry at your circumstances, tell him about all those who you struggle with,
where would He lead you? Would your
current journey be the same as the one he would show you? How would you cope
seeing Him in the ordinary every day?
Would he still be enough for you?
I hope you know that God did not just die for the beautiful dressed
people that sit in church every Sunday and read their bibles regularly. He died for us who cry at night while the
world sleeps, then wakes up too late for church and makes seemingly unforgivable
mistakes and don’t communicate with him for weeks. He died for each and every one of us and we
are, each and every one of us, enough for Him. Don’t forget that.
Our stories are intricate tapestries just like
the people in ancient times. We have treads of thanksgiving for many things such
as families, homes, jobs, health. But, also interwoven are strands of sorrow
woven with letting go and holding tight onto love things, people we love. May we remember that who we are is made up of
every part of your journey. Where others
often see mess, may we see beauty and remember you are enough. As we journey on
in our lives with Gods love shining through with strands of gold, interwoven
with his grace, know he has plans for you and you are loved, like Hagar, like
you. If you see God on the bus, give him
my love.
5th
Gospel (Beth
Millman)
Growing up I went to church
every Sunday Morning and also had set times in the calendar year
where my faith would be more prominent and structured in my life such as
Christmas and Easter. I never really thought what about where else I could
find God as these times were always present. However over
the last several years due to being at university, travelling and moving
further away from Hodge Hill Church this has been more difficult. This has
encouraged me and enabled me to think more about where I can find God and where
I can express my faith away from “Church”.
There are two significant
examples that come to me when I think about finding God in other places. The
first one was in New Zealand when I was travelling. I had been travelling for a
couple of months and was really missing worship and struggling to find the head
space to pray and reflect. I found myself sat on an empty beach fairly early in
the morning. I spent a long time sat watching the waves, listening to the
nature around me and feeling the wind against my skin. I put some Music on my
phone and was lost in thoughts and found myself praying and reflecting more than
I had for months. After that morning every time I sat on a quiet beach I was
taken back to that place and was extremely thankful for the ability to
reconnect with God and reflect.
The second one was much
closer to home. Most of you will probably I am a physiotherapist at Birmingham
children’s hospital. This mean I sometimes have to work weekends and bank
holidays. This specific time was the first time I had ever worked Christmas
Day. I was working from 8 in the morning until 10 in the evening. I
had lots of concerns about missing family time, dinner, drinks and presents but
I hadn’t really thought how I felt about not having a period of time at church
or for reflection. I got half way though my day and although there were
presents, Christmas songs and Santas everywhere in the Hospital I just didn’t
feel that Christmas magic.... until I walked past our beautiful chapel and
heard O little town of Bethlehem coming from inside. I sat in the chapel and
listened to the music and was taken to a deep reflective Christmassy place
which I was able to take with me for the rest of the day.
One thing that I have
realised really helps me connect with God is music. This can be worship music,
music with reflective lyrics or even music that takes me on a journey. This
always helps me to look around and see God’s Kingdom and meet with God in the
most unlikely places.
A prayer for this journey:
If you would enter into the wilderness, do not
begin without a blessing.
Do not leave without hearing who you are: Beloved,
named by the One who has travelled this path before you.
Do not go without letting it echo in your ears,
and if you find it is hard to let it into your heart,
do not despair. That is what this journey is for.
I cannot promise this blessing will free you
from danger, from fear, from hunger or thirst,
from the scorching of sun or the fall of the night.
But I can tell you that on this path there will be
help.
I can tell you that on this way there will be rest.
I can tell you that you will know the strange
graces
that come to our aid only on a road such as this,
that fly to meet us bearing comfort and strength,
that come alongside us for no other cause
than to lean themselves toward our ear
and with their curious insistence whisper our name:
Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.
(Jan Richardson, Circles of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons)
Questions for reflection / discussion
As I read / listened to the
readings and reflections for this week…
·
what
did I notice, or what particularly stood out for me?
·
what
did they make me wonder, or what questions am I pondering?
·
what
have they helped me realise?
·
is there anything I want to do or
change in the light of this week's topic?
On this week’s theme – Holy
ground: where do we meet God?
· How have I encountered God ‘in church’ – or in gatherings together? What kind of experience was it?
·
How
have I encountered God at home – especially in this time when we’ve not been
able to meet together ‘in church’? What kind of experience was it?
·
Where
have I encountered God in places of difficulty and hardship? What kind of
experience was it?
·
Where
else in the world have I encountered God? What kind of experience was it?
Any other reflections…
Activities
/ conversation-starters with young (and not-so-young!) people
·
Think
about the places where you’ve encountered God. Where have you felt awe and
wonder – places that made you go ‘wow’? Where have you been filled with joy?
Where have you experienced a sense of peace? As you remember these places, you
might like to find or create pictures of them, or write down how you felt when
you were there.
· Make your own portable prayer station: Choose or create things which help you to feel close to God. You could include pictures, words and objects. They might link to a special time, place or person that has helped you feel close to God, or they might remind you of God. Pack all your items into a bag, box or other container (you might want to decorate it). Try spending time with your prayer station items in different locations – in your bedroom, in the garden, or out and about. (You can find out more about portable prayer stations on Ruth’s blog here.
·
This
week’s readings are both about people who encounter God in difficult times –
Hagar and Jacob. Can you think of other people in the Bible who encounter God
in difficult circumstances? Or stories of people in history (eg. Martin Luther
King, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa)? Can you think of times in your own life
which have been (or are) difficult – how might God have been (or be) present in
those times?
·
If you tried the ‘awareness walk’ or the ‘make
your own pilgrimage’ options last week, try repeating them this week. What did
you notice that was the same? What did you notice that was different, or that
you didn’t notice before? I wonder what God might be saying to you through
this… You might want to consider making awareness walking/pilgrimage a regular
habit, and be aware of what you notice over time.
[1] “We need to bring back the wildwoods
of Britain to fight climate change” Guardian article by Isabella Tree, 26.11.18 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/wildwoods-britain-climate-change-northern-forest
[2]
First published in The Rural Muse, Poems by John Clare in 1835.
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