I See You -

The story of Sarah and Abraham and Hagar and Ishmael is on that fills me with great sadness. It is a complicated story fraught with human emotion that reminds us how our understandings of life and cultural expectations and faith can become knotted up and lead to unnatural, unhealthy, and devastating situations. I suspect that we often read this story and immediately identify characters in this way:

Abraham = the great patriarch of faith

Sarah = the great matriarch of faith

Hagar = the pesky other woman

It isn’t much of a leap for us to arrive at these definitions…especially those of us who have grown up steeped in the stories of our faith. After all, Abraham and Sarah are the parents of Isaac, the promised and longed for child.

As I read this tale, my heart reaches out to Hagar. I want to weep on behalf of her situation. You see, as much as we want to paint her as “the other woman,” “the mistress,” “the whore of pre-Babylon” she did not have much say about her situation. She was a slave in a culture that did not recognize our cultural understandings of marriage, partnership, and fidelity. She was their property and they could do with her what they liked.

As a result of decisions made on her behalf, Hagar finds herself and her child alone in the wilderness without water or food. How does she protect her child from wild animals? How does she look into his hungry eyes and tell him there is nothing to eat or drink? What does a woman do in the midst of loneliness and desperation as her heart breaks with in her?

There are simply no words.

So, Hagar, hides her son under a bush. Maybe she is protecting him from the dehydrating effects of the sun…maybe she simply cannot bear to watch him die. In the midst of her despair, she sits watch over her child as she weeps and prays.

But, God breaks into her weeping – God speaks into her silence, “I see you… I see you….I see you.”  Then, God takes Hagar over to her son, looks into her eyes and says, “Do not be afraid. Hold him tight.” As the mother holds her child, her eyes are opened in a new way and she sees a fountain of life giving water.

We do not know much more about the story of Hagar and Ishmael but we do know that God saw them and they lived.

I know a woman who grew up attending church. Zoey was involved in summer camps and mission trips and youth group. She and her boyfriend were leaders – others saw them as super Christians. But, as often happens with high school relationships, they broke up. The dissolution of a long term relationship is difficult for a couple and even more difficult when it seems as if a church community is taking sides, making judgments, and casting blame. (These types of situations make for the best sorts of gossip) Anyway, Zoey bore the brunt of the blame. She was shunned by the community of people she once knew as friends and suddenly had no place inside the only church family she had ever known. Whether the community would have recognized it or not, Zoey was heart broken, cast out, and left alone.

Like the story of Hagar, Zoey’s story breaks my heart.

For those of us who might have readily identified with Sarah, we must ask ourselves, “Who we are casting out?” We must consider how our own actions (intentional and unintentional), judgments, jealousies, and false piety can result in another being left for dead in the wilderness. While we often look at Sarah as the matriarch of our faith, in Hagar’s story she (and Abraham) is the one who casts out. In Hagar’s story, Sarah (and Abraham) is the villain. Do our own insecurities make us into the villain? Do they keep us from reaching out the hand of love? And that’s the challenge, isn’t it?

The other truth is, many of us have been to the wilderness. We have run out of water and sat alone feeling utterly hopeless. The greatest challenge is to follow the finger of God to the life giving water. It is truly more difficult than it sounds. When we feel desperate and helpless, it is natural to close our eyes and hearts to anything except what is dying in front of us. It is natural to wrap ourselves in grief and hold tightly to it because it seems that our grief is all that remains. Yet, if you dare to open your ears, you might be able to hear the voice of God through God’s messenger saying, “I see you. I see you. I see you.” No matter how we might feel, no one is invisible to God.

I do not have easy answers about loneliness and suffering.  I have lived on both sides – I have been both Sarah and Hagar. I have been the cause of the loneliness of others and I have felt the sting of loneliness myself. The reality is that it is not as simple as just drawing a line and standing on one side or the other. I have walked in the shoes of both women. What I do know is that whether we find ourselves in the situation of Sarah or Hagar, we have been seen by God. If we understand what it means when God says, “I see you – all of you,” then we have a taste of how important it is for us to be God’s messenger who turns to see others.