I preached this sermon on October 20 and 21 at St. Lydia's, as part of a series on the story of Hagar. We read Genesis 21:1-4, which you can read too by clicking here. We also read the version of the story found in the hadith, which tells the story as Muslims know it. You can read it by clicking here.
There are a lot of different ways to be in the wilderness.
And it turns out that how you got there makes a big difference.
I have travelled across the country by car twice in my life.
The first time, I was a twelve year old,
heading from Connecticut to Seattle,
where there was a new home waiting for me and my family.
And the second time, I was twenty two years old,
heading, strangely enough, back along the exact same route,
from Seattle to Connecticut,
where I was beginning my Divinity School degree.
These two journeys through the wilderness of our nation
followed almost the same route.
But they were very different journeys.
The first time, as a twelve year old,
I didn’t have much choice in the journey, or how it played out.
My Dad had a new job, and we were moving to Seattle.
And so I watched as our things were packed up
and reluctantly climbed into the back seat of the car.
I never would have chosen to leave behind the first group of friends
I had found that made me feel welcome and at home.
I had had no choice in picking out our new home
or the town in which it was situated,
or choosing my new school.
As twelve year olds, we don’t get a whole lot of choice about of anything.
And so I’m sure that I was not a very pleasant traveling companion
for that seven day trek across the country.
Despite my parents’ best efforts as we stopped at roadside attractions,
and spent the night at motels with pools and cable TV,
I was not to be moved.
I was an unwilling sojourner on I-90 West.
*
I-90 East was a different story.
After a year abroad, I flew home to Seattle,
stuffed the makings of a new apartment into the first car I had ever owned,
and headed East,
my boyfriend at the time in the passenger seat
with a map of the country spread across his lap.
We camped by still, cold lakes as we crossed the rockies,
took a ferry across the unending expanse of Lake Michigan,
and caught a parade in a small midwestern town.
I was headed toward a new university, a new town,
a place of my own -- a graduate degree --
but mostly I was following a call, and I could feel that call,
drawing me with the steady pull of a magnet
toward a new life that was beginning to unfold.
It was a bittersweet trip, in many ways,
for though I had not yet admitted it to myself,
some part of me knew that the new life that was calling me
meant the end of my relationship with the navigator in the passenger seat.
In all the photos from that trip, I look like I’m on the verge of tears.
*
Both of those journeys brought me through a wilderness of sorts.
A geographic wilderness, in which my traveling companions and I
navigated the unknown and expansive territory around us.
And a wilderness of the soul.
That wilderness was a place of more unknowing than knowing.
A place where uncertainty became a well-known passenger.
*
In our exploration of the story of Hagar this month,
we have encountered a variety of interpretations of this story.
There are multiple voices that comprise the narrative itself,
and multiple communities that have seen themselves in her story
and claimed it as their own.
Reading a variety of scholarship on the text,
I’m seeing that in addition to our five characters:
Hagar and Isamael, Sarah and Isaac, and Abraham,
there is a sixth character in this story:
that of the wilderness.
The wilderness can be seen in all sorts of different ways.
For the Jewish people,
and for those who wrote this text,
the wilderness was a place of exile reminiscent of the Diaspora,
when Jews were forced from their homeland of Judea
and scattered or enslaved.
In the wilderness, we the Jewish people remember their homeland with longing,
and ask God to bring them home.
There are many stories in the Hebrew Bible of meeting God in the wilderness,
stories of God feeding the people of Israel of caring for them,
but there are not many stories of staying there.
Muslim scholar Riffat Hassan offers a different perspective on the wilderness,
and on the narrative of Hagar.
Is Islam, the wilderness is associated with the hijrah,
in which one goes into exile for the sake of God.
The hijrah is a blessed state in which one leaves one’s place of origin,
one’s home,
and sojourns for God.
“Each year,” she writes,
“as millions of Muslim pilgrims run or walk
between the points that symbolize Safa and Marwa,
they pay homage to Hagar,
who has become an indestructible emblem
not only of a mother’s love for her offspring
but of a true believer’s faith in the saving power of God.”*
Delores Williams, author of Sisters in the Wilderness
offers a third perspective on the wilderness
which emerges from the experience of enslaved Africans in this country.
“...for African America slaves, female and male,
the wilderness did not bear the negative connotations
that mainline white pioneer culture had assigned to it.
Rather, for the slave, the wilderness was a positive place
conducive to uplifting the spirit and to strengthening religious life.
Wilderness experience,
involving a compatible relation between humans and nature,
was to be sought actively...
Going into the wilderness assured slaves
that they would meet Jesus if they persevered.”**
*
How you end up in the wilderness makes a big difference.
In the story from Exodus,
Hagar is thrown out,
pushed into the wilderness with some bread, water, and no explanation.
In the Muslim story,
she is accompanied there,
left under a tree with some dates and water.
But she has some idea why.
“Has Allah ordered you to leave us here?”
she shouts.
“Yes,” is the answer.
“Then he will not neglect us.”
How you end up in the wilderness makes a difference.
But in both stories,
God shows up.
In both stories,
God gives water in the wilderness.
In both stories,
God makes a way out of no way.
*
Hagar, where have you come from, and where are you going?
That’s the question God has for Hagar
when God finds her alone in the wilderness the first time.
Where have you come from,
and where are you going?
It’s a question we each might ask ourselves
in whatever wilderness we happen to find ourselves this evening.
As a twelve year old, headed west,
I had come from a town that I found contained everything that I needed:
the security of all that was known,
and the love of those who understood me.
I was going toward a place I had never seen
and people I had never met
and a life I could not imagine could fill the hole in my heart.
As a twenty two year old headed East,
I was coming from a year of grown-up living in a strange new country,
and headed toward what I was very sure was some strand of my future.
I had caught the hint of a melody carried on the wind
and I was following it,
(despite what it meant leaving behind)
toward an unknown but unfolding future,
certain that God was by my side.
*
We don’t always choose the wilderness.
Our ancestors landed on the shores of this country
in varied and sundry ways:
some were running from persecution,
some were following freedom,
some were chained in the belly of a ship.
It makes a big difference how you ended up in the wilderness.
And yet every story seems to tell us
that in the middle of most desolate moment,
when the water skin is empty
and the child on our back is crying for milk that will not come,
God makes a way out of no way.
God draws water from the dessert,
and hope springs up where no hope could be seen before.
Where have you come from, and where are you going?
Only you and God know the answer to that question.
Perhaps your life has been one long wilderness,
a long search for home.
Or perhaps you have only just being called out
into territory that seems arid and barren.
Perhaps you have met God in the moments when you have cried out,
or perhaps you trust, like Hagar, that God will not neglect you.
Perhaps you have no such trust.
Perhaps you yearn for an end to this wilderness.
There are many ways to tell the story.
But in each of them,
there will be water.
*Riffat Hissan, “Islamic Hagar and Her Family,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Eds. Phyllis Trible and Letty Russell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
**Williams, Delores, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1993).
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