As we walk through the names of God, let us pray that we learnThis passage is about God seeing us in our suffering, but it is also about much more.
First, God understands us within our context – the context here is thorny. Second, God restores – what did God say that changed things for Hagar?
This story takes somewhere around the turn of the 19th century BC. Sarai and Abram cannot have children (we know that changes, but at this point they don’t). It takes place in a culture where there were various forms of servanthood, slavery and concubinage, all of which were very different than American chattel slavery or modern human trafficking. The idea of a servant coming in as a second wife and bearing children was a well accepted concept, and the raising of Hagar’s status was a natural result.
Unfortunately, Sarai’s messy response was also natural. Often our best laid plans go wrong and when they do, we often blame other people.
So Hagar is sent away, and is then met by the angel of the Lord who asks her two questions. “Where are you from, and where are you going?” But Hagar only answers the first one, because she does not know where she is going. And so the angel provides an answer to that question, and the answer is, back into the context she came from. That’s where a typical sermon might end, with the idea that sometimes God keeps us in our hard situations in order to bless us further.
But that’s not this sermon, so let’s go back to verse 4. Hagar begins to despise Sarai. This despising comes out of pride. CS Lewis sets the stage for this particular sin:
There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others…
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.
So what we can learn from this story is that God sees us not just in our suffering but also in our contempt and our pride.
— Sermon Notes, Paul Cabellon, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 18, 2024