The Handmaid's Tale

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Genesis 16:1-16  and Genesis 21:8-21:

Last week after we looked at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, several people said to me that they had never heard a sermon on that passage. I’m willing to bet that is even more true in hearing about the story of Hagar. But, we ignore these stories, and Hagar in particular, at our own loss, because, to name just a few things, Hagar is the first woman that God talks to, she is the first woman that God makes a proclamation to about a pregnancy, she is the only person, not just the only woman, but the only person who names God, who gives a name to God, in the Bible, and she is the only woman to arrange a marriage for her son in scripture, and those are certainly not insignificant events.

We don’t really know all that much about Hagar, except that she is a slave, she is Egyptian and she is owned by Sarah. And just an editorial note, although in chapter 16 they are still named Abram and Sarai, for simplicity sake, and to make it easier on me, I am going to refer to them as Abraham and Sarah regardless of which chapter I am referring. While there are some translations that try and soften the reality of Hagar by calling her a maiden, or a handmaid, like my title today, the Hebrew words used to describe her all mean slave. We know that there are many slaves in the family, and presumably most of them are owned by Abraham, but Hagar belongs to Sarah. It’s possible that they received Hagar as a gift from the Pharaoh, but that’s just a guess.

Covenant

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 17:1-22. I missed several weeks due to illness and then vacation, so we skipped over several Genesis stories.

The book of Genesis can be broken into two different types of stories. First, and the way it begins, are with etiological stories, or stories of origin. These are stories that seek to explain why things are the way there are, and these have sometimes been called the primeval stories, or also the myth stories. But, myth here not understood the way we understand the word myth, meaning false and therefore not true. But that’s a modern understanding. Instead, we should see myths as stories that are fundamentally true, even if they aren’t factually true, and thus you can have multiple creation stories that tell different stories and yet contain fundamental truths about God and about the world and about us. And then we move into what are sometimes called the saga stories, or better the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs, beginning with the father and mother of the faith, who begin their journey known as Abram and Sarai. And they also serve as the transition, as we are told that Abram is a descendent of Shem, who was one of the sons of Noah. And so we transition from universal stories, to particular story about the the beginning of the people who will become known as the Israelites although we are not quite there yet.

And so we are introduced to this man as being a descendent of Noah, through his son Shem, although he is many generations later, but God speaks to Abram and tells him to leave his family and his homeland and go to a land that God will show to him, and God will make his name famous and bless him, and through him the world itself will be blessed. And the surprising thing is, Abram leaves. That was just not something that was really done. There is safety and protection in familial ties, and in the land you know and inhabit, and protection in the local gods that you worship, that don’t travel, but live where the people live. And so although we aren’t told anything about Abram before this, including whether he knows anything about this God who talks to him, Abram packs up all his possessions, including, we are told, the people he owns, that is slaves, along with his nephew Lot, and they leave and go to the land which, as we are told, was occupied by the Canaanites.