A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
January 7, 2007
Readings:
"Hagar the Runaway", Genesis 16
"Hagar the Exile", Genesis 21
Copyright 2007, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
As part of this year’s curriculum on wisdom from the World’s Religions, our Sunday school classes begin studying Islam this month. Islam is the youngest, after Judaism and Christianity, of the three monotheistic traditions. All three trace their beginnings back to Abraham, chosen by God as the patriarch of a great nation. The difficulties and intricacies of this promise are recounted Genesis 12-22 in the Bible and Suras 2 and 37 in the Qur’an. Abraham and his wife Sarah are childless and too old to bear children by the time God tells Abraham of God’s promise. Sarah, in an attempt at surrogacy, gives Abraham her slave Hagar, who bears Ishmael. And then begins the parting of the ways. According to the story in Genesis, Sarah miraculously becomes pregnant and bears a second son, Isaac. Sarah’s jealousy, especially after the birth of Isaac, moves her to demand that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. He does, in obedience to both Sarah and God. Then comes the call from God for Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham painfully sets out to comply. God’s messenger intervenes at the last minute, saving Isaac’s life and praising Abraham’s heartbreaking obedience. According to the Qur’an, Isaac is born the second son, to be the prophet for the Jews. But the eldest, Ishmael, is the one whom God tells Abraham, through a dream, to sacrifice. Ishmael, old enough to make his decisions, encourages his father to follow Allah’s will. Together they go to the place of sacrifice. And again, an angel stays Abraham’s hand.
Although they swap roles as the chosen son, Ishmael and Isaac, as well as Abraham, and even Sarah are portrayed similarly across the different traditions. The character who fascinates me, who carries strikingly different interpretations from tradition to tradition, and even within traditions, is Hagar—Sarah’s slave, Abraham’s concubine, and Ishmael’s mother. For centuries, she has been essentially ignored by theologians and believers alike in Judaism and Christianity. She is not even mentioned in the Qur’an. But with the emergence of liberation theology, the interpretation of scripture from those on the margins: the poor, women, people of color, sexual minorities, people from developing countries, characters like Hagar have been given new attention. Many of you know I am a bible geek. This kind of interpretation fascinates me because it reveals what I love about the biblical stories. Separated from doctrines that try to make them fit into positions supporting specific beliefs, these stories are free for what they are meant to do: to explore our complicated human relationships: with family, with "the stranger", with exile and conflict, with positions of power and of weakness, and with our experiences of God, or the Holy and the Sacred.
Hagar is paradoxical character. In so many ways, she is a nobody: a foreigner, a slave and concubine, a woman. In other ways, she is a person of the highest status: the mother of Abraham’s eldest son, and of a whole people, the one who not only communicates with God directly but who names the Holy One, something no other human character, male or female, does in the whole of the Bible. She plays as important a role in God’s promise as Abraham and Sarah. The inclusion of her story in Genesis suggests that she and God’s promise for her son Ishmael are not to be dismissed as readily as Sarah wished or as the mostly male interpreters have done through the centuries.
Given that God’s promise to Abraham is the common starting point for the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths, this morning I am going to compare how Hagar is viewed by all three faiths, especially by feminist and womanist (African American feminist) theologians.
Historically, Hagar has not been treated kindly in Jewish religious commentary and interpretation. She and her son are often viewed as a threat to Israel’s salvation history. Firestone notes that while the Bible attaches special significance to Ishmael’s birth and includes Ishmael in God’s blessing, "…by the time the earliest extant anthologies of this material were committed to writing, the rabbis had associated Ishmael with enemies of the Jews" (1990:39).
Justification for both Abraham and Sarah’s responses are found in the story itself and the blame is laid squarely on Hagar: "He went to Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt upon her mistress" (Genesis 16:4; Frankel 1996). That Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham for the purpose of bearing Sarah a child was not an unusual practice in the ancient Near East. What was unusual was the emotional responses—Hagar’s contempt and Sarah’s jealousy—to what should have been a normal transaction (Niditch 1992). The rabbis interpret Hagar as having overstepped her bounds by raising herself above her mistress and the one who was supposed to be the matriarch of the promise.
In The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, Ellen Frankel (1996) provides powerful insights in the story of Hagar from a feminist Jewish perspective and challenges the rabbis’ conclusion that Hagar is a threat. She notes that Hagar’s very name suggests her status as "the wanderer" (hajira); "the foreigner" (ha-gera), and "the banished one" (ha gerusha) (1996:18).
Frankel gives Hagar back her humanity. Her interpretation challenges Judaism to reassess its treatment of Hagar, and to recognize and acknowledge Sarah, Abraham, and God’s own shortcomings in their treatment of her. However, Sarah is still the center for Frankel. Frankel sees Hagar as responding to Sarah, while Sarah remains the Matriarch of God’s Promise through her natural son, Isaac.
The first Christian to comment on Hagar was Paul in his letter to the Galatians. His interpretation of the story is not exactly kind to Hagar:
…it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother… (Gal. 4).
Paul turns the story of Hagar back on the Jewish community by claiming that Hagar, mother of slaves, symbolizes those who remain enslaved to the Sinai covenant while members of the new Christian community are Sarah’s children, born to inherit the promise of this new covenant of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Christianity, like Isaac, as the second child of monotheism, was wresting the claim of God’s promise of choseness from the older sibling.
In the last twenty years Christian feminists and womanists have given Hagar her voice. Phyllis Trible in Texts of Terror (1984) notes that Hagar experiences all that Abraham and Sarah experience: divine promise, a nomadic existence, and the threatened loss of her son. The difference: Hagar is powerless not only because she is a woman and a slave but because God has chosen Sarah over her:
As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people. Most especially, all sorts of rejected women find their stories in her. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying upon handouts from power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others (1984:28).
Yet, Trible sees the inclusion of Hagar’s story in the Bible (and thus in the story of faith) an affirmation of those on the margins: "Hagar is a pivotal figure in biblical theology. She is the first person in scripture whom a divine messenger visits and the only person who dares to name the deity. Within the historical memories of Israel, she is the first woman to bear a child. This conception and birth make her an extraordinary figure in the story of faith: the first woman to hear an annunciation, the only one to receive a divine promise of descendants, and the first to weep for her dying child." (1984:28).
If Abraham and Isaac are precursors for God the Father and Jesus, then to Trible, Hagar is precursor for Mary.
In Just A Sister Away, African-American theologian Renita Weems (1988) emphasizes the relationship between Sarah and Hagar, as a prototype for destructive dynamic she witnesses between white women and black women, rich women and poor women. According to Weems, Sarah failed to recognize that Sarah and Hagar had more in common in the oppression they suffered as the property of Abraham than in the class and status differences Sarah exploited against Hagar:
Hagar and Sarah’s story searches out our unconfessed sins of arrogance and low self-esteem, presumptuousness and passiveness, jealousy and faithlessness, and our conspiracies to get others to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Like a endless row of braids, the plot weaves the strands of so many women’s lives together. And Hagar’s life becomes the braid of the oppressed and rejected women—from the exploited maid and the welfare mother to the single mother and the pregnant girlfriend (1988:16)
Sarah and Hagar were both used by Abraham and by God. The lesson then is not who is the "real mother" or the "real victim" or the "real recipient of promise" but how women work against their own gender’s liberation, both physical and spiritual.
How then does Islam view Hagar? She is held as the mother of Ishmael, the son of Abraham, who survived exile in the desert to found the tribe from which the Prophet Muhammad would descend. But despite her importance as the matriarch of Muhammad’s line, Hagar, unlike the other characters in the story, is never referenced in the Qur’an (Stowasser 1994; al-Hibri 1996).
Her importance is revealed instead through Islamic lore and ritual. The commentaries passed down in Islamic tradition generally agree with the biblical text. But the Islamic commentators add important details to the story that make it significant to their faith. First, some Islamic commentators add that Sarah threatened to or actually cut Hagar, or circumcised her, thus beginning (oddly I think) the tradition of female circumcision (Firestone 1990; Stowasser 1994).
But Hagar’s true importance is reflected in one of the seven pillars of Islam, the pilgrimage to Mecca or the Hajj. Abraham accompanies Hagar and Ishmael into exile, bringing them to Mecca, before returning to Sarah. This place becomes the Holy City of Islam because while there, Abraham and Ishmael built the Ka’ba, the shrine Muslims visit during the Hajj. Furthermore, the rituals of the Muslim pilgrims during the Hajj—running 7 times between the hills of Safa and Marwa, and the drinking from the well of Zam Zam—are done to recreate and honor Hagar’s experience of running back and forth in her desperate search for water and of Ishmael kicking the ground with his heel to reveal the sacred well. (Firestone 1990; Stowasser 1994; al-Hibri 1996).
Given Hagar’s importance in Islamic tradition and ritual and the rise in feminist scriptural interpretation, I was very surprised to find almost no Islamic feminist commentary on Hagar. There may be a couple of reasons for this. First, Hagar’s status is viewed very differently in Islam. There is no need for Muslim women to "reclaim" or "redeem" her story because she is perceived neither as a threat to God’s promise nor as a voiceless victim of oppression. Rather, she stands as one of the revered founders, a true believer, forever remembered in story and honored in the rites of pilgrimage.
The lack of special attention to Hagar by Muslim feminists may also be because of where these women are in their own struggles. Their focus has been on how the shariah (Islamic Law) has been interpreted through the Qur’an and the Hadith. They are "…more concerned with Muslim practice…" than theology." (Roald 1998:24).
I find Hagar compelling for a couple of reasons. First, her story resonates with my family’s own: I hear in Hagar’s anguish echoes of my grandmother’s as she made the choice to leaver her daughter, my mother, in an orphanage during World War II, hoping she would be safer there than with my grandmother. It happens every day: parents facing anguishing separations from their children: refugees fleeing wars or genocides, gay parents fearing denial or loss of custody, young, poor or single parents facing battles for survival or custody, parents having to leave a sick or hurt child in a hospital…Hagar’s story is a sacred witness to these unbearable fears, these unbearable experiences.
She also stands a witness to how we as religious peoples and communities can derive very different understandings and interpretations of our shared experiences, our shared stories. The responses and interpretations over the centuries demonstrate the choices before us. We can use such sacred stories to justify our domination or superiority over others, to claim jurisdiction over the ultimate truth and over God or the Holy. Or, we can use our shared sacred stories to explore honestly the conflicts and the tragedies, the love and the hope of our human relationships, and discern the presence of a larger spirit of love, or eternal wisdom which makes them sacred.
Bibliography
Al-Hibri, Aziza
1996 A Family Affair. Pp. 185-212 in Genesis: A Living Conversation, edited by Bill Moyers, and Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday.
Darr, Katheryn Pfister
1991 Far More Precious Than Jewels: Perspectives on Biblical Women. Louisville: John Knox Press.
Delaney, Carol
1998 Abraham on Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Firestone, Reuven
1990 Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Frankel, Ellen
1996 The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah. New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons.
Lee, Sonia
1996 Daughters of Hagar: Daughters of Muhammad. Pp. 51-61 in The Marabout and the Muse, edited by K. Harrow. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Moyers, Bill
1996 A Family Affair. Pp. 185-212 in Genesis: A Living Conversation, edited by Bill Moyers and Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday.
Niditch, Susan
1992 s.v. Genesis. The Woman’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe. Louisville: John Knox Press.
Roald, Anne Sofie
1998 Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic Sources: Muslim Feminist Theology in the Light of the Christian Tradition of Feminist Thought. Pp. 17-44 in Women and Islamization, edited by Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland. New York: Berg.
Stowasser, Barbara Freyer
1994 Women in the Qur’an: Traditions and Interpretations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trible, Phyllis
1984 Texts of Terror: Literary -Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Series: Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Weems, Renita
1988 Just A Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia.