Seeing, Hearing God

Pentecost 4A: Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17

Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

June 21, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1205543482

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

In the summer stretch after the Feast of Pentecost, our readings – which are assigned from the Revised Common Lectionary – are moving us sequentially through us chunks of Genesis, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and the Gospel of Matthew. We’ll hear some of the great stories of Genesis until late August when we shift to Exodus. Romans will be with us until mid-September. Matthew is our gospel until the Church year turns at the end of November.

Last week, we heard the story of how Sarah and Abraham came to have their son Isaac at the age of ninety and ninety-nine. The idea of bearing a child at that point in life seemed ludicrous to each of them, and they laughed when God told them – each of them at different points, though our passage featured Sarah’s reaction. The name Isaac was to be given to this child, God had told Abraham, a name that means “he laughs.” Laughter forms a key theme in the emergence of Isaac. It names a way of being and receiving the wildly improbable promises of God, opening us to possibilities beyond the limiting barriers of our imaginations. Or as the biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote, “laughter is the biblical way of receiving a newness which cannot be explained. The newness is sheer gift – underived, unwarranted.”^[1] Yet even amid this mirth, a connected story was also unfolding. As one of you said to me at the Peace last week, “Hagar wasn’t laughing.” Indeed. This week opens our eyes to her story and that of her son Ishmael. And whereas laughter is key to the Sarah and Isaac cycle, sight and divine seeing, as well as holy hearing, are foundational to the story of Hagar and Ishmael. 

Prior to our portion of the story, after Abram (as he was then called) had lamented his lack of children, God had taken him out of his tent to look at the uncountable stars of the night sky, saying, “So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5). Sarai (as she was then called) had later approached Abram, declaring that since she seemed unable to conceive, he should seek to have children with an Egyptian woman named Hagar who was enslaved in their household. Later, upon realizing that she had indeed conceived, Hagar “looked with contempt upon her mistress” (16:4). In response, Sarai treated Hagar harshly, so much so that Hagar ran away into the wilderness. This is the first wilderness foray by Hagar that Genesis narrates –our passage depicts a second sojourn. But at this earlier point in the story, pregnant and forsaken, Hagar sat by a spring of water in the wilderness. There God  sought her out in angelic form, asking where she had come from and where she was going. She replied that she was running from her mistress. In reply God told her to return and that she would have a multitude of descendants through the son soon to be born. He was to be named Ishmael, which means “God hears.” Ishmael would grow up to be “a wild ass of a man” who would “live at odds with his kin” (16:7-12). In reply, asking herself, “have I really seen God” and lived to tell the tale, Hagar declared, “you are El-Roi” – that is, the seeing God or the God who sees (16:13).

Hagar boldly named God, a point underlined and explored by feminist and womanist theologians. Noting that “this act of naming is Hagar’s last word in the Genesis 16 account,” one such theologian, Delores Williams writes, “This experience holds in solution a woman’s self-initiated liberation event, woman’s alienation and isolation, economic deprivation, pregnancy, and a radical encounter with God, which empowers the female slave of African descent to hope and to act.”^[2] Something in this holy encounter seems to have strengthened Hagar for the road ahead. The Womanist theologian and ethicist Barbara Holmes reflects on this theme in her book Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church:

After Hagar’s encounter with God, she is changed. No person can experience God’s presence and remain the same. A change in her spirit would ultimately change her relational circumstances. So although she goes back into ostensible bondage, her time of contemplation with God under the tree has freed her spirit forever. There is no longer a need to taunt Sarah or respond to Sarah’s taunts. Hagar has heard from God that she will be sustained.^[3]

Our passage picks up the story some years later. Sarah observes the young Ishmael playing with her son Isaac, newly weaned, and has a reaction. From the beginning of Hagar’s pregnancy Sarah had felt threatened. Now she tells Abraham to cast Ishmael and his mother out. Abraham complies and sends them forth with a skin of water. Once more Hagar makes her way into the wilderness. After the water runs out, she despairs. What she cannot bear to see is the death of her son. And so she leaves him under a bush and retreats a bow-shot away from the one who would become skilled with the bow. Hagar weeps, as does Ishmael. Amid this despair, God hears Ishmael, whose name means “God hears.” And now, once again, Hagar encounters God. God asks her why she is troubled, a strange question under the circumstances. But before she can answer, God continues: “Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is” (21:17). The God who hears had heard Ishmael. And the God who sees then opened Hagar’s eyes. In their midst was a well. She had not been able to see it. Was it the one where she had first encountered God, I wonder? With water she refilled her skin and was able, along with her son, to survive. Not only to survive but to adapt, and not only to adapt but even to thrive in the wilderness, if Ishmael’s prowess with the bow and later marriage to a woman of Hagar’s Egyptian heritage, is any indication.

In her book Sisters in the Wilderness, which centers on Hagar’s story, the Womanist theologian Delores Williams describes two connected but distinct biblical narratives from which the Black church has historically drawn particular strength. One is anchored in the Exodus narrative, the God who liberates the oppressed, who breaks the shackles, who sets the captives free. But a second one, no less significant in navigating ongoing oppression, driven notably by stories of biblical women, narrates survival. Hagar is at the heart of this tradition: “God’s response to Hagar’s story,” writes Williams, “is not liberation. Rather, God participates in Hagar’s and her child’s survival on two occasions” – the earlier part of the story that I described, and the later scene depicted in our passage. “God gave her new vision to see survival resources where she had seen none before. Liberation in the Hagar story is not given by God: it finds its source in human initiative.”^[4] Hagar bears witness to the God who meets those who are cast out; who comes among and alongside those struggling to put one foot in front of the other. This is the God who hears the cries of the despondent. The God who sees the lost, the righteously enraged, who opens the eyes of the overwhelmed, who cannot perceive possibilities. This God says, behold, a well. You can make a way out of no way. Follow me. Let me show you.

Juneteenth, which was Friday, and which our diocese celebrated in a service at All Souls Berkeley yesterday, uplifted both of these sorts of narratives. Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 on which General Gordon Granger conveyed General Order Number 3 to the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas proclaiming that “all slaves are free.” This order reiterated the Emancipation proclamation which had been issued on January 1, 1863, over two years earlier. Freedom was supposed to have been at hand, and yet it was not yet. Celebration and struggle both ensued. As they do today. The God who sets the captives free, and the God who joins the oppressed in the wilderness, opening portals of perception and possibility – both of these narratives are encoded into this story, too. The liberatory laughter of the Sarah and Isaac tradition and the anguished navigation of the Hagar and Ishmael tradition remain with us. As Walter Brueggemann notes, the Bible sets both stories before us, refusing to force us to choose between them, and in fact, inviting us to be sustained and galvanized by them. Both challenge and inspire us with holy truth.^[5] There is in our lives a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to listen and a time to speak, a time to push back in fierce anger, a time to dance, a time to come together in strength and solidary, as the people of God. In this moment, may we receive these holy stories, appropriating them for our lives and the loves of so many communities around the world in this hour. May the God who sees, who hears, the God who cries and laughs with us, strengthen us to be bearers of Good News in this world, this day and always.

^[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching) (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 182.

^[2] Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, 2013), 24. Phyllis Trible has written, “Hagar is a theologian. Her naming unites the divine and human encounter: the God who sees and the God who is seen.” Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 18.

^[3] Barbara Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 104.

^[4] Williams, 4

^[5] Brueggemann, 183