Hagar's Hope

“Hagar’s Hope”

Rev. Stephen Milton

Lawrence Park Community Church

July 13 2025

Genesis 16

Today’s passage occurs eleven years later. Abram and Sarai have had some adventures. A famine has pushed them into Egypt and back. Now they are on good land, and the living is easy. But, still no pregnancy. Sarai’s faith in Abram’s God is wearing thin. So, she takes matters into her own hands. She instructs Abram to have sex with one of her Egyptian slaves, Hagar. At that time, masters owned the children born to their slaves. Hagar will serve as a surrogate mother of sorts. Sarai hopes that she will no longer feel the shame of being barren once Abram has a child. So Abram, despite God’s promise, agrees to Sarai’s plan to preempt whatever God has in mind. He has sex with Hagar, and she becomes pregnant.

For a while, it looks like everyone will get what they want. But, that’s not the way it turns out. One of the features of stories in the Hebrew Scriptures is that no one is perfect. People often come to the Bible hoping to hear the stories of perfect religious role models. They want to meet pious people who do no wrong, who can be an inspiration for how we can be perfect people. But that is not what we find in the stories of people like Moses, Abraham or David. All of the major figures in the Hebrew Scriptures are flawed people. They make mistakes. Moses kills a man. Abraham fights in wars, King David commits adultery. They harbour resentments and grudges. They can do wonderful things, too, but they are always emphatically, obviously human, with all the light and shadow that entails.

Sarai shows that humanity here. She set up this pregnancy with Hagar. So, she should be pleased that her husband will now have a child, possibly a son. But instead, she gets angry. She senses that Hagar is now boastful, proud that she is bearing the child of the boss, Abraham. Sarai takes this as an insult to her position as Abram’s wife. So, she demands that Hagar be cast out. As a slave owner, she has every right to do this. And Abram, the man who should be the father of nations, a paragon of virtue? He meekly goes along with this terrible deed. They live in the desert. Casting a person out can be a death sentence. But he does it anyway.

Why does the Bible have characters like this? Why can’t they be good,  to show us how to be good? Well, it’s like we’re being presented with a choice. Do we want to pretend that people are better than they are? That we are better than we are? Or do we want stories about what people are really like, but who can become better? The Bible usually chooses the second path. 

In the Hebrew Scriptures, we meet people who have all sorts of weaknesses and failings. They will not improve on their own. If they improve, it is through their relationship with God, which changes them. Getting to know God and how God can change us is the point of the Bible. Some walk towards God and improve, others walk away and get worse. Even the heroes are not ideal. For, we are human, always capable of coming up short, even when we are trying to follow God. That’s just who we are. But with God we can be better. Not perfect, but better.

I would like to say that three thousand years later, we have become better than these characters. But lately, it seems like humans are just as flawed as ever. 

Atwood
Margaret Atwood used this story as the inspiration for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In it, she imagines a fertility crisis in a land obviously inspired by the United States. Most women have become barren like Sarai, so the fertile few become enslaved to bear children for the wealthy. 

That was fiction, but lately, we seem to be getting closer to it becoming a reality. World fertility rates really have dropped over the last fifty years. All over the West and in Japan, couples are having smaller and smaller families, if they have children at all. The only way to keep the population of countries growing is to bring in immigrants. Yet, all over the world, industrialized countries like Canada and the United States have been reducing immigration. In the U.S., immigrants and refugees are falsely accused of being criminals, a thin cover for racism against black and brown people from other parts of the world. In Canada, our inability to create more housing has led the federal government to agree to reduce the number of refugees, immigrants  and international students who are admitted into the country. 

Yet the math stays the same.

Fertility in Canada

Canada’s fertility rate is 1.48 children per couple, far too low to maintain the population. This will make it harder and harder for the economy to produce enough wealth to fund our pension system which retired people rely on. 

Two years ago, I attended a town hall meeting in Thorncliff Park, where Rob Oliphant, our federal MP for this riding, explained the problem in exactly these terms. Someone has to be working to pay for all the pensions and health care seniors rely on. Immigration was supposed to provide those workers. But if immigration slows, we have the same problem. Where are the young workers going to come from?

There are a few solutions being offered. The big Artificial Intelligence companies are saying that in the very near future, we won’t need many workers since AI will replace so many of them. A new kind of workforce will emerge that will be smaller and much more efficient. 

In Japan, scientists and the government are investing heavily in robots to replace missing workers. 

Robot restaurant
Robots are already in restaurants cooking and serving meals. 

Japan robots

Robots are also being used in long term care homes, to socialize with residents, as well as help them with physical tasks and movement.

Most countries that are cutting back in immigration are relying on an old fashioned solution: have more babies. All over the West, governments are offering couples incentives to have more children, often in the form of tax breaks and cash bonuses. Efforts to ban abortion are part of this as well. Abortion bans are usually presented in religious terms, as  respect for human life and morality. 

Abortion/Death Penalty map

However, in America, 17 states which ban abortion also have the death penalty for adults. Abortion bans may help raise the birthrate, but they do not prove respect for human life.

In countries with right wing governments, women are increasingly being told that their place is in the home having babies. They are told that immigrants are going to replace the domestic population - this is called the great replacement theory. It suggests that white voters will be outnumbered by immigrants. Trump and Vance have both endorsed this theory in America. It is racist,  and it puts more pressure on American women to stay home and have babies for the good of the nation. 

The politics of birth have not changed since Abraham’s time. When people need babies, they will often make desperate choices to have them, even if it means trampling on other people’s rights. It is happening in our day, and it took place in today’s scripture passage. Sarai gets Hagar pregnant with Abraham’s child out of desperation. Then out of wounded pride, she has Hagar cast out, knowing that will be pregnant, alone, far from her people in Egypt, a cast off slave. This isa recipe for disaster for Hagar, and Sari knows it.  

When we read the Bible, we expect to see hope in it, but where can we find hope in this grim situation? The hope comes from God. As Hagar wanders through the desert, she meets an angel, a messenger from God. In her society, Hagar is a nobody. A slave. A woman. A woman cast out. She is the last person an angel should be speaking to. But there it is. The woman who has been thrown away like garbage is addressed by an angel, the first person in the Bible to meet an angel like this. They meet on the road to a place called Shur, the exact same place where later the Israelites will escape to with God after they leave Egypt. It is not a coincidence. The text is underlining that God is with God’s people, even when they are in trouble and on the run.

Everything about this encounter is extraordinary. The angel says Hagar’s name out loud, the first time anyone pronounces her name in this story. And even more remarkable, Hagar gives a name to God, the only person in the Bible to do so. Hagar is told that she matters. Her son will be the father of a great nation. Her son will be called Ishmael, which means “God hears.” He will become the father of all Arabs, a nomadic desert people who live in the wilds. The angel provides a blessing to Hagar, just as God has made a blessing to Abram, who will be the father of multitudes. So, here in this desert, a pregnant woman who was cast out becomes just as important as Abram, favoured by God, the mother of nations. For all Christians who may think it is right to persecute refugees and migrants, or to treat women with disdain, let them hear this story. God is on Hagar’s side. She is told to go back to have the baby in safety. 

People being people, when Hagar returns to have the baby, her struggles with Sarah are not over. She and her son will be cast out again,  but God will come to her rescue once more ( Genesis 21). God favours Hagar, just as God keeps rescuing innocent people on the run throughout the Bible. Their worth is not measured in their wealth or social respectability. Instead, God helps the helpless, for all of us are God’s children, even the outcasts.

There is an interesting coda to this story. In the Koran, when Hagar’s son Ishmael is born, Abraham brings him and Hagar to Mecca, now the holy city of Islam. Ishmael becomes the ancestor not only of all Arabs, but the ancestor of the Prophet Mohammed. According to Muslim tradition, Hagar finds a well in the desert which to this day pilgrims visit and revere. For millions of Muslims, Hagar is a hero of the faith, very much a somebody.

Today, our challenge is to live up to God’s call. We are far more like Abraham and Sarah than we like to admit. We often allow people to get vast out as we pursue our narrow self interest. Homeless people, people who use drugs, refugees. God calls on us to look beyond our narrow self interests to consider the welfare of all people. For we are all the children of God, even those we might cast out. We all deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, for angels call on all of us, not just the successful. In fact, sometimes they visit the outcasts first, and those stories are kept alive, generation after generation, to remind us of humanity’s potential to improve, to draw closer to God on Earth. Amen.