The God who sees

There is a feast in Genesis 21, and it does not stay a feast for long.

Abraham throws a celebration for Isaac — the impossible child, the laugh made flesh. And in the middle of that celebration, Sarah sees Ishmael playing. Abraham’s other son. Hagar’s son. And something that looks like fear moves through her — fear for her son’s place, his inheritance, the future she has only just been given.

“Cast out this slave woman with her son.”

I want to say this plainly: this is not an overreaction we can explain away. It is a demand for the removal of a woman and a child from the household that has used them and no longer wants them visible.

Abraham is distressed. The text says so. But distress is not refusal. And God tells him: listen to Sarah.

Sit with that a moment. The people carrying the covenant — the household through whom all the families of the earth were going to be blessed — are the ones doing the expelling.

It’s likely that we have not heard this story as often as Sarah’s laughter or Abraham’s call. I want to say briefly why, because the why matters.

For most of Christian history, this text got read from the tent, not from the wilderness — footnoted into Sarah’s story, or allegorized, as Paul does in Galatians, into a symbol for bondage while Sarah becomes the symbol of freedom. The people doing the interpreting occupied something like Abraham and Sarah’s position in the world. It did not occur to them to ask what it was like in the wilderness.

It took Black women theologians — women writing from inside a history that had also known enslavement and reproductive exploitation — to read this text and see Hagar clearly. Womanist theologian Delores Williams calls her a prototype: an enslaved African woman, used for surrogacy without consent, discarded once she was no longer necessary. She bore the cost of a fear that was never hers — she did not create the threat Sarah felt, she simply became the place that fear landed.

Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness with bread and a skin of water. The water runs out. She puts the boy under a bush. She cannot watch him die, so she sits down at a distance and weeps.

No promise yet. No angel yet. Just a mother, a dying child, and weeping that the household, back at its feast, will never hear. This is what it costs when a household decides someone is no longer necessary.

But God hears the voice of the boy.

“What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid.”

God opens her eyes, and she sees a well of water. It had likely been there the whole time.

I want to be careful here. It would be easy to preach this as: God left the feast and went to the wilderness instead. I don’t think that’s right. God was not less present at Abraham’s feast than in Hagar’s wilderness. God was exactly as present in both. What changes is not God’s location. It is Hagar’s perception.

Go back to Genesis 16, the first time Hagar is sent away. There, alone, she names God. El Roi. The God who sees me. The first person in Genesis to name the divine. Not Abraham. Not Sarah.

Back at the feast, no one is afraid anymore. The household was not more right about where God lives. Its fear was simply resolved by someone’s absence, while God was as present in the wilderness as at the table.

I want to say something about how fear works in both of these stories, because I think it changes what we do with them.

Fear is not, in itself, the problem. It is an old and useful thing in us — it tells us something has changed, something needs attention. The trouble was never that Sarah felt something when she saw Ishmael playing. The trouble is what the household did with what she felt.

A community that has practiced holding fear together — naming it, sitting with it, learning courage as a shared discipline rather than a private burden — can let an uncomfortable presence stay. A community that has not done that work reaches for the fastest way to make the fear stop, and the fastest way is almost always someone else’s removal. Sarah’s fear was nobody’s to help carry so,  became a demand. It became Hagar’s problem to survive.

Jesus, in Matthew 10, does on purpose what Abraham’s household never did. He names fear directly to people with real reason to feel it — they will hand you over, they will hate you — and he says this to a community sent out together, not to isolated individuals carrying it alone. Do not fear them, he says, twice. Not because there is nothing to fear. Because fear that is carried together does not have to go looking for someone to blame.

This is not a story about individual courage. It is a story about whether a community has learned to hold its fear together — or whether fear nobody helped carry will decide who gets cast out.

Twice in these texts, someone afraid is told not to be.

The angel says it to Hagar. Jesus says it to the disciples. Neither is comfort offered carelessly — both are spoken directly into real cost, and both are exactly the kind of naming Sarah’s household never did. I want to say this to the room plainly: some of us have been afraid. Some of us have lost family, or standing, or welcome, for telling the truth about who you are.

Jesus does not pretend this won’t happen. He says: I see what it costs. I am with you in it.

This text does not end with Hagar restored to Abraham’s household. God does not send her back, or rewrite the story so everyone ends at the same table. God stays with her and the boy in the wilderness. The last word about Ishmael is simply: God was with the boy as he grew.

That is harder, and truer, than “welcome home.” Many queer people have not been restored to the households that expelled them. Some have built lives, faith, and family in the wilderness instead. This text refuses to pretend the wilderness is only a detour back to where we started.

So here is where three weeks of this have brought us.

The church has not cut God off from queer people by excluding them. That was never within its power. What it has cut off is its own access to what they have seen — because they have been naming God in places the church assumed were empty, places its own fear, with nowhere else to go, had taught it to avoid.

The Christian writer Rachel Held Evans said it better than I can: “I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead, God wanted to use gay people to show me how to be a Christian.”

That is the whole argument of these three weeks. We have not been deciding whether to extend belonging that was ours to give. We have been discovering, again — in a woman reaching from a crowd, in a laugh at a tent wall, in a well that was there the whole time — that the promise was never ours to administer.

All the families of the earth shall be blessed. Said before Abraham took a single step. Before any household existed to narrow it. Before fear could decide who got sent away.

The question is not whether we will welcome the people we excluded. That still assumes the welcome is ours to extend. The question is whether we will admit our vision has been too small — and let the people who saw more clearly teach us what they saw.

El Roi. The God who sees. Hagar knew that name before any of us did. Perhaps it's time we let her teach it to us.