Lent 5 - the cry of Hagar.

Picasso, Blue Nude

Recently I have taken on the challenge to read the Bible in one year. This has meant re-reading parts of Genesis that I had not read in a long time. Reading these stories, I am amazed and inspired by the women of the Bible: by their suffering, their strength, and their courage. Too often these women have been villainized and their stories treated as nothing more than cautionary tales. But reading these stories, I see in these women beauty and strength, and I also find a call for action and for prayer.

These women were used, abused and put into impossible situations. Often, their only purpose in society was as property of men and as the vessels of production of heirs. Abraham offers Sarah as a sexual partner to other men in power, claiming she is his sister, not his wife, to protect himself. Hagar, Sarah's maid, does what she is told in producing a child for Abraham, but then is cast off-- essentially sent into the wilderness with her baby son to die.  Lot's wife crumbles into salt, a tiny pile of dust, for looking back toward the life she had spent her years building for herself and her family. And Lot's daughters are offered to the men of the town as sexual objects as an act of hospitality.  Then they are abandoned by their husbands and when their husbands, mother and community all parish in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they are left to live out their days alone in a cave with their father. Like Hagar, they are cast off from society and forgotten. Their only hope of a future seems to be the unthinkable. I can't help imagining what tears and anguish accompanied the wine that they poured their father, as they prepared to make a future for themselves the only way they knew how: by making children with their own father.

These stories fill me with anger, with heart break and with questions. And I think that is precisely the reason that the telling of these stories is important. They awaken me to suffering that is still very much alive (read a few examples here, here or here). Much of this suffering has been ignored, accepted and even inflicted by the church.

The stories of scripture compel me to ask: how will we look for the women who have been acquired or cast off as property, who have been forced into caves, who have been abused and forgotten? How will we be like the God who saw Hagar in the wilderness and heard her crying? How will we be wells providing relief in the desert? How will we shine a light into caves where injustice and suffering is hiding?

God of gentleness and strength, break open our hearts to see the Hagars in our midst, that we may build wells for our sisters in the desert. I pray we will hear their cries for justice. I ask for compassion, anger and courage enough to join them in raising our own cries and for the strength to never be silenced. Train our ears to hear the quiet weeping of the daughters who have been offered up like objects to those who are violent and power-seeking. Open our eyes to see how we participate in the structures that work to oppress women, and keep their oppressors in positions of power. Awaken us from our sleep, that we way work to see beyond ourselves. Help us keep our eyes open even when the looking is hard, even when the looking tears us open, even when the looking breaks us. I pray for the eyes to see the dark caves where daughters are doing unthinkable things because it is their only hope of survival. Let us be the builders of bridges and doorways that provide a way out of hidden places of suffering. Let us be instruments of love building wells of grace in situations where all that seems possible is more death and tears. Help the church to be a place where women discover their own power. Where they find sisterhood. Where they find strength. Where they find a voice. Let us raise our voices for Sarah, for Hagar, for Lot's wife and Lot's daughters, for they are still in our midst and their suffering has not ended.