Brent Newberry Second Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 22 June 2014 8:30 service Dallas, Texas The God Who Sees, Hears and Calls Genesis 16:6-13, 21 I was a bit disappointed this week. I was duped, only momentarily, into believing that an article I read online was actually true. The story goes like this: there was a woman who was married to a pastor, and she ran into a lady who looked like her at the grocery store or the mall or someplace. So the pastor s wife proceeded to hire this woman to be her body double for Sunday morning church services. That s quite an indictment of her husband s preaching. There was no mention of whether it was the 8:30 or 11:00 service she was most trying to avoid, but we know, don t we? I wanted so badly for this be true, and to be honest, I m still not 100 percent sure this hasn t happened somewhere before. We re talking about 2,000 years of weekly sermons across hundreds of civilizations. And in some of these places they still have Sunday-night services. I feel as though I should apologize ahead of time to Kim: I m sorry for any weirdly personal questions you ll be getting in the coming weeks as people try to decipher whether it is in fact really you and not a body double. I might have gotten a few of those questions when I shaved my beard a couple of months ago. Body doubles. My first thought was how it s ingenious, finding a body double to cover for us. It would free us up to work more hours, go to more family gatherings, get more involved in church. Unless those are the things you d assign your body double to. We d love for someone to play our part, fill our role, free up more time for us. Thinking a little longer on it, though, I m not sure we don t end up being the body double more times than not playing the parts we re assigned, living into the expectations of others. As we pull back the curtain on our text this morning, you can understand the plight of Hagar. She s the Egyptian slave girl of Abraham and Sarah. She has a part to play, a role of service that values her more for her function than her humanity. She isn t given a voice in the culture, in the house, not even in the story. until she encounters God in the wilderness. She is expected to serve her masters, even to the abhorrent point of sleeping with Abraham if that s what s expected of her. She has a role to play, expectations to meet. She s like Sarah s extra, her body double, or, more appropriately, just a body to Sarah. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than Sarah s unconscionable demand that Hagar be her surrogate. And lest there be any confusion, the text doesn t mention
any conversation indicating that Hagar has any say in the matter. And the story goes on like this: tensions arise. It s probably once Hagar begins to show signs of being more than just property, more than just a role in the household, more than just a body; it s when Hagar s body starts to change and it becomes clear that she is a real person with feelings and instincts and needs that Sarah begins to treat her poorly or more poorly. She s no longer waiting hand and foot on Sarah and Abraham, but instead Abraham might now be attending to Hagar s needs. 1 It s here where Sarah s jealousy begins to take root; she finally sees Hagar as a person and begins to envy her. It s here where Sarah s insecurities begin to take the shape of a face; she finally sees Hagar as a person and projects her own insecurities and shortcomings and mistakes onto Hagar, and she begins to hate her. And so Hagar flees. If anyone needed somebody to stand in her place, even if only for eight or nine months, it was Hagar. With all she was thinking and feeling, Hagar wasn t simply running away from a place. She was running away from circumstances and an environment and a family that had come to define her in a certain way, by insecurities or mistakes or cultural norms that valued her more 1 http://frederickbuechner.com/content/weeklysermon-illustration-hagar for her functionality than her personality. She was seen in a specific light, and it wasn t good. So she ran. From the situation, from this family, from whom she was because everything around her was telling her that this is who or what she was. Hagar was trying to be somewhere else, be something else, be someone else be someone at all. If anyone could use a fill-in, someone to cover for her, a body double that would go through the motions and play her part, it was Hagar. Instead, she was the one left playing the part that was expected of her, even if it left her demoralized and dehumanized. There s a sense in which our entire lives are lived in such a way as to figure out who we are. It s part of our humanity. We are constantly discovering places, people, successes and failures, possessions. And yet so much around us categorizes and assigns values, roles, hierarchies, expectations. And so very often we define ourselves by these very things that limit us. We are seen only for what we produce, who we impress, whom we know. You wanted to be a teacher, but your parents wanted you to be a doctor. You want to be a liberal, but your parents expect you to be conservative. Employers demand that you produce, families need you to provide, churches expect you to preach well (not here, of course). Friends want you to perform. We are instruments, tools, means to 2
ends that we don t easily get much say in. In so many areas of our lives, we are defined by what we do, whom we know, what we bring to everyone else s table, not for who we are. Kazuo Ishiguro offers a striking metaphor for this situation in his book Never Let Me Go. While his larger point might be to offer a social commentary on humanity s obsession with immortality, what sticks with me is the dehumanizing effect our culture can have on each of us. At the risk of ruining a big surprise in the book this is your cue to plug your ears for a few moments if you want to read this book, just please don t hum out loud the author tells his story from the perspective of a donor. You come to find out that donors are in fact just that people who were created to be donors for those after whom they were genetically engineered. They are the clones of other people. The donors grow up at boarding schools, but instead of getting much education, they are instructed to make art. They exist on the margins of a society that has classified them merely as donors, as hosts for their counterparts organs. The author draws you into their humanity, their pain and love and loss, as you wrestle with questions of what it means to be human. It s poignant and horrific, and while being about something that we don t have to actually deal with yet (literal body doubles or duplicates or clones), it s exactly what we all deal with in our everyday lives. From our ancient sacred text to science fiction novels, we are reminded that our humanity can get lost in the current of a culture that is obsessed with gaining and winning and succeeding. Hagar s story goes on like this: God finds a pregnant Hagar by a well of water and tells her to return to Abraham and Sarah, saying that she will name her child Ishamael, God Hears, and to that we hear her voice for the first time as she names God Elroi The God Who Sees. The God who sees her wandering in that wilderness, the literal one, but also the God who saw her all along, living through her own wilderness of slavery and oppression and hatred. The God who hears her cries in that wilderness, but heard them all along. In spite of all the expectations and demands and duties placed on Hagar, God sees who she is. God hears the longing of a slave girl to be seen as a girl at all. That God who sees, that God who hears, that God who calls out to her and gives her hope and life and a name, that God sees you and hears you. In a noisy and busy culture, in a success-obsessed world, God sees through the haze and finds you, hears you, knows you as more than mounting debt or professional awards, as more than mistakes or good decisions, as more than a disappointment to your family or a respected member of your community. 3
In spite of your roles, the parts you play, the places where you re more like a body double than yourself, God sees you and hears you, and God calls you to remember, to remember who you are, and whose you are and to remind others who and whose they are. If our employers, if our families, if our world doesn t teach us and remind us of who we are, then the church must answer the call. The God who sees us and hears us calls us to remind each other that we are God s, and we are part of God s story and God s mission in the world. This morning we got to see and hear and be reminded of the love of God by literal children. This week we hosted Vacation Bible School here. We do it every year, of course, and throughout the year we have many activities and opportunities for kids and youth to get involved in. It s not that we re just trying to fill Joan and Julie and Darren s calendars so they can earn their keep around here. After working with preschoolers this week, I think they all deserve a raise. It s because we as a church believe in our calling to teach and remind these students that they are loved beyond their deepest imagination, that if they are like sheep in a herd with the Good Shepherd, they are so loved that the Shepherd would search them out individually and know them by name. We sometimes see George walk up and down these aisles carrying little children and helping families dedicate them to God. It s always beautiful and sometimes comical, and George reminds the families that the children are not theirs they are God s. It would do us well to remember that about ourselves more often. You are children of God. You don t belong to debt collectors or custody arrangements. You don t have to be enslaved to the latest fashion trends and beauty tips. You aren t more or less valued because you re wealthy or impoverished. You are not reduced to a sexual orientation or a race or a gender. You are wholly, completely, unreservedly loved by the God who sees you as you are: people being shaped by the Spirit of God. You are more than what people expect you to do. You are more than who people say that you are. God sees you and hears you and loves you. And God is calling you to remember and remind each other. In the book and TV miniseries, Roots, a Gambian man named Kunta Kinte is sold into slavery. His slave owner renames him, but Kunta Kinte resists. So the slave owner ties him up and begins to whip him. Your name is Toby. I want to hear you say it. What s your name? Kunta Kinte mutters, Kunta. Kunta Kinte. 2 The slave owner whips him again. You are Toby. What is your name? 2 Roger Paynter uses this image to illustrate a similar point in one of his sermons that is unavailable online. 4
Wheezing, he replies, Kunta Kinte. 5 [Whipping sound again] What s your name? Toby. I want to hear you say it. Kunta Kinte whimpers, Toby. The slave owner makes him repeat it more loudly and finally has him untied by another slave. As the fellow slave helps him down, he whispers in his ear, Your name is Kunta Kinte. 3 3 Roots, TV miniseries, 1977.