Genesis 16 & 21: Hagar in the Wilderness

Sunday, June 21, 2026

The Rev. Megan Collins

Watch | Listen

Dave and I took a trip camping in Olympic National Park, on the upper peninsula in Washington. We didn’t camp in a tent, because Washington is cold and wet. We slept in a retrofitted minivan, that had a thin foam mattress where the back seats would usually be, and a pull out surface for cooking. I am fascinated by Olympic National Park because it is just so big. There are three ecosystems in the one park. I loved the coastal bluffs along the beaches, and the mountain views that would peak out when the clouds broke. But most of all, I love the woods. The trees in the rainforest are gigantic and mysterious, covered in a green moss. We did a hike that takes you to one of the quietest spots in the country, deep in the rain forest. Surrounding you it’s all trees, and you can hear is the rustling of the leaves when the wind blows. There is something healing about that kind of stillness and quiet. 

I found myself thinking I could just stay out there forever.

Then it started raining. And it’s so cold.

I was more than happy to crawl into my warm minivan at the end of the day and get into my dry down sleeping bag to read. 

One of the books I read while we were camping was about a woman who through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. She hiked all the way from the start in Georgia to the terminus in Maine, over 2000 miles, 6 months in the woods. She talks about the kind of people she met along the way. A lot of the people she encountered actually went into the woods to take a break from the sort of wilderness of their lives in some way. Their wilderness was the death of someone close to them, a fork in the road, an unknown future, the end of an important relationship. It took all kinds of forms. But almost across the board, they had left the wilderness back home, to go into the woods. They were looking for something there: clarity, quiet, healing. They hadn’t chosen the wilderness of their lives. But they did choose the woods. 

Maybe this idea of choosing to be in the woods isn’t your thing. (It’s not for everyone, especially if you like indoor plumbing). But I’m willing to bet you do know the wilderness. You’ve been in those seasons that make you want to run, to hide, to give up. You’ve had seasons where you felt alone, or like you didn’t know where to go from here. 

Today we’ll be looking at someone who had a wilderness of her own. We’ve been following the story of Abram, who becomes Abraham, in Genesis. God makes this promise to him that he and his wife Sarai, will have children. But then they don’t get pregnant right away. And so they get impatient. We’ll pick up in Genesis 16:

16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. 

There is an important conversation to be had as we move through the Old Testament about fertility. It is a unique and significant pain for those who want to have children and cannot. We’ll see that often in the Bible, those who want children pray, and God eventually answers that prayer with a child. We know is not always the case for us today. We’ll talk about this more when we get to the story of Hannah in 1 Samuel. But today the main character of our story today isn’t Sarai. Let’s keep reading. 

She had an Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar, ² and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. ³ So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. 

There’s a scholar I normally really like that has written a whole volume, just about Genesis. So when I was preparing for this message, I went to look at his reflections on this passage and he said this:

“No moral judgement need be rendered against the alternative device for securing a son, as this may be attested as a proper legal practice elsewhere in the biblical period.”  

Nope. On this, we disagree. We can absolutely be appalled by the handmaid’s tale situation unfolding in this passage. And this quote “alternative device for securing a son” needs a whole separate conversation as well. We’ll look at what we do with this horrific practice in the Scripture when we get to Genesis 30, which is a foundational text in The Handmaid’s Tale.

So, I put down the commentary, and went looking for another, perhaps not written by an older white man. (It's not that I don't appreciate older white men. They too have wisdom to share. But perhaps this time we need something different). I spent the week with Delores S. Williams who wrote Sisters in the Wilderness. She is one of the strongest voices in womanist theology. I went to her because Hagar is not only a woman. She is a slave. Womanist theology works from the intersection of being female and being black.

Our study in the Scripture today will be heavily influenced by Williams and her work, as it should be. Because the main character in this story isn’t Abram or Sarai. It’s Hagar. Hagar is a woman whose story unfolds under slavery, awoman whose body was not treated as her own, a woman who had to find her way in the world by herself, with her child. And she is a woman who has a powerful and unique experience with God. 

⁴ He went in to Hagar, and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. ⁵ Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!” ⁶ But Abram said to Sarai, “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her.

Genesis says Sarai dealt harshly with her. The word in the Hebrew for harshly here is the same word used in the book of Exodus, to describe the tremendous suffering of the Hebrews when they were slaves in Egypt. This suffering made them cry out to God. It led to the plagues and the parting of the sea and the Hebrews fleeing.  But with Hagar, there are no plagues, no parted seas. no community. It's just her. She flees alone from her wilderness with Sarai and Abram, and into the wild. In doing so becomes the first female in the Bible to leave an oppressive structure and go out on her own. That takes courage. She isn’t alone for long. 

⁷ The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. ⁸ And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” ⁹ The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” 

Okay. This doesn’t make God look great. I don't know more than God, of course. But if I was writing this down, the Lord will say something like “let’s go find a new place for you to live, and I’ll take care of everything.” But that’s not the story. Latin American biblical scholar Elsa Tamez wonders if perhaps this is God acting for the survival of Hagar and her child. Giving birth out in the woods, alone, would likely have been a death sentence for them both. Going back wasn’t a good situation, but it might have been the only one she had to survive. I still don’t love it, but it helps. Then the Lord makes her a promise:

¹⁰ The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” 

¹³ So she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi,” for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”

This is huge. Hagar becomes the only person in the Old Testament to name the Lord. Other people name altars or monuments. Hagar names God directly. She says You are El-roi, which means the God who sees. Then Hagar goes back to Sarai and Abram, and has the child. In the meantime, Sarah has also finally become pregnant, and had a child of her own, Isaac. And you can imagine how well that is going. Our story with Hagar picks back up in Genesis 21:

⁸ The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. ⁹ But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. ¹⁰ So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” ^{. . . 14} So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

This time Hagar doesn’t run away, but instead she is sent, into the woods. She is in a new wilderness where she does not have enough to provide for her son. 

¹⁵ When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. ¹⁶ Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. ¹⁷ And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. ¹⁸ Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” ¹⁹ Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

LIke the last time, the wilderness for Hagar is a difficult place. But just like the last time, God meets her there. 

Williams wrote this:

 “Many times, as a little girl, I sat in the church pew with my mother or grandmother and heard the black believers, mostly women, testify about “how far they had come by faith.” They expressed their belief that God was involved in their history, that God helped them make a way out of no way. Their testimonies suggested they believed their lives were about more than white people's oppression of black people."

Hagar went to the wilderness twice: once to run away from the abuse she was subjected to, and once because she was sent away. 

She knew her life mattered.

She saw that God was involved in her history.

And she saw God made a way out of no way. 

You can end up in the wilderness for all kinds of reasons.

Maybe you are running from something. Maybe you were cast out.

Your wilderness might look like grief, or a lack of direction, or not having enough, or loneliness. And we all find ourselves in the wilderness of this world, where equality for all people is up for debate, where we are in senseless wars, where some don’t have enough and others have more than they could spend in several lifetimes. 

The wilderness is real for us all. 

But Hagar can teach us how to survive it. 

It doesn’t matter how you got there.

God will meet you in the wilderness, every time.

But remember Hagar doesn't name God "the God who will make everything just like I want it, when I want it." God meets us not as the God who makes it all go away, or fixes everything overnight, but as the God who sees.

God sees you, all the stuff you are going through.

God sees us, all the things in this world that makes us lose sleep.

And, if we have the faith of the women Williams writes of, we can trust that  God makes a way, where there is no way. Maybe not always the way we would want it to be. But a way, just the same. 

The wilderness is a tough place. But maybe it’s not all bad. Because we meet God there.

Williams also wrote about the wilderness in the antebellum period before the Civil War in America. She said enslaved people actually had a positive feeling about the wilderness, in that time. It was a place you could go to find relief from the oppression of life as an enslaved person and all the horrific realities that came with it. Because in the wilderness, it was just you. The wilderness was a place where you could find shelter if you had run away. It was a place where plants and herbs could be found that provided food and medicine. It was a place where you could hide. And, as one of the songs from that time said “if you want to find Jesus, go in the wilderness.” It was a place where you could meet God.  

The wilderness can be tough. But it’s not all bad. No matter what wilderness we find ourselves in, we meet God there. And maybe find a bit more of ourselves. 

While we were in the rainforest in Washington, we were hiking through these huge trees, and I saw a small plaque, with a poem. Now I’ll be honest, normally, I’m not a poem person. And I also normally really don’t like plaques in the forest. Just let the trees be trees. But maybe it was just the quiet majesty of this particular forest, because I stopped to read this poem, and it spoke to me.

It was written by Mary Oliver, a white woman, so someone who does not know the legacy of slavery for her personally, but a woman who knows the pain of abuse and a body that was not treated as her own. She was known for spending hours in the wilderness as an adult, writing. The poem said:

“When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness, I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, "Stay awhile." The light flows from their branches. And they call again, "It's simple," they say, "and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”

In the wilderness we are invited to slow down, to get back to ourselves.

And we remember that we have come into the world to be filled with God’s light. And to shine.

We know that we are never, truly alone. 

God sees us, God will always meet us, in the wilderness.