A Post from Rachel Matthews - Gratitude is what I feel for Hagar. I am grateful that she is remembered in our Lenten study today because there are so many women that have experienced alienation, abandonment, and the powerlessness of social structures that support her only as long as it benefits the benefactor. God knows that woman. God cares for that woman. Scripture gives her voice. The Word is powerful. I think about young women who fell in love, may or may not have gotten married, had a child and whose very sense of self was beginning to blossom in the relationship with the other only to find that relationship broken through divorce or betrayal. Her Self then is grows in relationship with bitterness and rejection. Love is a much better partner. Self for women, as I understand women’s development, grows in relation to others as a part of how she is made, in connectivity so what she is connected to impacts the very core of her identity: her family, her partner, her work. Here in this text with Hagar we see the power of a relationship with God who does not abandon and stays with and even gives life to her part in the creation of life, her son. A whole nation comes from this relationship with God. She is not alone and bitterness does not have to take root. And, then there is this connection with the text we all experience brokenness and alienation. Here is just one more example of how God helps us feel not alone. The older I get the more I trust that it is true. Thank you, Hagar, for sharing your pain with God.
From Rachel Matthews - Today I have been chopping, measuring, mixing, cooking, mixing some more, kneading, baking, waiting, waiting, tasting, arranging, cleaning, preparing.....and preparing....for guests. It is what you do at a funeral. Either you are preparing to serve and comfort the bereaved or, as the bereaved, you are preparing to receive the community, the family, the loved ones to walk with you to the grave and back again. Holy Saturday feels like the days before a funeral. Suspended between death and life, you just carry on. You work, as usual, but not. That's what the women who loved the Rabbi were doing: preparing the spices, arranging the body (Christ's body), wrapping, loving and weeping, and waiting, and waiting and preparing....for guests. I am giddy thinking about the surprise that awaited them - the Guest!! And, I am giddy waiting for our guests to come to our home. My boys won't be here, so there is grief. I miss them so much. But, the new Amer...
Thank you, indeed, for Hagar. I, too, am grateful that this passage shows us how we are not alone. I also appreciate our author not mincing words about what exactly happened to Hagar; yet she is not known as a victim at all. I love Hagar's name for God: God who sees. God loves us, cares for us, God hears.While bad things do surely happen in this world, God does see and respond.
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