Sacred Journeys

Transcripts are computed-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Cody: Thank you friends. It's good to be here with you in this place today. Today we begin a two month sermon series called Experiencing God in the Wilderness. The wilderness is a landscape that shows up nearly 300 times in both the Old and New Testaments. And throughout the Bible, this is a landscape of both ecological and metaphorical significance. A landscape of precarity and possibility, of risk and revelation. The wilderness, which is sometimes translated in your Bible's desert, is a place where a person might very well die. Of hunger, of starvation, of isolation. And the wilderness is a place where a person may also encounter God.

In the New Testament, the Greek word translated wilderness is one literally meaning something like isolated place. Yet it is a place where over and over again in the biblical text, the spirit is leading people, even Jesus, into community with the wild of the earth and the wild of the divine. Normally each week in the sermon series, these next two months, we will be introduced, the sermon will be introduced, by a story from someone here in this community who has experienced their own personal wilderness, where their life was pushed to a precipitous edge, where precarity and possibility, risk and revelation, isolation, and communion become palpable. These will be stories of grief and loss, of illness and injury, of searching in the desert places of our lives for the presence of God.

These stories will embody The Table's commitment as a community to what we call being unapologetically human, where transparency is a prerequisite for transformation as we live honestly before God and one another. These are going to be tender and sacred stories shared by people here living their life openly and vulnerably, and these stories will be a gift to us in the coming weeks.

But today I'm gonna start the series with a story of a wilderness journey, a sojourn in the literal desert that I took with another person a few years ago, and we'll read that experience right alongside one of the first times in the biblical text that we encounter God in the wilderness.

So two stories here. My wilderness accompaniment journey began like this: Shortly after the 2016 election, a handful of churches where I used to serve in Cambridge, Massachusetts got together to begin planning on how to accompany undocumented people in our community through what we knew would be an increasingly cruel season in the life of our country. And our churches got together and began planning how to practice sanctuary with undocumented people who needed a place to live for a while, as they either made their cases for asylum or they got their papers in order so that they could stay in the country. And sanctuary sometimes worked for people who just needed to get their affairs in order before they surrendered themselves for deportation so that their family who was staying here had what they needed.

So we converted a space in one of the churches into an apartment because while this detail recently changed, prior to this year, ICE did not make arrests in churches, in schools, or in hospitals. That's why sanctuary practice in a church could work at that time.

And we were soon approached by a young woman with two very young children who was at risk of deportation back to a country where her life would be in danger if she returned. Soon she and the children moved into the church apartment and she was accompanied 24 hours a day by two volunteers at a time from among the 10 churches that made up this sanctuary coalition. And while her kids were walked to school every day by one of the volunteers, their mother could not leave the church or else she risked arrest, detainment, and deportation. So she lived in that church building for four and a half years. We celebrated four years of her children's birthdays with parties in the church fellowship hall where all the church members from these places came and celebrated their birthdays as we watched them grow.

Sometime into her stay she was summoned to an immigration hearing in Arizona where her case had begun some years back before she had moved to Massachusetts. And after a long period of her lawyers trying to get her case moved to Massachusetts, the judge would not budge. And the day was almost upon us. And I remember the leader in the coalition who called me and said, “We have to get her to this place in Arizona. It's really important that she shows up at this hearing. She's afraid she needs some people that she trusts to go with her. Would you just consider going with her to Arizona?” And I said, “Yes, of course. When are we planning to do this?” And he said, “Well, tomorrow morning.” (Audience Laughing) He was very good at making asks, you see. Foot in the door technique.

So the three of us, the woman and three other coalition volunteers got in a Subaru with this young mother and we drove and drove and drove for two and a half days. That's all the time we had. Two and a half days to get 2,639 miles to the middle of the Arizona desert. So if you're doing the calculations, that's 39 hours of driving that we did in about 60 hours of total time. Sleeping in churches that we had arranged along the way to host us. It was a grueling trip necessitated only by the cruelty of an immigration system that makes life as hard as possible. Even for those who are trying to prove cases of asylum, of danger in their home country.

And while many of the nice white folks in our sanctuary coalition would often say that the system is broken, one of the immigrant leaders of the coalition was quick to always remind us that the system is not broken. It works as it is intended to work. A system of cruelty.

I've visited the Holy Land twice. Been to cathedrals and churches and monasteries all over the country, experienced the majesty of around 15 national parks. And despite the discomfort of 39 hours in a small car, taking turns at the wheel, and always looking over our shoulders in fear of seeing blue lights flashing, I can honestly say that this, this was the most sacred journey I've ever taken. Into the desert, with a stranger turned friend whose life was on the brink. Thrust into a wilderness in which she had very little control over what happened in her life.

When we arrived in the desert to our destination, it was this place, Core Civic, which owned this detention center. A for-profit company generating nearly $2 billion in annual revenue, operating 65 correctional and detention facilities in 19 states with 76,000 beds. And it was inside the detention center where the U.S. Immigration Court was operated. And after a hearing that lasted likely less than an hour, we got back in the car and headed home again.

She had to make this journey into the desert two more times after that. And in the two times that I accompanied her on this journey, for the hours we sat in the sterile waiting room with the same film playing on loop on a little TV in the corner, our friend that we brought there was the only person I witnessed coming from outside of the detention center into immigration court. Every other person I saw was escorted from their holding cell down to the immigration court and back to their cell.

Isaac Samuel Villegas' book, Migrant God: a Christian Vision for Immigration Justice, is a book that our Luther Seminary community, where I teach, is reading this summer. It's a book that I would also invite you to read alongside us if you want to pick this up. We'll leave this picture up here. You can take a photograph of it and look at it later. And I'd be glad to get together with anybody who reads it this summer and talk with you about it at the end of August. That's about when we're gonna wrap up our book discussion at Luther. Maggie's gonna be in that discussion too.

Villegas says this about immigration detention. He says, "Imprisonment is a labyrinthine passageway into the realm of social death. Alienation from kinship, from community, from life. Migrant detention centers as a feature of the U.S. prison complex deaden a person's humanity, estranging them from their sense of self."

And even though I knew I would be leaving in just a few hours, experiencing only the waiting room and a hallway and the courtroom, this Core Civic detention center was one of the most spiritually deadening places I've ever experienced. And our equally long journey home was so much lighter than the heaviness that weighed on us as we made our way into that desert place.

Our second story is one of being thrust into a wilderness over which another woman had very little control of what happened in her life.

Genesis chapter 16, the story goes like this: “Now, Sarai and Abram,”—later in the story, you'll know them as Sarah and Abraham, but their names haven't been changed yet.

Now, Sarai and Abram, Sarai, Abram's wife, bore him no children. Remember that God had promised Abraham offspring. Sarai bore him no children, and she had an Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, "You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my slave. It may be that I shall obtain children by her." And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave, and gave her to her husband, Abram, as his wife.

He went into Hagar and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. "And Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my slave to you, 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." But Abram said to Sarai, "Your slave is in your power. Do with her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her. The angel of the Lord found her by the spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur.

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." The angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress and submit to her." The angel of the Lord also said to her, "I will greatly multiply your offspring, that they cannot be counted for multitude." And the angel of the Lord said to her, "Now you have conceived and shall bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael. For the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man with his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him. And he shall live at odds with all his kin." 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?" Therefore the well was called Bear Lahai Roi. It lies between Kadesh and Dureed. Hagar bore Abram a son and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore Ishmael.

Hagar, if the story is not familiar to you, was an Egyptian and an enslaved person in service to Abram and Sarai before they were renamed Abraham and Sarah. Now God had made a covenant with Abraham, not a casual promise, but a covenant, that Abraham would have offspring, but neither he nor Sarah believed it possible. So Sarah convinced Abraham to force himself upon and impregnate their enslaved woman, Hagar. So that at the very least, they would have an heir born of Abraham. And a note that's important is in the ancient Near East, this wasn't an uncommon practice. There's nothing especially noteworthy about this practice at the time. And then when Hagar, with no voice and no choice in the matter, became a surrogate mother, the one forced to have Abraham's child against her will, she looked with contempt upon Sarah. And Sarah complained to Abraham, and he told Sarah, "Do with her as you please."

And Sarah dealt harshly with her up until the point when Hagar had to run away. Hagar was a runaway slave of Abraham and Sarah. Don't miss that part of the story. We have a way of reading the stories of the biblical text and covering over the ugly details, but Hagar was a runaway slave of Abraham and Sarah. She incurred abuse at the hands of her mistress, a term that encodes both physical and sexual violence in the original Hebrew. She can see no future for herself. In this passage, she speaks only of herself in the past tense. The trauma she has endured has foreclosed her future.

Now, the most famous annunciation in the biblical text, where someone is told they are to bear a child that has been God's gift to them, and the most famous one is the one we read every advent in Luke's gospel, when the angel appears to Mary and tells her that she will give birth to a son and call him Jesus, but before Mary's annunciation, there was Hagar, the first woman in the Bible to receive an annunciation, and the messenger of God visited Hagar in the wilderness. Return to your mistress and subject yourself to her, not a comforting message there, but also a promise. Greatly will I multiply your seed so that they cannot be counted for multitude, and God made promises to Hagar.

Listen to this detail; you miss it if you read too quickly over this story. Unlike Abram and Sarai, who God never calls by name, God calls Hagar by name, and whereas most are rendered silent in the presence of the divine, God and Hagar enter into conversation, and what you don't get upon first reading of this passage, because we usually just assume that the people in the story know what we know in the story, is that Hagar doesn't know that this is a messenger from God. That detail, a messenger of the Lord appeared, is just part of the narrative of the text. The messengers didn't show up and say I'm a messenger of God. The reader is let in on that knowledge, and Hagar is left to surmise just what is happening to her in the wilderness, a daydream or delirium, a theophany or a head injury, but Hagar is portrayed as a person of such deep faith in the story that she recognizes God in the wilderness. She knows with whom she is engaged in this holy conversation, in a landscape of risk and revelation, and she is the first person in Genesis to be visited by a messenger of God, and the first woman to be given promises by God.

Remember, Sarah was not promised offspring, Abraham was promised offspring. Hagar is the first woman who hears from God a word of promise, a runaway slave at the brink of death in the wilderness. And Hagar responds, not only by identifying the messenger as God, but by giving God a unique name, which is, by the way, not something that others in scripture usually do. God gives people new names all throughout the scripture. People do not give God new names in the scripture.

And likewise, whereas Abraham and Sarah never called Hagar by name whenever they referred to her, whenever they spoke to her, only God does in God's encounter with Hagar, who sees her in the wilderness. God calls Hagar by name. But Hagar, an African enslaved person, woman of multiple intersecting oppressions, a victim of rape, a person with her back constantly against the wall, says, "You are the God who sees." That is the translation of that name for God she offers. Or the God who sees me lives is a more literal translation. "You have seen me here like this. And what's more, I have seen God and remained alive."

Then the story continues in chapter 21, after God's promise to Hagar came to fruition, and she had a son and named him Ishmael. And after God's promise to Abraham also came to fruition, and he and Sarah had their own son, Isaac, Sarah one day caught a glimpse of Isaac and Ishmael playing together, and she did not like it. Sarah said to her husband, "Cast out this slave woman with her son, "for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son, Isaac."

And that is exactly what happened. And when their water ran out in the wilderness where they had been driven out of their dwelling, Hagar resigned herself to both of their deaths in the wilderness. Ishmael, she put a little ways away from her so she wouldn't hear his dying cries, and she went a little ways away, resigned to death herself. When the messenger of God appeared again, and the story continues like this, as they were again thrust back into the wilderness. The text says:

When the water in her skin—the water that she had taken—was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 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. 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. "Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, "for I will make a great nation of him. "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. "God was with the boy and he grew up "and he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Peran and his mother got a wife from him from the land of Egypt.

The name Ishmael means God hears. A witness to God's attention to those in distress, those imperiled in the desert, those on the brink in the wilderness, just as Hagar had previously called the divine the God who sees me.

What is clearer than anything else in this passage is that God takes sides. And you may not want to hear this, but it is the message of this text of scripture. God takes sides. I know many good, kind, friendly Christians would like for God to be a squishy, good people on all sides, don't rock the boat, keep the peace at all costs, reflection of our own gross distortions of the faith.

But friends, and especially you friends who think this is starting to sound a little too political, if you have decided that your faith has nothing to do with the suffering of your neighbor or systems that are being built to ensure your neighbor's death and destruction, then you do not follow in the way of Jesus. That is not the faith that was handed down to us.

And unfortunately, if we hear anything in this text from Genesis this morning, the word most palpable to Christians in America today may be that God is at work outside the confines of the faithful, because most of us will not follow the spirit into the wilderness when we are summoned there. Terrence Fretham, who was a former professor of Old Testament at Luther, says of this text, "God acts in both word and deed outside the boundaries "of what we normally call the community of faith."

God's attentiveness to Hagar and Ishmael comes more in spite of what Abram's family has done than because of their concern for outsiders and their welfare. Indeed, God enters the picture most decisively at precisely that point when exclusion from the chosen family has taken place. Hagar laments her impending death in the wilderness. She lifts up her voice and weeps and the cries of a dying Ishmael ring out. And it was the messenger of God who answers back, do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. God hears, God sees, and God takes sides. When the enslaved woman Hagar forced into surrogacy and her newborn baby Ishmael are mistreated and end up in the desert on the brink of death, it is God who shows up with water in the desert and words of unconditional promise to her

Now here's something I've observed in my nine months with you as your interim pastor. And that interim is beginning to come to a close here at the end of the sermon. It's not sermon, sorry. (Audience Laughing) Surprise! Here at the end of the sea, summer. Here at the end of the summer. (Audience Laughing)

But here's my observation. And it comes with good news and a bit of a challenge. You’re a community whose collective heart is in the right place, always. You're attentive to the cries of those in the wilderness of our current era, a wilderness that is growing more and more dangerous by the day. And you're still looking for how to engage your faithful energy as a community to stand alongside those whose lives are on the brink. Not a community that feels the right things. Not a community that believes the right things. You are seeking to be a community that is engaged in faithful practices alongside God and the wilderness places between life and death, between precarity and possibility, between risk and revelation. You are searching for those places to stand in solidarity.

And here's another thing that I know that I need you to hear this morning. That thing you're looking for, the place you're looking for, the way of embodying your faithful practice and solidarity with those whose backs are against the wall will not find you. You have to find it. You will have to look for where God is at work in the world and join God in God's mission there. Because God is already so far out ahead of where you are and beckoning you to come along.

And if you need to know where to look for where God is at work in the world, among those driven into wilderness spaces, those with their backs against the wall, the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed, then take your cue from Hagar and Ishmael. The cries of those on the brink of death are the surest signal of where God is present, working new possibilities out of foreclosed futures.

And that is where we should be too.