So what? What does this story of my mother’s and my trauma and silencing have to do with biblical stories of women and with you?

Biblical women’s stories are most often told in snippets, sentences here and there, regularly ignored by our traditions except as an incidental part of the overriding narrative of powerful and revered men. Overwhelmingly, men have shaped the way Biblical narratives have been interpreted over the millennia. Now it is time for women and understanding men to raise up women’s narratives—Biblical and personal. Narratives are always shaped from snippets with the imagination bridging and enhancing the snippets to create enlivened and enhanced meaning. If we do not shape our stories, someone else will—or the stories will remain snippets with no significant effect on others.

In my own life, I read back from the way I react today to threatening—whether real or not– authority how my fearful reaction silences me, often fear of shaming myself by misspeaking. Other times I am fearful of negative reactions and judgments meant to dismiss or belittle my meaning.

In writing this talk, I chose to begin with my mother’s words, “Now I understand the suffering of the Jews.” I will never know the substance of my mother’s wrestling to understand the suffering of the Jews; however, by writing these words I have encountered the depth of my mother’s integrity in confronting my granddaughter as a daunting adversary, then through her lawyers fighting for justice against my grandfather’s will, and finally in the unremitting agony of her living day-by-day with my grandparents’ cruel legacy.

Now it is our turn to encounter stories of Biblical women with the same determination, deciding for ourselves whether their stories are life-giving or death-dealing to us as women.

Christianity began as a movement within the Jewish faith, incorporating the Hebrew Bible into its liturgies and stories—bending the Jewish stories to fit Christian theology. In Eucharistic services—the Mass, Communion, the Lord’s Table—the Episcopal Church has always traced its history back to Abraham. One of these prayers begins: “God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob….”

In 1977 I heard the woman priest celebrating the Eucharist say this prayer differently. She said, “God of our fathers and mothers, God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel….”

“God of our mothers, Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel….” For the first time I heard myself named! Passionate energy surged through me, body, mind and spirit. What had been flattened out by leaving out women’s names, in an instant, came alive for me. I had never experienced myself as excluded by the Church; in that moment, I knew I had never been fully included.

During church services I began experimenting, calling God “God” instead of “Father”, “Lord”, “He”, or “Him”. Instead of singing “God of our fathers,” I sang “God of our mothers,” making my mother’s faith visible, our names heard. Trying to decide whether to study psychology or theology, it dawned on me that I had to study both. I asked myself, “How can I dedicate myself to helping people heal if God is imaged as a man? Women cannot become whole if wholeness is imaged as male, if there is a stained glass ceiling. Neither can men become whole if they have to be like god in order to be worthy.”

Subversively, I framed my subsequent calling to the priesthood: to work for change in the male-centered language and, consequently, the patriarchal theology of the church. I created a course which focused our thoughts on the characteristics and actions of women in the Bible, uncovering how focused the church’s teachings and liturgies are on the actions of men and on a male God. This is how I came to pay attention to the complicated relationship between Sarah and Hagar, mothers of Judaism and Islam.

In the seminal story of Genesis, traditionally told as the story of Abraham, the voices and traumas of Sarah, married to Abraham, and Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian slave, have been diminished and even silenced. Their twice-told story (Genesis 16:1-14 and 21:8-21) sets the women against one another on the basis of race, age, class, marital, and childbearing status. The ultimate worth of each woman is measured by her body’s ability to conceive and bear a male child. Because Sarah has not been able to conceive and bear a son for Abraham, she chooses the younger Hagar to conceive a child by him. As Egyptian and as slave, Hagar is helpless to defend herself against Sarah’s command and Abraham’s demand. She is subject to Abraham and Sarah’s whims. However, Hagar’s more youthful body becomes her advantage over Sarah—she is able to bear Abraham a child when Sarah is long past childbearing age. This woman against woman, horizontal as well as vertical, violence of Sarah against Hagar is worsened when Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar’s pregnancy, even though under Hebrew law the child will legally be Sarah’s and Abraham’s. Hagar is sent into the desert by Abraham to die until God’s messenger appears to her and sends her back into the whirlwind of Abraham’s family. With Ishmael’s birth, Sarah’s position in the hierarchy becomes more tenuous.

Once Sarah bears her own son, Isaac, her jealousy takes an ugly twist into envy that wants to destroy the threat embodied by Hagar and Ishmael. Out of her fear that Ishmael, Abraham’s first born son, might displace Isaac in the line of inheritance, Sarah demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael into the desert where they are certain to die. Abraham’s willingness to abandon his own child is echoed through centuries of men willing to deny their progeny when it is convenient for them to do so.

However, the narrative changes in an unexpected way. In the desert for a second time, just as Hagar and Ishmael are facing death, God’s messenger again appears to Hagar and promises that her son will be the progenitor of a race of people, just as God has promised Abraham and Sarah that Isaac will be. These direct appearances of the Holy to Hagar, a woman, an outsider, a slave, is the first biblically reported epiphany or appearance of God to a woman. We are confronted by an evocative, inescapable paradox which haunts humanity through history: Ishmael, the son abandoned by his father Abraham, is to become the mythic progenitor of the Arab race while the mythic Isaac fathers the Hebrew people, a clear premonition of Israelis set against Arabs.

Today our assignment is to ask: How could this story be told differently? My friend Ilene told me about a play in which seven imaginative alternative scenarios are imagined. “What if Abraham had not been so solution-oriented and instead had said, ‘Sarah, look how well Ishmael is playing with his younger brother Isaac. They are laughing together.’” I ask, what if Sarah had trusted there would be enough for everyone to share? In addition, we have to deal with a male God who encourages the contentious story to evolve as it does. A formidable conundrum for us to wrestle with with our eyes open, and listen to with suspicious ears, wondering how to proclaim this contradictory God.