I thought it would be better to do
it at night, and then at day time.
Plus, in fact, it's nice to be back
again.
I'm going to get a number of friends,
and meet them during this retreat.
Some that I've only seen once in the
last two years, twenty-five years.
Some I haven't seen at all in a
couple of twenty-five years.
And what amazes me is how these folks
have aged.
All right.
And here we are.
I hope some of this is a good
time to get on the floor.
You understand, of course, that I'm only here
the 12th of this month, all of a
sudden you're here all week.
But I've got the chance of asking you
to spend some time with me again, in
very, very happy years, and proud of you.
And during the times that we're sharing a
word of thought together, or daily, I'd like
to look at various pictures, passages, that tell
us the story of people who are in
deep trouble.
Rumi's album, like Eliza, who has suicide attacks,
and that guy named Joe, with his peace
distress.
And perhaps pick up on a few human
sentiments.
If you do not have any peace distress
in your own life, then perhaps you can
at least read the Bible, and read some
of the passages that you can help.
But I'd like to begin this morning by
looking at Genesis, chapter 16, and its short
chapter, called, I believe, the whole chapter.
Genesis, chapter 16.
My main desire today is to make this
quote a bit different from the translation of
this poem.
While parents loved more than their children, they
had an assistant handmaid whose name was Eliza.
And Sarah said to Eliza, Behold now, the
Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
So unto my maid, it may be that
I shall bring children my birth.
And Abram heard this in the voice of
Sarah.
For after Abram had dwelt ten years in
the land of Canaan, Sarah, Abram's wife, took
Hazar the Egyptian, her maid, and gave her
to Abram, her husband, as a wife.
And he named her Hazar, and she conceived.
And when she saw that she was conceived,
she looked with contempt on her mistress.
And Sarah said to Abram, May the Lord
come to me beyond you.
I gave my maid your embrace, and when
she saw that she was conceived, she looked
on me with contempt.
May the Lord judge between you and me.
And Abram said to Sarah, Behold, you have
made me your father.
Then Sarah sat possibly with her, and she
said unto him, The angel of the Lord
has found her by a stream of water
in the wilderness, and has turned her on
the way to Sheol.
And he said, Hey God, hear this, Sarah,
I am.
Where have you come from?
He said, I am fleeing from my little
Sarah.
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 was so greatly mocked while you
were despondent, that they commenced to humble pornography.
And the angel of the Lord said to
her, Behold, you are with child and forbear
of time.
And he called his name Ishmael on her,
because the Lord hath given him evil afflictions.
He shall be a wild ass of a
man, and be prone against every man, and
every man prone against him.
And he shall dwell over her against all
who see him.
So she called the name of the Lord,
which he spoke to her, thou art a
God of healing.
For she said, Have I really seen God,
and have I known the light after seeing
him?
Now, that particular Hebrew translation is open to
all sorts of translations that he has taken,
and we'll just let that go, and if
we have time we'll deal with it as
we get to it.
Therefore, the world is called Jerusalem, it lies
between Shadesh and Zerub.
Probably many of us, every time we hear
the song, His Eye is on the Sparrow,
since no one could ever walk or sing
that, that beautiful, black, soft tune.
I suppose it's forever enshrined in my memory,
the first singing of it, that His Eye
is on the Sparrow.
And all of us are aware of the
biblical text from which it comes.
Our Lord, in two gospel accounts, talks about
sparrows, and God uses these sparrows in both
Luke and Matthew.
Luke and Matthew tells us that two sparrows
are sold for, let's say, a penny, a
relatively worthless bird, two units to give any
value.
We only value what is rare.
These sparrows are two units to give any
value.
If you have a winter bird feeder, you
go running to call your children to come
see a sparrow feeding on that bird feeder,
you wouldn't think of doing it.
If I go out in my backyard in
the morning and find a dead sparrow on
some particular side, if it's a mothing bird
or something like that, I'm a little more
obsessed with that kind of a bird.
I'd be incensed if the cats would prowl
our neighborhood.
Curse my neighbors.
If the cats would prowl my yard and
terrible owner's wives to kill a mothing bird,
pardon me, or some other rare bird, I'd
be quite upset if it killed a sparrow
the way I do.
Sparrows are simply part of the landscape.
Nobody really values them.
In fact, our Lord would stand on that.
I don't think he could have shown the
worthlessness of sparrows any more than when he
said, two sparrows are sold for a penny,
five for two pennies.
If you buy four, a fifth is sold
in three.
Now, don't forget, he was talking from Palestine,
and he was talking about Jewish merchants.
Now, when you get a Jewish merchant to
throw something in three, it can't be worth
much.
In this anyway, our Lord could have said,
they really have no value in the sense
that five sparrows for two pennies.
Then our Lord said, not one of them
is forgotten by God, or not one of
them falls to the ground without their having
a body.
Who notices the death of a sparrow?
God does.
In fact, if I read the Scriptures correctly,
God is much more likely to be the
God of a sparrow than he is the
God of meals.
Now, he's the God of both, of course,
but if I understand God correctly in the
Scriptures, his natural tendency is to go to
the sparrow rather than the eagle, to be
identified with the sparrow.
Now, our country is identified with the eagle.
What kind of a country would it be
that had a sparrow for a national emblem?
But, if I could also suggest an emblem
for God, it would be the sparrow.
I think, as we think about ourselves and
we think about God, we confuse pomp with
glory, and God isn't confused by those two
terms.
And the great men of our world, the
natural rulers of our world, surround themselves with
pomp because they have no glory.
Pomp consists of those external tappings that are
temporal and artificial and manufactured that supposedly show
up the greatness of the individual.
Glory is the expression of what the individual
is, and our natural rulers have no glory,
so they have to get pomp.
And we human beings are impressed by pomp
and not by glory.
And when God reveals himself with pomp to
human beings, it's not because that's a reflection
of the greatness of God.
That's the kind of stuff that impresses us,
and God has to get our attention and
when it's necessary to get human attention to
surround himself with pomp, God can do it.
But, he shouldn't think for a moment that
when God takes on the tappings of earthly
splendor, that's when he credits it on.
God, the creator of the universe, God who
exists forever, takes on the tappings that belong
to this world.
That impresses us.
That's no credit to God in the sense
of who God is.
That's a condescension on God's part.
No.
God is the God of glory, and glory
is the outshining of what the person is.
And we can see this, and you see
the glorious God in Bethlehem's manger.
That's glory.
A vague, helpless child born in a stable.
That's the glory of God.
You see the glory of God as he
reaches into the tomb of Lazarus.
You see the glory of God as he
reaches out and touches a leper.
You see the glory of God in that
bloodied figure on a cinder cross.
That's the glory of God.
God is the God who serves, not the
God who likes to sit and match his
feet and tell everybody what to do.
And that's why it's so puzzling for us
to hear our Lord tell us to think
of that in the coming season, they are
going to sit at the table and he's
going to wait on them.
And we don't understand that because we've been
confused half before.
And if I understand the God of glory
correctly, he's much more liable to be identified
with a sparrow than with an eagle.
And that shouldn't puzzle us.
Paul tells us in his first letter to
the Corinthians that God didn't choose any mighty
or noble or wise in this world.
For whom does God identify himself?
With the foolish, and the weak, and the
despised.
And those were nothing in this world's power
structure.
That's where God naturally gravitates.
That's the glory of God.
And that's where you find our Lord in
his earthly ministry.
Of course he put him around for those
who belong to the power structure on their
own level.
But where did he find the enormous and
common people that he loved?
Surely his eye is on the sparrow.
I understand God correctly that God would expect
it to be.
His eye is on the sparrow.
It seems to me if we are going
to reflect the character of God in our
own lives and ministries, we ought to have
a great ministry to this world's sparrow.
We have left from wise men to sent
hostages and salvaged nuns.
But we ought to have a ministry to
this world's sparrow.
And any church is impoverished that doesn't have
an active ministry among the poor.
My natural tendency is to gravitate to the
noble and the wise and the mighty as
opposed to the hope that some of it
is going to rub off on me.
But that only indicates how far removed I
am from the vision of God.
The poor, our Lord said, is like what
you have with you always.
And whenever you will, the only problem is
our will.
And when you will, you may do what
you will.
Yes, his eye is on the sparrow.
And I think we're sitting in a black
box with females that seem there to make
that her song.
His eye is on the sparrow.
Agar was one of life's sparrows.
He was just some slave girl bought by
the people's goods by Abrams.
He'd come to him and made the sparrow
his wife.
That's the people's slave girl.
brought and sold and traded on the marketplace
like cattle or furniture.
And I said, hey, I'm not part of
the power structure.
I'm not part of the decision-making process
even of Abrams' own household.
He was simply an efficient slave girl.
That kind of thing is new, isn't it?
Of course, in ancient history human beings were
treated like pieces of good.
But he was more than that, or worse
than that.
He became Abrams' concubine.
And I suppose concubines are not exactly the
right term, particularly in the culture in which
Abrams came.
Literature in that culture is revised, by the
way, in the New Testament.
And we're aware culturally of this whole arrangement.
And Abrams said, I would simply follow the
standards of their own tribe when they made
their alliances.
It's probably not quite correct to say that
Agar was Abrams' concubine.
But nevertheless, it shows us how helpless this
girl was.
She was not asked if she wanted to
go to bed with Abrams.
She was just told she had to.
She was not asked if she wanted to
bear Abrams' child.
She had to.
She had no choice in that.
She was a piece of good.
And he bargained and traded and bargained with
you.
And that wasn't all.
She became the center of a family conflict
between Abrams and Farrah.
Partly her own fault.
Once she became pregnant, she despised her mistress.
And to read through the 16th chapter, what
Farrah saw was that Abrams didn't know a
thing about her.
Abrams was aware of it, but didn't coerce
her.
And Farrah would continue to get the impression
that he approved of her.
And then she would begin to wonder, naturally
enough, if he did not prefer this younger
girl to her.
And maybe having a child by Hagar wasn't
all duty on Abrams' part.
And so she turned in viciousness on this
girl.
Of course, on Abrams.
He was ahead of his household.
You should have done something about that situation.
You should not have allowed my handmaid to
do that.
And Abrams, like a weary husband, says, that's
your handmaid.
You do with her whatever you want with
her.
And then all that pent-up jealousy and
anger on Farrah's part was vented on Hagar,
and she triggered a heart attack.
And Hagar had no recourse.
There was no one to whom she could
appeal.
She couldn't appeal to Abrams.
Even though Abrams was the father of the
child she had within her, Sarah was Abrams'
wife.
Hagar was nothing but Sarah's slave.
And she had no court of appeal, no
one to whom she could turn.
And, finally, in desperation, she became a refugee.
She fled.
And, obviously, where she was found by the
angel of the Lord, she was on her
way back to Egypt.
From where she was brought, like a piece
of good, that there was nothing she could
have done in Egypt.
What's a pregnant slave girl, who's a runaway,
going to do when she gets back to
Egypt?
Remember Hagar, one of life's But, his eyes
on the saddle, and we read that the
angel of the Lord found her.
What grace and love on the heart of
God!
You're aware that this is quite the angel
of the Lord which serves about five times
as a defensive alone.
He is one of the Old Testament designations
of the appearance of God himself.
That shows up in what Hagar had to
say about the angel of the Lord who
appeared to her.
And God came to Hagar.
But, note what it says, that the angel
of the Lord found her.
She was not hunting God.
God was hunting her.
She could get away from Abram's indifference, and
she could get away from Sarah's cruelty, but
she could not get away from God's love.
And the angel of the Lord found her.
God himself came to Hagar.
Now, look, the angel God of Abram, and
later on, Isaac and Joseph is the God
of Hagar.
Don't ever forget that.
I think we misread our Bibles so often.
I do.
I see the stream of Biblical revelation which
God gave to the nation of Israel.
I have a tendency to see that as
the end rather than the mean.
And when God revealed Himself to Israel, God
was only choosing a channel, not a goal,
a channel.
Israel wasn't the end, but the mean.
God's goal was the world.
He had to have a channel through whom
to reach the world.
He had to have some family, some nation
into which His son could be born, and
Israel was that family and nation.
But they were never God's goal, they were
God's mean.
And what I have in this Scripture, in
the Old Testament particularly, is the record of
God's working with the channel, the mean.
And I can read that as though that
was the goal in the end, and it
isn't.
And I have a tendency to put Israel,
God's chosen people, in a position God never
intended them to have.
I tend to see them as the end
of God's feelings instead of the means of
God's feelings.
But fortunately in the Old Testament, you find
these different people outside the Messianic line who
know God, to whom God has endeared Himself.
And fortunately you read God's self-revelation to
Israel at Sinai in the 19th chapter of
Exodus.
He wanted them to be a kingdom of
priests, and priests were those who mediate God
to others, and God never intended them to
keep that revelation to themselves as it would
be a means of channels.
And God is not just the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Simply because we are shut up to the
Biblical revelation that God gave to Israel, we
forget that He is the God of Hagar.
God's eye was on the Pharaoh.
But more than that, I think God did
her a signal of honor in this passage.
He holds her to her responsibility.
Return to your mistress and submit to her.
When God faces us with our responsibility, He
does us a tremendous honor.
He treats us seriously as human beings, capable
of meeting that responsibility.
And if God says you go back and
face that responsibility, it means that God is
going to give her the ability to do
it.
She fled from that responsibility once.
God says you go back there.
And if God sends her back, He will
give her the ability to meet her responsibility.
Too often, I'm like the individual in the
parable of the talents.
I knew you were a hard master.
You reek where you haven't sown.
God never reeks where He hasn't sown.
And if God wants anything out of our
lives, it's because He has already put the
seed there.
He never reeks where He hasn't sown.
And He is not demanding from Hagar what
He Himself hasn't supplied for her.
The third evidence of God's great love for
this woman is in the name that He
gave the child to be born, Ishmael.
It means God hears.
And note what the angel says, God has
heard your affliction.
Now, briefly, the description of Ishmael as a
wild ass of a man would be as
the light to Hagar.
What God is saying to Hagar is, your
son is never going to share your slavery.
He'll fight his way free.
And if Hagar has to spend the rest
of her life as a slave girl, she's
going to delight that her son never will.
She didn't, of course, but she would delight
that her son never would.
She's going to be a wild ass of
a man with his hand against every man
and every man's hand against him.
Nobody is going to make a slave out
of your son.
And the anguish of her own slavery would
make her delight in the freedom that her
son would But Ishmael means God here.
It means that the Lord said, God has
heard your affliction.
Now, notice, he does not say, God has
heard your cry.
I don't doubt that Hagar may have cried
to the God she had come to hear
about in Abram's household.
Perhaps hadn't seen too much of in the
behavior of Abram and Sarah.
At least she had heard about him.
But there's nothing about her cry.
God has heard your affliction, because his eye
is on the Pharaoh.
And so you get sometimes in life to
that point in Romans, chapter 8, where you
don't know what to pray for as you
are.
But, God hears our affliction.
When the situation is such, you can't put
words to it.
You don't know what to pray for.
You don't know how to pray.
You only get before God and groan, God
has heard your affliction.
Now, God has not promised to exempt us
from affliction.
We share the common lot of the human
race.
We live in a human race crippled by
sin, and we live in a world that
physically has been cursed because of sin.
And God has not promised his people immunity
from affliction.
It may be our lot in life, because
of the country in which we live, the
money that we have
keeps away from us a great deal that
other people have nothing to shield themselves from.
And if we, for one moment, think it's
because we are spiritual, or God has special
favor for us, and those people have to
suffer somehow because they deserve it, then God
has to We have made a God of
our goals.
What delivers us is our bank accounts and
our ability to live in the suburbs.
And we're not worshiping God.
We're worshiping the product of our own middle
-class society.
And it's only because we have isolated ourselves
from other people who don't have that protective
wall, and we have never sat down and
suffered with them, that we get the idea
that God somehow has promised to protect us
from these things.
And we read the book of Proverbs as
though it were a book of promises instead
of a book of Proverbs.
It's not a book of promises.
It's a book of Proverbs.
And don't turn Proverbs into promises.
They're not promises, they're Proverbs.
They're the distillation of the wisdom of men
who observed life under God.
But don't you ever forget, and you can
read this right in the book of Proverbs,
that those situations depend upon a godly king
on the throne of Israel.
And when there's a godless king on the
throne of Israel, all bets are off.
And the righteous man is not going to
prosper.
He's the one that's going to get it
in the neck when a godless king sits
on the throne of Israel.
God has not promised us deliverance from affliction
simply because we are Christians.
God has not promised to throw a wall
around us and our family simply because we
are Christians.
God has heard your affliction and we are
not exempt.
And lastly, in this chapter, it's the name
that this dear woman gives to God.
You've seen it in the text many, many
times, how God sees you.
It's the warped Christianity that puts that on
the kitchen wall to control the children.
If anything was ever ripped out of context,
it's to use this verse for that purpose.
Remember, God is watching you when you do
what is bad.
Now, what kind of a god do you
think your children think about when they think
about God?
The same kind C.S. Lewis reports on
the child who said God is somebody who
is sitting up in heaven watching to see
if anybody is having a good time and
putting a stop to it.
The God who sees in Genesis chapter 16
is not a God of judgment, but a
God of grace.
It's not God who is watching for our
sins, but God in compassion and love sees
us where we are.
And his heart goes out to us.
When God came to Moses ready to deliver
the people of Israel, God said to Moses,
I have seen the affliction of my people.
And God's heart goes out to people when
he himself cannot or, for other reasons, will
not do anything about it.
But God still sees us.
And we think of the generation that came
out of Egypt in the miraculous deliverance of
the Passover and the Red Sea.
Have you ever thought of the generations that
died under the lash of the Taskmaster?
Was God indifferent to them?
Had God not seen their afflictions?
Not all of us are going to go
through the Red Sea.
Some of us are going to die under
the lash of the Taskmaster in Egypt.
But God sees.
And he has not obligated himself to straighten
everything out in this world, in our lifetime.
God sees.
And Hagar could have had reason to question
that.
Where were you, God, when I was being
bought and sold like a piece of good?
Where were you, God, when I was forced
to go to bed with Ava?
Where were you, God, when Sarai was treating
me harshly and making life a hellhole for
me?
Where were you?
Now she knows God sees.
And he was not indifferent as she went
through all that suffering.
He was not indifferent to the inhumane treatment
that she received.
But this is not the Day of Judgment.
And when we ask God to straighten everything
out, either in our own lives, or in
our family's lives, or in the world, I
don't think we would be prepared for the
answer.
What we're asking for is the Day of
Judgment.
But God sees.
And he is not indifferent.
And so you find those words that Peter
quotes, the eye of the Lord, the eye
of is upon the righteous, and his ear
is open to their cry.
The faith of the Lord is against them
that do evil.
Now, he hears.
It does not mean he is always going
to do what we ask.
But perhaps for us now, it is enough
to know that he hears.
And as the psalmist could write, as God
could say through the psalmist, I will guide
thee with mine eye upon thee.
And I think God is indicating the deepest
interest in each one of us is his
eye is on her.
Take her in your affliction, in your distress,
in your running away from home.
God sees her.
And the living God came to her.
And with that, she could go back to
Sarai, her mistress.
God may not change our circumstance.
God may not correct our problems.
God may not directly answer anguished prayers that
have gone up for years.
But God sees us.
He will come to us.
And he will go with us.
Would you rather have your