“Where You Are”
Pentecost + 4C June 21, 2026
Memphis First United Methodist Church
Genesis 21:8–21
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.” 11 The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.
12 But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. 13 As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”
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.
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. 20 God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow.
21 He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Let us pray.
And now, O God,
You who refuse to be contained by our dogmas and doctrines,
You whose reach goes first beyond the fences we build toward those left on the other side. .
May your words that reach us today
be deeper than our certainties
and gentler than our fears.
Open us to what we cannot yet imagine,
and meet us, wherever we are, by your grace. Amen.
I. Wilderness
Ever find yourself somewhere you never asked to be? Someplace you end up in life that you’re not sure how you got there? A place with no address. No exit sign. No map that gets you back to where things made sense. We call it by different names, but the Bible calls it wilderness.
The Bible knows this place well. It’s where Moses spent forty years in the wilderness of Midian before he knew what he was being called to do. It’s where Israel wandered forty years between slavery and promise. It’s where Elijah collapsed under a broom tree, spent and empty, convinced the journey was over. It’s where Jesus was driven after his baptism to find out what he was made of.
And it’s where we can find ourselves, too.
There’s wildernesses of many kinds. Some are of our own making and others not so much.
Lord knows grief is a wilderness. The lonely silence that accompanies the absence of presence where a voice used to be. The chair that sits empty. The habit of reaching for someone no longer there.
Displacement is a wilderness. Cast out by circumstances and powers beyond our control. Where no door opens reliably. No certainty from day to day about where you’ll lay your head. It’s a weight and a cold no one wants and yet they cannot avoid. And over time, more and more of us on this planet will come to know it.
Your wilderness can be the life you counted on, simply stopping. The call that never comes. The door that closes. The job that ends. The future you were building, suddenly gone.
One thing about wildernesses that’s universal — it disorients. It takes away the world you knew and leaves you navigating something you never asked for. If we were to bear witness this morning, some of us could tell our wilderness stories. If you’re not in a wilderness now, you probably remember one. And if you’ve somehow avoided one so far, keep living, it’ll come.
The wilderness has a way of clarifying things. It strips away what we thought we needed. It takes away the roles we play and the identities we perform until what’s left is just the truth of who we are and what or who we actually trust.
The one constant about wildernesses is simply this - the only way out is through.
The story we’re entering this morning knows all of that.
And while our reading begins at a feast table with laughter in the house, a promise finally kept, it begins much earlier.
II. Waiting Changes People
Forever ago, it seems, God had called Abram to take Sarai and leave what they knew for a future they could not yet see.
“I will bless you,” God said. “I will make of you a great nation.”
“In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
It’s a powerful promise demanding faith to see it through.
The problem, though, was that the distance between a promise made and a promise realized was greater than Abraham and Sarah’s patience.
Lord knows, when impatience overcomes waiting, perspectives can change.
I mean, really. Time marches on, and nobody’s getting any younger. Turns out, patience has a shelf life, an expiration date, after which fear rises as faith subsides.
You can feel fear settling into this household.
The slow temptation to secure their future themselves.
Eventually, fear nudges them toward more self-determined choices than embodied faith. And it all comes down to this — Sarah hasn’t provided Abraham an heir yet to fulfill God’s promise.
That is where Hagar enters the story.
And who is she? Hagar is an enslaved Egyptian woman living within Abraham and Sarah’s household who becomes entangled in a promise she did not make, and a future she did not control.
Now, as I was working on a sermon using a text about an enslaved woman surviving in the wilderness, it was important to read it through lenses that can see what mine cannot. So, I turned Womanist theology, the field of study authored by Black women scholars who read Scripture through the intersection of race, gender, and class. They have given us some of the most penetrating readings of Hagar’s story. I am indebted to those voices here.
One such scholar is Delores Williams who observes that Hagar’s life is “structured by the problems and desires of her owners.“¹
Her motherhood is never freely chosen. Her body becomes entangled in the anxieties of people with power over her, enlisted to secure a future they no longer trusted God to provide. Abraham and Sarah reach for control, and Hagar becomes part of their attempt to force into existence what could only ever be received as a gift.
It was during her pregnancy that she experienced mistreatment of Sarah, the same woman who had given her to Abraham now treated her so harshly she fled into the desert alone, carrying a child she never asked for. And it was there, at a spring in the wilderness, that an angel found her and asked the question she could only half answer: “Where have you come from and where are you going?”
She knew where she had come from. She had no idea where she was going.
And there, is that desert wilderness, God made a promise to her there. About the son she was carrying. About his life and his future. And Hagar did something no one else in Genesis had done yet. She names God.
El Roi (el ro-EE). The God who sees.
Hagar carried that name back into Abraham’s household. She carried it with her into every day that followed, living among people with power over her who had forgotten what she had not.
But she has not forgotten.
And Ishmael is born. He would become the father of a people, and through them a faith, that worships the same God, Allah, to this day.
But then, impossibly, or maybe predictably, Sarah finally conceives, and Isaac is born.
This is where our reading for today begins, with laughter filling the house. Sarah laughs. She laughs because in her old age, she had Isaac, whose name means “laughter.”
So here we are, with servants moving in and out, carrying food and wine. After all this time. All these years, the promise finally has a face. But despite the laughter, the household that spent years reorganizing itself around fear now has a problem.
There are now two sons. Two futures.
Two mothers bound together unequally inside the consequences nobody seems able to untangle.
III. Wilderness Begins Before the Desert
One day, Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac. That is all the text says.
No argument. No threat. Just children playing. But what the text gives us in that single word is more than it might first appear.
The Hebrew word for what Ishmael was doing is מְצַחֵק — metzaḥeq (met-tsah-KHEK). It means to laugh. To play. To sport. And here is what makes that significant — it comes from the exact same root as the name Isaac. Ishmael was doing the thing that was Isaac’s very name. Whether that was innocent play or something more provocative the text refuses to say, and perhaps tht’s on purpose.
But Sarah saw it. And fear filled in what the text left open.
Because what fear cannot abide is ambiguity. Fear needs to know. Fear needs to decide. And what Sarah decides in that moment is that the blessing might have to be shared — and that Ishmael has become a threat to the future she has waited her whole life to hold.
And now that God has fulfilled the promise in Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael are the living evidence of Abraham and Sarah’s lack of faith. Womanist scholar Wil Gafney sees Sarah’s fear becoming so consuming that another woman’s suffering becomes secondary to securing a future for her own child.
So Sarah tells Abraham, “Cast out this enslaved woman and her son.” Notice, they no longer have names, just labels. It’s what happens when you push people to the margins. It’s just easier to dismiss someone who carries a label than someone you know by name.
While this is distressing to Abraham, for he loved Ishmael, whatever inner conflict he feels isn’t enough to do something different.
Well before regret, people often lament the wrongs they take part in.
Institutions do that. Churches do that. We all have the capacity to do it.
But God assures Abraham that Ishmael, too, will become a great nation.
That the promise of God is wider than Abraham can yet see. God’s blessings are not commodities to be stored, bartered, or traded. Being blessed doesn’t mean the blessing belongs to you; it means you’ve gladly received what God has bestowed so that the blessings can be shared with others.
But come morning, Abraham does it anyway, banishing Hagar and Ishmael into the desert wilderness. Sure, he sent them with some bread and water. But that had to be more about the pangs of his conscience than it was to give them a chance. Out in the desert, they had none. Sometimes our small generosities become the way we excuse our larger compromises.
IV. Pushed Outside the Circle – Memphis Knows This Too Well
Memphis knows something about being in the wilderness.
Our city has lived too long with the consequences of decisions made far away from the neighborhoods forced to bear them.
As the capital of the Delta, Memphis still carries what was never fully put down — the legacies of plantation culture, the echoes of Jim Crow, reminders not to get too uppity, and generations of racial trauma that didn’t disappear. It just reorganized.
You feel it when a data center goes up in a neighborhood that’s been asking for a grocery store. Millions of watts of cooling for servers. The neighborhood gets the noise and the electrical load. The economic benefit goes somewhere else. The people who live there were never really part of the conversation.
And sometimes the truth just needs to be said out loud.
The protections that took generations of blood and sacrifice to secure are being rolled back. Not because the problem is solved. Because the people with power have decided they are tired of being reminded that it isn’t.
You feel it when district lines get redrawn, not on schedule, not after a census, just whenever Black and Brown voting power gets strong enough to matter. Because if those votes count, the grip on power that those in charge have not been shy about naming as their intention starts to slip. So, the lines move. The voices get parceled out and diluted until they disappear. Not to represent the people, but to nullify them.
Recent Supreme Court decisions make these machinations possible with the audacious claim that “the country has moved on,” leaving the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively inert.
The country has moved on.
Hmm.
Has it?
Yeah, Memphis knows something about wildernesses, alright.
Today falls just days after Juneteenth — the day that marks emancipation, and the unconscionable delay before the news of liberation reached those it was meant to free.
The gap between proclamation and reality is a kind of wilderness of its own, isn’t it?
Sarah and Abraham had convinced themselves they were doing what was necessary.
Responsible.
Practical.
Maybe even faithful.
But I bet ya that Hagar would tell the story differently.
The wilderness always looks different depending on which side of the boundary you stand.
And now, there is only a mother, a child, and an empty water skin seemingly abandoned in the wilderness under a desert sun.
V. God Hears Outside the Circle
Then comes one of the most astonishing lines in Genesis:
“And God, the one whom Hagar has already named “the God who sees,” heard the voice of the boy, where he is.”
The Hebrew word for heard is שָמַע, shama, (shah-MAH).
It’s more than hearing a sound. It’s an attentive hearing. One that prompts action.
God hears. And God moves toward.
But of course, God would. Ishmael’s very name, יִשְמָעֵאל, Yishma’el, means “God hears.”
God hears the cries from those outside of the circle, those cast out from it.
“God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.”
Not where power says he belongs.
Not where fear has placed him.
Where he is.
The wilderness, their wilderness, your wilderness, our wilderness, is not evidence that God stopped paying attention.
It is the exact place where God is listening, where God sees.
VI. A Well in the Wilderness
Walter Wink argues that the principalities and powers have a vested interest in making the present order seem like all there is because they are of divine origin³ - rendering invisible what they cannot afford for us to see.
But God is not bound by what the powers permit, thank God. In the wilderness Hagar discovers that God is not only concerned with liberation someday, but with sustaining life today as God opens Hagar’s eyes to see the source of sustaining life that was always there.
A well. Water. Life. Possibility.
Delores Williams again insists that survival itself is a theological category. ⁴
And maybe that is part of the grace of this story.
Maybe it is only from the wilderness that God helps us see what our fear has kept hidden.
VII. The Final Scandal – Where Are You?
Perhaps this is the final scandal of the story.
Out there in the wilderness, the enslaved woman becomes the theologian.
Hagar has been in the wilderness before. She knows this God by name.
The God who sees.
The God who hears.
Where they are.
And that is the comfort of this story — for those in the wilderness, for those cast outside the circle, for those the world has rendered invisible. The God who sees finds you. The God who hears moves toward you. Where you are. Not where power placed you. Not where fear sent you. Where you are.
But the same God who comforts those in the wilderness convicts those of us who are not.
Because if God sees where Hagar is and we are not there,
God sees our absence.
If God hears the cry of those cast out and we have learned not to listen,
God hears our silence.
The God who sees goes where fear says not to look.
The God who hears listens for the voices power has learned to ignore.
Already present in the places we have decided not to go.
Which means every time the church organizes itself around its own survival instead of its neighbors’ suffering, every time fear decides who the church shows up for and who it passes by, every time an ism draws the circle smaller than God drew it, the church is not just failing its mission.
It is failing to recognize the God it claims.
And maybe that is why the question lands the way it does.
But if we turn the title of this sermon sideways, another question emerges.
Not Where You Are.
But Where are you?
This question belongs to those of us who claim to follow the God who hears and sees.
Those of us who speak in God’s name.
Those of us who call ourselves the church.
Because the challenge before the church has never been getting people to where we think they ought to be.
The challenge is learning to meet people where they are.
The way God does.
To listen before speaking.
To draw near without judging.
To go where suffering is easiest to overlook.
To see before fixing.
To hear voices power has trained itself to ignore.
Because people on the margins already know where they are.
The church is the one that keeps losing sight of them.
And maybe that is the question God is asking us now.
Because God is already there.
Where are you?
Amen.
Endnotes
1. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), especially chapters 1–2.
2. Wil Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 33–48.
3. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 13–31.
4. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, especially her discussion of survival and quality of life as central theological categories for Black women.
Works Cited
Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.
Gafney, Wil. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.
Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
