Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, good morning, Knox. It's so good to be here with you. All this morning, I thought about all the ways that Matt prepared me for this morning. He's got his list of faqs. He put me in touch with the awesome team behind the scenes that's helping make all the slides happen. What he did not warn me about was that sitting in the congregation today, that I would have not just one, not just two, but three former Fuller professors sitting here with me and my former Sunday school teacher from Hollywood Presbyterian Church. So it is good to see some familiar faces. No pressure. No pressure. Actually, fun fact, my old testament professor is not here. I failed my very last class at Fuller, the Pentateuch. I'm preaching from Genesis today.
So it was a fluke. I missed an assignment online, and anyway. But he's not here. Thank goodness.
But, you know, as I was prepping today and I thought about all of the different connections that I have to this congregation, I thought about my Fuller seminary days, my Presbyterian church circle. I'm an ordained Peace USA pastor.
I've known parents from my kids from elementary school who've attended here, and of course, door of hope, the ministry that you all partner with us, the ministry that helps families overcome homelessness in Jesus name. And that's an awful lot of connections in a small congregation. Right? But as I thought about those connections, theology, church, homelessness, our local community, I realized that those connections are what I want to preach about today. Because I'm going to be talking about God's heart. Heart for people experiencing homelessness. And I'm going to be asking what God's heart for this community means for us as christians, as a local church, and in a community where homelessness is a huge and ever present issue. And I think that that is a really important topic to tackle through scripture. Because while the Bible has all kinds of opinions about homelessness, so do the media and social media and political parties and all of us, really. In fact, if I were to give all of these groups this fill in the blank sentence, people experiencing homelessness. Homeless people are blank.
I would probably get about as many opinions as I have different connections to this congregation.
Homeless people are blank.
I want you to take a mental note of the first word that comes into your head. Not the Sunday school answer, not the politically correct answer. In fact, if you are someone who really engages the homelessness issue, you'll know that I'm not using in this sentence the politically correct terminal. When I say homeless people, it's actually more respectful to say people experiencing homelessness.
Or unhoused people, because to label someone homeless is an identity.
But to describe someone as experiencing homelessness or unhoused better conveys the temporary condition that homelessness should be.
Nevertheless, all kinds of people have all kinds of different opinions when it comes to homeless people.
And so today I want us to think biblically about how God sees people experiencing homelessness. And to do that, I want to turn to the book of Genesis, chapter 16. We'll have our scripture reader come up in a minute. But by way of introduction to this passage, the main characters are Hagar and her baby to be Ishmael.
Hagar is the servant of Abraham and Sarah. You might know them as the patriarch and matriarch of the nation of Israel.
And when we meet Hagar in today's scripture, she is really in trouble. She just ran away from her masters.
She is pregnant.
She has no job. She has no home.
And so let's hear what God has to say to her from this reading of Genesis, chapter 16, verses seven through 16.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Please pray with me, Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your holy spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you have to say to us today. Amen.
A reading from the book of Genesis, page eleven of your pew bibles.
The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?
I am running for my mistress, Sarai. She answered.
Then the angel of the Lord told her, go back to your mistress and submit to her the angel. I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.
The angel of the Lord also said to her, you are now pregnant, and you shall give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael. For the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him. He will live in hostility toward all his brothers.
She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me, for she said, I am now seen the one who sees me.
This is why the well was called Bir Lahi Roi and is still there between Kardash and bared.
So Hagar bore Abram a son. And Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne.
Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael. This is the word of the Lord.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Thanks be to God.
Thank you.
So in this text, I wonder if you can picture Hagar with me for a minute.
She's alone, broke, hungry, thirsty.
She is a single, pregnant, unemployed, unhoused egyptian African. So in this context, outsider to God's chosen people.
If you can picture her now, I just want you to place her for a moment right here in the streets of Pasadena, sitting on a street curb on Colorado Boulevard with the sign that says, help.
How do you think we'd complete that sentence if we walked by Hagar today?
Maybe we'd see her baby bump and think, yikes, why is she pregnant?
I'm not sure I should give her any money.
But thank goodness. If we are mature bible readers, we know that we can't read anything out of context.
And so now I'd like you to take Hagar out of Pasadena and place her back into this old Testament context and start looking at her backstory.
How did this moment come about?
And here's what we would discover years before today's passage began. God promised Abraham a huge family, kids, grandkids, great grandkids.
But his wife Sarah couldn't get pregnant. She was getting up there in years. She was getting impatient with God's timing and God's plan. And so she decided to take matters into her own hands by having Abraham get her servant Hagar pregnant.
Now, this wasn't a great deal for Hagar.
The historical custom would have meant this child belonged to Sarah, not Hagar.
So Hagar was really more like a forced surrogate rather than a second wife. And so it's not a huge surprise to me that when Hagar finds herself pregnant, she gets an attitude with Sarah.
Scripture tells us that she started to display her mistress.
Maybe she was resentful. Maybe she was taking advantage of the small amount of power that she finally had as the future mother of Abraham's child. But whatever the reason for this poor behavior, Sarah would not put up with being treated this way by someone she thought was beneath her.
And so she goes to Abraham. And then Hagar realizes just how powerless, undervalued she is because Abraham could have just sat the two women down and put the conflict to rest. But instead, Abraham told his wife, well, she's your servant.
Do with her what you want.
And so Sarah turns on Hagar and mistreats her. In fact, the word mistreat in scripture is the exact same word used to describe Israel's persecution under the Egyptians when they were in slavery.
That's how bad this mistreatment is.
And so Sarah abuses her so badly that Hagar runs away with no other options. That's where today's story begins, with a woman who has been used and abused, a woman who Abraham had gotten pregnant but didn't value enough to stand up for, a servant with no rights, an egyptian african outsider to God's chosen people. This is the woman that we encounter on the side of the road.
Friends, no one becomes homeless in a vacuum.
There is always a context.
There is always a backstory.
And so, as we look at the scripture today and ask how God sees unhoused people, I'd like us to consider this first.
People experiencing homelessness are hurting.
They're hurting.
75% have lost their housing because of a life altering crisis like job loss, illness, divorce, domestic violence.
92% of mothers experiencing homelessness have experienced severe physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime.
50% experience severe depression once they fall into homelessness. And the symptoms of those traumas might present as anger or apathy or substance abuse or mental illness or the inability to hold a job. It's those symptoms that make us complete that sentence. Homeless people are blank with words like lazy or addicted or unable.
But if we're going to see people experiencing homelessness through God's eyes, we need to move from the question, what's wrong with you?
To what happened to you?
That transition.
In my world, the world of homeless services, is called trauma. Informed care, looking for the pain and the trauma underneath a problematic circumstance or a problematic behavior.
And actually, that's what God does. In today's text, some of Hagar's hurts were domestic violence, classism, racism, workplace exploitation to end up a servant in the first place. She probably had no parents or parents too poor to care for her.
And instead of God saying, why did you run away? You had a job.
Aren't you pregnant?
Isn't that a stupid choice?
The angel of God comes to her and says, where have you come from?
In other words, what happened to you?
And then if we look a little deeper in today's text, we see that Hagar is actually one of the most revered and esteemed people in the entire Old Testament.
Sarah and Abraham may think that she's a nobody, but God thinks she's a somebody. And here's where I get that in today's text.
First, she is the very first person in Genesis to be visited by an angel of goddess. We are 16 chapters in. God could have sent his angel to visit many people prior to Hagar. He'll send the angel to Abraham in the future. Yet it is to this runaway slave that God appears in this form. 1st, 2nd. Hagar is the first woman in the Bible to be given a promise by God up to this point. Noah has received a promise, Abraham has received a promise. But I find it interesting that God chose this african servant outsider as the first woman to hear directly from God.
And last, Hagar is the only person in the entire Old Testament to give God a name.
Now, there are a lot of names offered for God in the Old Testament. The God who provides, the God who hears, the God who saves, the God who's with us. I could go on and on, but all these names are ascribed to God by either a narrator or a prophet channeling God's voice. They are God's name for God's self.
This is the only time when a human is given the power to name God. It's so important in the Bible and in this story that there is a physical place to commemorate this very moment. And here is the name that Hagar gives God. The God who sees me.
Think about that.
She could have chosen any name, but she experienced God as the God who sees me, the God who sees her pain, the God who understands her heartbreak, the God who esteems her and loves her and uplifts her and speaks value and encouragement over her. I, the God who thinks that she's important and worthy, the God who says that she is beloved.
And so that leads me to the second thing I'd like us to consider from today's passage. People experiencing homelessness are beloved.
They have value.
God sees them. God esteems them.
And so after we see their pain, we need to learn to see them like God sees them.
They are beloved.
They are made in God's image.
Years ago, I met a woman named Sarah at a homeless shelter I was volunteering at. She had been homeless, addicted to drugs, in prison. She had tattoos all over her arms and her chest. And so it was easy for me to imagine the kind of life that she used to live. But during her time at this shelter, she had given her life to Jesus.
And while the tattoos were still there, there was not a sign of that hardness left in her face and in her spirit.
She was joyful and hopeful. And one night I got the chance to hear her testimony. I remember it so clearly because of how she talked about goddess.
She talked about all these things that God had showed her. It was as if she could see God, and God saw her and was pointing all of these incredible things out about her. So she said that God showed her that she was a great musician, and God showed her that she didn't have to go back to the life that she was living, and God showed her that she could forgive her family. And then as she was wrapping up, she said this off the cuff comment, oh yeah, and God showed me that I'm awesome.
And it was such a throwaway comment at the end, but I was so moved when I heard it because I thought about how many years she must have spent trying to prove to herself and the world how awesome she was with those tattoos and the drugs and whatever pain she was trying to numb with those drugs.
And then I thought about her reentry into society and her search for a job with all of those tattoos, how she might struggle to prove how awesome she was in this post prison world.
But now she could cling to the truth that God thinks that she's awesome, that God sees her, that she is beloved.
This is how God wants us to see people experiencing homelessness.
Yes, they are hurting, but they are also beloved.
And then the last thing I'd like us to consider from today's text is people experiencing homelessness are resilient.
Now, I think that is a really important point, because even if we come to believe that people experiencing homelessness are in pain and that they are beloved, we might still fill in the blank with a well intentioned but very harmful thought.
People experiencing homelessness are helpless.
We need to serve them. We need to save them. We need to rescue them. But can you imagine how much strength it takes to simply survive homelessness?
Finding a bathroom, finding a shelter, navigating the system, figuring out how to shower and eat and do just about anything that we all take for granted? In my experience, unhoused people know how to hustle.
They are incredibly resilient. God knows that about them.
And God knows that about Hagar, too.
Because after God connects to Hagar's pain and tells her how beloved she is, God gives her a huge and really hard assignment to return to Abraham and Sarah's household.
And here's why he did that.
Abraham and Sarah are about to become the founders of the nation of Israel, God's chosen people.
But because they're broken, today's story is all the evidence we need of that brokenness. Because all God's people are broken.
God knew that they could become a really exclusive group, but that's not what God wanted.
God was forming this people group so that they could bless other people, so that they could be a light to all of the nations. And so God sends Hagar back so that she can live with them as an outsider among insiders, this is not an easy calling. It required strength and resilience, but that's what God saw in Hagar. It was formed through rough times, overcoming challenges, healing from pain, having to hustle. But that's the kind of strength and resiliency that I see time and time again with people experiencing homelessness.
And so I'd like to end today by sharing a quick story. This is Zacchaea, a hurting, beloved, resilient daughter of God, and truly a modern day Hagar. Let's take a look.
[00:21:49] Speaker C: I remember London and I used to sleep in his park. Actually, we used to sleep over here, like where the benches are. And I just remember telling her one day, you know, we'll have a home of our own and not have to be here anymore. And nowadays we have our own home. And now she just comes to play.
He would just start a fight. No matter how much I cooked, I cleaned, cared to him and did everything. The fights would get so bad where my daughter would cover her ears and, like, she would just tune us out. And I'm looking like she's so young, like, that's pretty bad. Like, it didn't affect her anymore. She was just used to it. I remember a time I blacked out from being choked out. Never experienced that. Everything just went dark. I thought I had fell asleep. Everything was just dark and cold. And that was one of the scariest, scariest moments. One of the reasons why I stayed was, where would I go?
I want to leave, then I'm not going to have anywhere to go. And that's one of the ultimate decisions and sacrifice I had to make for my daughter. And I was just to leave. And we ended up on the streets. I had no tent. I'm sleeping on the bench with my daughter, you know, trying not to really, you know, go to sleep and hold on to her tight as I can. But then there's ants all over you and then you have to go to the bathroom, but everything's closed now. Where are you going to go to the bathroom at? But I still went to work and sleep on my lunch breaks and things like that. Being with my daughter, being disabled, you know, on the streets, it was hard because I had nowhere to keep the antibiotics cold, so I would constantly try to buy cups of ice, things like that. Keep going was the key, just like my father taught me. That's what I was instilling in my daughter to make, you know, always keep going and always promising her, her there would be a better way out. And she trusted me and we trusted each other, that she wouldn't give up on me, and I wouldn't give up on her. Staying at shelters, you can only stay there for 30 days, some three months. And when my three months ended, I found myself calling 311 again, and that's how I discovered dwarf hope, by calling 311. So then they ended up giving me keys, and I'm like, keys, what are these for? You usually in a room with other families and things like that. I just thought it was going to be like a shelter. I had no idea. When I opened the door. I'm in a fully furnished, you know, food is provided, birthdays, how you name it. So you're able to save your money. They give you all the tools. Without those things, you know, you're just going to end right back up. You know, on the street, there's no or other organizations to this day that I know that give you all the classes from, whether it's spiritual, financial, they give you the tools. They really care. They have the one on ones with you. I just graduated last year where I'm able to donate a vehicle, saving for a home, and now I'm helping others for employment just from the tools. Dwarf hope kit, you know, in that little time. Spanish. Since coming in, arriving at door of hope and leaving door of hope, my whole life has changed, and it's just been getting better and better and better. I can't. Every day is like a dream.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Well, that's the ministry that you all are partnering with us to provide to mothers and fathers and children experiencing homelessness, but finding the help that they need. So thank you, Knox Presbyterian church. And if you have been feeling God's nudge, to come alongside and to walk with any of the families that we serve, I invite you to come and talk to me or my team. Carmella and Emily are here today. Can you guys raise your hands? And they'll have a table on the patio. But we'd love to just learn more about you and how God has been tugging on your heart.
People experiencing homelessness are hurting.
They are beloved, they are resilient, and we get the privilege to come alongside in their time of need so that they can overcome that situation, thrive.
I'm going to pray.
God, we thank you that even though we might come into issues like this, homelessness, with our own ideas and the media and the world tells us things that you call us to see these hurts and these problems in the world with your eyes, goddess, with your compassion, you call us to see your image implanted in each and every precious human being and so I pray God that at times we fail to do that, you convict us. I pray that you would give us your eyes and your heart for justice and compassion and servanthood. And I pray all of that in Jesus mighty name. Amen.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: I.
