Worth

Genesis 16
1 Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, 2 and Sarai said to Abram, "You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her." And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. 4 He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl 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!" 6 But Abram said to Sarai, "Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her. 7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, "Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?" She said, "I am running away from my mistress Sarai." 9 The angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit to her." 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, "I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude." 11 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. 12 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." 13 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?" 14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered. 15 Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Samuel I. Newhouse IV is worth a lot. His friend Jamie Johnson (himself worth a lot) decided back in 2003 to make a movie about a group of young people born into some of the richest families in the United States and Europe. The title of his little documentary (appropriately enough) is Born Rich. In his movie, Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson Company’s fortune) interviews S.I. Newhouse IV while he is attending Harverford College in Pennsylvania. Johnson asks Newhouse how much he’s worth—apparently a taboo question among the super-rich—and the twenty-one year old Newhouse eagerly responds, “Twenty billion would be a low estimate.” In case you didn’t hear me well, that’s twenty BILLION (with a “b”), and even that’s a LOW estimate!
Of course, folks like you and me probably can’t even imagine what twenty billion dollars looks like. Well, neither can Willie and Sarah Goodell . Willie and Sarah were married with three children (all from different fathers) and living in the second floor of Sarah’s grandmother’s dilapidated house in Claremont, Massachusetts. Sarah was unable to work, claiming that certain psychological conditions resulting from diverse childhood traumas had left her incapable, but Willie, on the other hand, had a roofing job—a two and a half hour drive away. In a good year, Willie would earn around $30,000, but it would all be squandered between paying for gas, cigarettes, and other habitual necessities, so they would have to scratch around trying to make ends meet (hence their living arrangements). If you were to ask them what they were worth, Sarah and Willie would look around at the peeling linoleum, warped boards and busted windows and likely tell you they weren’t worth much, if they were worth anything at all.
And perhaps they’re right. After all, we tend to measure worth with commas, decimals, and dollar signs. We tend to measure worth with the same gauge as people like S.I. Newhouse, Jaime Johnson, and companies like Goldman Sachs. One would think we have come a long way since those ancient, barbaric days when men and women would kill one another over a sliver of silver, a nugget of gold, or a barrel of oil. One would think that today, in our civilization, an individual’s worth would be found in their contribution to society or the strength of their character, not the weight of their purse or depth of their stock portfolio, but sadly we are not so far removed from our ancient ancestors who sought to put a price on everything from the field to the foreigner. Even as a people of faith, we are not so far removed from that earliest patriarch Abraham and his views of worth.
To read the story of Abraham through the lens of the New Testament is to see a man of righteousness proved by faith, a man who unflinchingly responds to the voice of God whether it calls him to go to a strange land or sacrifice his only son, a man whose worth is found in his active response to an unseen God. Yes, to see Abraham through the Apostle Paul’s eyes is to see a great hero of faith adorned with a halo of holiness. But to reflect on the man Abraham (or as he is named in our text this morning, Abram) in the earliest accounts of the Old Testament is to witness a man who is bent on self-preservation, all for the sake of a divine promise. Not once, but twice (in Genesis 12 and 20) Abram puts on like some ancient sex trafficker, pawning his wife Sarai off to kings in exchange for his own life and riches. It seems for Abram that his worth was above the worth of others, including his wife and a certain slave girl he had been given in that Egyptian exchange in chapter 12, a girl named Hagar. It is her story that interests me this Mothers’ Day.
From the moment she was born, Hagar’s worth was set; she was a slave-girl, under the service of the Pharaoh. Her worth was bound up in her service and the price with which she could be bought, sold, or traded. A day came when her name was called, and she was given to Abram as a part of the loot Pharaoh showered him with as he left Egypt. She now had a new owner Sarai, and Sarai, an older woman desperate for a child, had a plan for Hagar.
The text says in verse 2 that Sarai “said to Abram, ‘You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.’" Sarai had found a new sort of worth in Hagar—she would be the vessel through which God would give Abram his long-promised son. And Sarai’s plan went off like clockwork, likely to the pleasure of Abram and the horror of Hagar, but not everything played out they way she had wanted it to, because now, for the first time in her life, Hagar was worth more than just her price as a slave—she was carrying a child. She was an expectant mother, and she didn’t mind letting Sarai know it! Perhaps she walked around rubbing her ever-growing belly, groaned loudly as her feet and back began to ache from the added weight of a growing child. She taunted Sarai with the obvious reality of her youth and fertility. Sarai didn’t like what she saw; her plan had worked, but she wasn’t ready for its reality—Hagar, the slave-girl, now seemed to be worth more than Sarai, the wife of the promised one of God.
What happens next really puts Hagar back in her place! Sarai goes to Abram and complains in verse 5: “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl 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!" Of course, Abram, as most husbands tend to do when confronted by a problem from their wives, tries to ignore the problem and puts the responsibility back on Sarai in verse six: “Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please." “She’s your property; you handle it” he says to Sarai, and she does handle it indeed!
Sarai begins to treat Hagar, the flaunting expectant mother, harshly, and Hagar, perhaps in a hormone-induced reaction, flees into the wilderness. Here is where I am most struck by this story. Hagar, the woman supposedly carrying Abram’s son and therefore the fulfillment of God’s promise (at least according to Sarai’s plan) runs into the wilderness…AND NO ONE COMES AFTER HER! Despite the child she carries, despite what she may have thought she was worth, no one comes to bring her back; no one comes to protect her. Is there any clearer declaration of one’s worthlessness in the eyes of another than a complete and total indifference to his or her welfare? Is there a clearer pronunciation of one’s insignificance than when no one else seems to care at all?
How many times have you felt like no one cares? When those impossibly difficult times in your life have come around and all you can do is run but no one comes along to care, no one comes along to call you back, to bring you home, to (at the very least) hold your hand and walk beside you through the wilderness of depression and impossibility, do you get the feeling that you’re worthless? No matter how much you give, how much you try, how much you think you are worth, do you ever feel like no one cares whether you live or die?
Perhaps that’s how the angel of the Lord found Hagar by the well at Shur. She was on her way back to Egypt, back to a place where they at least thought she had some worth, even if it was as a slave. There she was, all but without hope. We don’t know how long she had been running or how far. We just know that when the messenger of Lord found her in verse 8 he said to her "Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?"
It’s the simplest of questions, “Where have you been and where are you going?” At times it can be the easiest question to answer, “I came from the store and now I’m going home.” At other times it can be the most perplexing of philosophical inquiries where the only answer seems to be “I don’t know.” For Hagar, it must have seemed like an inappropriate question. After all, this messenger of the Lord knew that she was a “slave-girl of Sarai.” Surely it knew where she was coming from at least. Regardless of this angelic being’s lack of precognition, Hagar says in verse 8, "I am running away from my mistress Sarai." This is a messenger from God, so surely if Hagar pleads her case regarding a situation in which she has been used and mistreated, God will deliver her from her difficulties, place her in a position where her worth will be appreciated…But that isn’t what happened at all! The angel commands her in verse 9 “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” WHAT?! That’s the word from the God of liberation? That’s the command from the God who would deliver Israel from the bondage of Egypt? “Return…and submit”?!
Sometimes it seems like we are running away from our problems, away from our difficulties, hoping that when we reach the end of our rope, God will reach his divine hand down and deliver us. Sometimes we just want to hear a voice from the darkness call out to us and tell us that we are worth everything we claim to be. But sometimes, when we want God to deliver us, to carry us over from hardship to happiness, He tells us to go back. He shows us that there is something more we have yet to do, something more that will shape us through the trials of difficulty, something that will prove our worth not to the rest of the world but to ourselves.
Hagar, perhaps reluctantly, obeys the words of the angel, and after an exchange involving the naming of springs and offspring, she returns to Abram and Sarai. The Bible doesn’t say how she was welcomed back (not well if I had to guess). It simply tells us in verses 15 and 16, “Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.” (Notice how the author goes out of the way to mention Hagar as the boy’s mother). Surely it wasn’t easy for Hagar as a mother, having her only son taken away from her, given into the arms of a woman who didn’t care whether she lived or died. It couldn’t have been easy to be reminded day after day that her worth was found only in her ability to produce children for a couple who didn’t care if she lived or died.
And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to wake up each morning already feeling defeated and deflated, knowing that you’ll be facing a world that doesn’t care whether you live or die. It isn’t easy to get moving when you feel worthless, and the people around you are all building their worth in this world with the advantages they’ve been given while you struggle to just survive. It isn’t easy when you think no one else cares, no one else can relate, when you think there isn’t anyone out there to come running after you in the wilderness after you’ve tried running away from it all. It’s never easy when you think you’re worthless.
But just when you think you’ve sunk to the bottom, just when you think the wilderness has won and no one finds you worthy enough to care, just when you think you aren’t worth anything, the God who made the heavens and spins the Earth on its axis has intervened in history for you; the God who numbers the hairs of your head finds you at the place where your hope runs out and says “My child, get up!”(Luke 8:54). That’s when you find that worth isn’t measured with commas, decimals, and dollar signs. That’s when you find that your worth isn’t measured by the standards of anyone in this world. That’s when you find that worth is measured by the depth of God’s love—and God’s love is unfathomable!
What are you worth? Where do you look for your worth today? Are you running into the wilderness, away from a world that doesn’t seem to care? The voice of the Lord asks you this morning “Where are you coming from, and where are you going?” Are you heading towards the cross and the salvation offered by God? Are you seeking your worth in a life of faith, founded in the gospel of Jesus the Christ? Or are you still trying to find your worth in a world that couldn’t care less? I ask you today, where are you coming from, and where are you going?
Let us pray…