Passage: Genesis 16
Purpose: To identify with Hagar’s loneliness and despair, so we can feel the deep beauty of having a “God who sees” us.
Time: 6 minutes
Setting: Low light, with a low box or stool covered in a neutral blanket to look like a rock. Hagar enters from stage right, exhausted and parched—she is focused on an invisible stranger.
Photo courtesy of Jessica Echezabal via creationswap.com
Script:
Some water, sir, from your well?
Where do I travel? Have mercy sir, I am about to die of thirst.
[To herself] He demands to know—if I tell him, he may capture me or worse, but if I don’t, I’ll die of thirst before the sun goes down.
I travel to the nile.
You want to know why I would travel so far alone, a woman…and, yes, in my condition. [Pause] I see I have no choice but to tell you. You won’t mind then if I sit as I tell you?
[Hagar reaches down to the stool and lowers herself onto it, being pregnant and exhausted.]
For three days I have been fleeing for my life. My master is Abram of Haran. Surely you have heard of him. They say he has more flocks and servants than anyone on this side of the Euphrates. Many years ago his God told him to come to this land and promised him that his seed would become great—a whole nation.
But my master had no children. During the great famine, my masters animals began to die. The land could not support their great number, so they sought refuge in Egypt. At that time I was a child barely on the verge of womanhood, I was given to them as a gift from Pharaoh. When they returned to their land, I was taken from my own.
Back in this land, my Master’s God appeared to him again with the promise of descendants, but year after year passed and my mistress was barren. This went on for 10 years. Finally they decided their God must mean to give them an heir through a surrogate mother in keeping with the custom of the land. They decided to use me.
[Repositions herself on the stool, and pushes her hand against the side of her belly as if the child is pushing a foot into her rib.]
That was five months ago. At first, their was great rejoicing—Yahweh, as they call their God, was giving them a heir.
I rejoiced as well. This would change things for me. I was bearer of their child, the vessel of their God—surely this would change my position in the family, perhaps I would given the status of a concubine. But, as my excitement grew, Mistress Sarai became difficult to please and at times, even angry.
At first it was just words and angry looks, but then, one day, during chores I felt the child kicking me and stopped to rub my belly. [Puts a hand on her belly and looks down.] An instant later the back of my head throbbed. She had hit me! She accused me of being lazy. How dare she! I was growing her child in me, my child that would be hers.
Several other servants stood by watching, so I waited for them to tell the master. Surely, once he heard what she’d done, things would change. He would make her treat me well.
That evening, when he was told, all he did was look at me. There was sadness in his eyes, but he said nothing. He just turned his back and followed Mistress Sarai into the tent.
After that, Mistress Sarai became more difficult to please, more abusive. I couldn’t do anything right. The food was too bland or too spicy. The tent was never clean enough. Several days ago, while I was cleaning the tent for a second time, even though there was not a speck of dirt to be found in it, I looked up and saw her in the doorway, her eyes were fixed on me and there was a whip in her hand.
That night, I could not sleep. I kept seeing her in the doorway with that whip and the look in her eyes. I had seen that look before, in the eyes of my old master, before he had killed my brother.
I could not stay. I crept to the food supply, grabbed a skin of water and some cheese and headed south into the night—toward Egypt. I knew the desert had a hundred ways to kill me, especially traveling alone, but better that my child and I die there, than under her whip.
So, that’s why I’m traveling alone, fleeing from one death towards another. I have no family, no protection, and now I am about to die of thirst. The god of Egypt have abandoned me. And Yahweh—their God—must be against me, for he is the cause of all my misfortune.
[Looks abjectly at the floor, exhausted, about to cry, but too tired to.]
Does anyone see me?
Does anyone even care?
[After a moment of frozen silence, the lights turn off completely].
