The Woman Who Named God

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I was standing among the crates of various peppers at Adam's Fairacre Farm, a beloved place here in the Hudson Valley. The woman next to me was picking up and putting down the colorful ones. She laughed and looked at me, "I need to stop being so picky and just choose one." We laughed, went about our lists, and I thought nothing of it.

Then, on the other side of the store, we found each other again. She had a long list too, she said. Her son was coming home from college and she was excited. For thiry minutes we talked in the area between the dairy and the bakery. She had been a college professor, taught nutrition, asked me about my calling as a minister, about the church, about what I believed about this and about that. She was curious about everything.

At one point she said, almost as an aside: "Some people can be so mean, can't they? And sometimes they don't even know it. They talk and talk and never ask about you. You are there with them and you feel completely unseen."

That statement has not left me.

Feeling unseen is one of the most disquieting things a person can experience. You are present. You show up. You reach out. But, for reasons unknown, no one seems to notice or care, it seems. And in that feeling of invisibility the seed of a lie can germinate: that you are alone in it. That your suffering or personhood are unwitnessed. That the whole world is indifferent.

There is a name for God in Scripture that speaks directly to that lie.

El Roi: "The God who sees."

Typically in Scripture, God is named by prophets, a patriarch, or a king. Not this time.

A woman does.

An enslaved woman. A foreigner. Someone who had been used and discarded, who was pregnant and alone in the wilderness, who had every reason to believe no one in the world was paying attention to her story.

Her name was Hagar. And the God who found her there is the same God who sees you now.

What strikes me about El Roi is that divine seeing in Scripture is never passive. When God sees, God acts. When God saw the misery of his people in Egypt, he came down to deliver them.

The name does not simply declare that God's eyes are open. It declares that his gaze is directed, attentive, and consequential. He does not notice and move on. He notices and it changes things.

Hagar names God from her own experience, not from received tradition. "You are the God who sees me." (Genesis 16) God found Hagar on a road to nowhere. God will find you and your loved ones wherever you are.

I think about the woman in the produce section and how a thirty-minute conversation can crack open what we are thinking about and feeling. It's a gift to be seen.

Perhaps it is a greater gift to be the one who sees, names, and cares.

I wonder if there is someone is your life who might feel invisible. Maybe reaching out to them today would be to them like grace from heaven while in the wilderness.

From the Sermon Library

A few months ago, I preached on Genesis 18, Hebrews 12, and Luke 19, and the question that runs through all three: does anyone care about the innocent sufferer? The sermon is called Mercy and Justice because mercy doesn't weaken justice; it completes it. And it almost always starts with a name, and a face. [Read Here]​

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For Your Sunday Pentecost Sunday is just a few days away! The liturgy is available here. "Come, Holy Spirit. Fill us as you filled that upper room: with wind, with fire, with courage, and with life. . . " May this liturgy bless you and your congregation.

From the Website

I have been studying and writing about the Names of God. What I keep finding is that these names do not simply describe who God is. These names dismantle lies we have come to believe. El Shaddai speaks to the lie that God's promises have expirations dates. El Olam combats the lie that God has grown weary of you, that God's love and attention have a limit. And El Roi, the God who sees, speaks directly to the lie that you are invisible. That no one is paying attention to your particular pain.

A Prayer for the Week

God, open my eyes to the well that is already in this wilderness. Help me see the provision, the way forward, the source of life that is already present before I can see it. And make me someone who sees others the way you see me: with attention, with care, with the willingness to stop and ask where they have come from and where they are going and what do they hope for. Empower me to give to others what I've received from you. With hope in my heart, Amen.