Hagar, Patron Saint of Climate Refugees (Genesis 16, 21)
Climate Bible Study: April 2022
Hagar and the Angel in the Wilderness, by Francesco Cozza
“According to a World Bank report released in September, more than 200 million people are likely to migrate over the next three decades because of extreme weather events or the slow degradation of their environments. Most are displaced within their home country. But experts say that about a fourth of the people who flee will cross borders, seeking a better life in a different land.”
-Inside Climate News, 2 Nov 2021
Climate refugees have a patronage problem. Who is looking out for them? If they remain within the borders of their home country, and thus are designated as “displaced persons,” their distressed or even hostile governments are of little assistance. If they cross a border and become “stateless,” they encounter what Hannah Arendt once described as lacking “the right to have rights” because there is no political state to grant them the rights afforded to citizens.
Fortunately, the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees stepped up to offer protection. Even so, its definition of what constitutes a refugee does not apply to those who leave their land due to climate or environmental impacts. As journalist Moira Lavelle explains, the Convention “defines a refugee as someone ‘who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.’ Hurricanes, floods, droughts or the inability to grow crops do not fit neatly within this definition.”
Many people working on behalf of the Paris Agreement are also working hard at rectifying these refugee loopholes, and of course, the biggest protection we can offer to climate refugees is preventative: let’s double our efforts to reduce carbon emissions so as to reduce the climate devastations which force them off their land in the first place. Those of us who are praying on behalf of the Paris Agreement can be faithful in interceding for climate refugees as well.
Who in the Church is looking out for refugees? Is there even a patron saint of refugees? In 1950, a year before the UN Convention, Pope Pius XII named Mother Cabrini the patron saint of immigrants, but there is no indication that her purview extends to refugees. Writers have commended St. Joseph for his care over his wife Mary and child Jesus as they fled into Egypt as temporary refugees, but that only makes him the patron saint of travelers and immigrants, which are easily lost in his bigger portfolio that includes patronage of fathers, expectant mothers, house sellers and buyers, working people, and—hello!—the Universal Church herself. Who sees refugees and listens to them? While Catholic canonical law does not allow for the canonization of Old Testament figures, save three archangels, and most Christians may be reluctant to honor someone who is famously not in the line of promise of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, nonetheless, the crisis of climate refugeeism demands that we at least revisit the story of Hagar.
Hagar’s story is recorded in Genesis 16. A hitherto- barren and hitherto-named Sarai offers her servant, Hagar, to her husband Abram so that he might produce an heir. When Hagar conceives, and when Sarai feels disrespected by her--what other enslavers will later call “uppity”—Sarai appeals to Abram. He responds to her: “Your slave is in your hands. Do with her whatever you think best.”
We read: “Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.” Oppressed, pregnant, alone, displaced, and stateless—Hagar temporarily flees to the desert. She flings herself down next to a spring. At least there will be drinking water for this refugee but she has no assurance of much else, at least until the Angel of the Lord appears to her. He tells her that she will not only give birth to a son, but that he “will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” There will be struggle and strife in her son’s life, for sure, but he will be alive and he will be free. Meanwhile God confers a name on her son. “You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery.” The name Ishmael means “God hears.” Hagar returns the favour by giving God a name:
"She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: 'You are the God who sees me,' for she said, 'I have now seen the One who sees me.' That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered."
El Roi: “The God who Sees”. Beer Lahai Roi: “the Well of the Living One who Sees Me.” Ishmael: “God Hears.” Who will look out for refugees? The God who sees and hears will.
In the late Rachel Held Evan’s final book, Inspired, she gives a wonderful retelling of Genesis 16 with Hagar as the first-person narrator. Hagar remarks not only on how “Yet just one person in all your sacred Scripture dared to name God, and it wasn’t a priest, prophet, warrior or king. It was I, Hagar—foreigner, woman, slave.” She all remarks how the well, with its name, remains. She muses,
Many of my sisters would draw from that well: the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh by delivering the babies of slaves, the despised Samaritan who scandalized a town for daring to speak to the Messiah, the young women ripped from their homes in West Africa and shipped like livestock across the sea, the mamas who saw their boys lynched and the grandmas who saw their grandsons gunned down, the millions of black and brown people whose name the world has forgotten but whose God never failed to see…(Evans, 33).
Hagar and Ishmael reappear in Genesis 21. They are back in the desert, but this time, they have not fled Sarah, but rather have been banished by her. In other words, their government has turned against them. And this time, there is no readily-available spring of water. Their waterskin runs dry. The mother puts the boy under a bush and walks away because she cannot bear to see him die. But then El Roi sees and hears:
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. (Gen 21:17-18)
Our intercessory prayers for climate refugees can be like the tears of Hagar and Ishmael poured out before the one patron that matters most: the God who sees, the God who hears.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team
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Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2018.