Happy summer, y’all, and welcome to our summer series! We’ll spend the next six weeks looking at stories of women in the Hebrew Bible.And we start with doozy – the stories of Sarah and Hagar, which we find in Genesis chapters 16 and 21. It’s so tempting to read these as stories of two individuals – or 3 if you add Abraham in there - but what are the social forces at work here? How much agency do these women really have? As the power dynamics become increasingly twisted and the possibility of a peaceable ending for this family becomes ever smaller, we wonder - why doesn’t God just subvert the whole social structure and tell a different story? Well, that’s not what happens. BUT - through the pain and plain awfulness of these stories, we see clearly that blessing can be intermingled with injustice – and that it is a powerful thing and empowering thing to have a witness to our sufferings.