Night Travelers: Shame - the Hiding Place
Night Travelers: Shame—The Hiding Place
Genesis 16:1-16
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
April 26, 2026
Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave 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; 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, 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 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 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 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.
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We are in the middle of a six-week series called Night Travelers — drawn from the ancient image of the spiritual seeker who turns toward the darkness rather than fleeing it, trusting that the light they are looking for is found precisely in the places they were most afraid to go. Each week we are turning toward one of the difficult emotions — not to be consumed by it, but to discover that God is already there.
We have turned toward anger. We have turned toward rage. Today we go somewhere quieter. Darker. More interior.
Today we turn toward shame.
We have been swimming in shame language our entire lives: You should be ashamed of yourself. Shame on you. Shame, shame, I know your name. Have you no shame? What will people think?
Shame is one of the oldest tools in the human social toolkit. Parents use it. Teachers use it. Religions — and I say this with the full weight of thirty years in ministry — religions use it perhaps most fluently of all. We learn early that shame is the price of being found out. And we learn, just as early, to be afraid of it. To organize our lives around avoiding it. To build elaborate systems of concealment and performance — all in service of one goal: making sure no one ever sees the thing we are most afraid they will see.
Here’s another shame adage, let’s see if you can complete it: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . shame on me. Fool me 350,000 times — you’re probably a meteorologist.
Shame is serious business. And today we are going to look at it directly — because that is what night travelers do.
The central question: what do we do with the self we cannot bear to be seen?
Before we go to the text, we need to make sure we have a solid understanding of what “shame” is.
Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor who has spent decades studying shame and vulnerability. One of her most clarifying contributions is a distinction that sounds simple but is really quite profound.
Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt says: I made a mistake. Shame says: I am a mistake.
Do you see the difference? Guilt has an exit. You can confess it, repair it, be forgiven, and move forward. Shame feels like a life sentence — because the problem is not something you did. The problem is something you are. Fundamentally. Irreparably.
Brown says that at its core, shame is the fear of disconnection. We are wired for connection — it is how we find meaning and belonging. And shame tells us that if we are truly known — if the hidden, broken thing is ever seen — we will be rejected. Cast out. Left alone.
So we hide.
Brown identifies twelve categories of shame — see if you find the greatest source of your shame as I share them:
1. Money and work
Family
Parenting
Motherhood or Fatherhood
Appearance and body image
Mental and physical health
Sex
Being stereotyped/labeled
Aging
Religion
I dare say there’s not a person in this room who can’t find a source of shame in their life (if they’re being honest with themselves).
Shame is universal. It is ancient. And it shows up on some of the most devastating pages of Scripture.
With that, let’s consider Genesis 16 which we read a moment ago. Shame isn’t directly named in the text, but we can certainly infer that Sarai felt enormous shame. You see, in Sarai’s world, the ancient Near East, a woman’s value was located almost entirely in her capacity to bear children — specifically, sons. Now, infertility can very much be a source of shame in today’s world, but in Sarai’s day, infertility was not simply personal sorrow . . . it was a public verdict. Children were understood as signs of God’s blessing. To be barren was to appear cursed.
Sarai has followed Abram across continents on the strength of God’s promise — that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars. She has trusted. She has waited. And her body has not cooperated. Every pregnant woman in the camp is an occasion for the shame to deepen. The promise of God feels like a taunt. And somewhere along the way, the grief of infertility has curdled into a whisper she cannot silence: something is wrong with me. I am not enough.
She doesn’t say this out loud. Her actions say it for her.
Brown identifies control as one of the most common shame responses — the attempt to manage outcomes so tightly that vulnerability is never exposed. Sarai cannot control her womb. So she controls what she can. Ancient Near Eastern custom allowed a barren wife to offer her servant as a surrogate — the child born would legally belong to the slaveholder. The shame would be managed. The problem would be solved.
I want to (carefully) name what the Scripture actually describes here: what Sarai engineers is the rape of her slave. Hagar has no voice, no choice, no protection. She is property being used to solve her mistress’s emotional problem. And this is what unexamined shame does — it doesn’t stay contained. It finds someone to pay its cost. And it is almost always someone with less power than the one carrying the shame.
Sarai’s unaddressed wound became Hagar’s suffering.
I want to introduce you to someone I’ll call Maya — a composite drawn from many stories.
Maya is in her mid-forties. Successful, respected, seemingly together. And for several years, she has been quietly drinking too much. But the shame Maya carries is not, at its root, about the drinking. The drinking is the hiding place. The original wound goes deeper — back to a childhood that installed in her, early and efficiently, the belief that she was fundamentally not enough. The drinking numbs the voice. It creates, for a little while, a merciful silence.
Nobody knows. Maya has built an architecture of concealment so elaborate and so practiced that she sometimes forgets it is there — until she is so tired of building it that she can barely breathe.
Maya is doing exactly what Sarai did: wielding control to manage what she cannot bear to feel.
Because here is what shame does once it moves in: it doesn’t just hurt us. It occupies us. Brown’s research shows that people who feel shame but don’t recognize it respond in predictable ways — they try to gain power over others, become aggressive, withdraw, keep secrets, or exhaust themselves seeking acceptance.
Watch Sarai move through that list. Once Hagar conceives, Sarai deals with her so harshly that Hagar flees into the wilderness alone and pregnant. The one who felt powerless in her shame becomes cruel in her control. Unable to rage at her own body, she targets the one with the least power to resist.
As for Maya — the energy required to maintain the secret is staggering. Managing appearances, lying to her doctor, carrying the shame of the drinking on top of the original shame that drove her to drink. Shame has become a full-time job.
Brown puts it plainly: shame makes people feel isolated, trapped, and powerless. And isolation deepens shame in a cycle with no natural exit. The more we hide, the more convinced we become that the hidden thing would destroy us if seen. The more convinced we are of that, the more desperately we hide.
But this is where the story turns . . .
Hagar has fled into the wilderness. Alone. Pregnant. Used and discarded. No social standing, no legal protection, no advocate. By every measure, the most forgotten person in this story.
And God finds her.
God doesn’t seek out Abram. God doesn’t go to Sarai. God goes to the slave. The foreigner.
The angel of the Lord finds Hagar beside a spring and asks two questions I want you to hear as the some of the most tender in Scripture: "Hagar, where have you come from, and where are you going?"
Not interrogation. Witness. The beginning of being truly seen.
What follows is complicated — God’s instruction for Hagar to return is difficult, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But in the middle of all of it, Hagar does something never done before in the entire biblical narrative. She names God. She is the first person in all of Scripture to give God a name, and she chooses this: El Roi: the God Who Sees Me.
Not the God who fixed everything. The God who sees me. She had been invisible to everyone who held power over her — and in the wilderness, she encountered a God who looked directly at her. All of her. Her suffering, her fear, her exhaustion, her desperate loneliness.
And did not look away.
That is what shame has told us will never happen. Shame says: if you are truly seen, you will be rejected. El Roi says: I am already in the wilderness. I have already seen you. And I am still here.
Maya’s turning point comes not from being caught or confronted, but on an ordinary Tuesday evening — sitting alone, the bottle in front of her, so exhausted by the weight of hiding that she cannot pick it up. A stillness settles in the room. Not judgment. Not the voice that always said you are not enough. Something quieter. Something that seems to say: I see you. All of you. And I am still here.
She calls a friend the next morning and says out loud, for the first time: I am not okay. I have been hiding. I am ashamed of what I have become.
The friend says: I know. I love you. Let’s get you help.
That is where healing begins.
Which brings us to what Brown calls Shame Resilience Theory — four movements toward the capacity to navigate shame without being destroyed by it or passing its cost on to someone else.
First: recognize, name, and understand your shame triggers. You cannot address what you will not name. For Sarai, the trigger was infertility in a culture that made her womb her worth. For Maya, a childhood wound about adequacy. Naming the trigger begins to separate who we are from the verdict handed to us.
Second: identify the external factors that created the shame. Shame rarely originates inside us. It is almost always installed by external forces — cultural expectations, family systems, religious messages. Sarai did not create the system that measured her by her fertility. She was its victim. Naming the external source asks the right question: whose voice is this, actually? And does it speak for God?
Third: connect with others to give and receive empathy. This is the move Sarai could not make — and it cost her, and Hagar, enormously. Brown is unequivocal: empathy is the antidote to shame. Not advice, not fixing — empathy. Someone who says: I see you. You are not alone. Maya’s healing began not with a program, but with one person saying: I love you. Let’s get you help.
Fourth: speak your shame. Shame cannot survive being spoken. Confession is not primarily about guilt — it is about shame. It is about bringing the hidden thing into the light and discovering that the light does not destroy us. It frees us.
That freedom — the discovery that being truly seen does not mean being rejected — is not something we can manufacture on our own. It has to come from outside the shame system entirely.
And that is what Hagar received at the spring. Not a solution. Not a removal of difficulty. A name: El Roi. You have been seen by the one whose seeing actually counts.
What would it mean to believe that? Not just as a theological idea, but as a lived reality — that the God who found Hagar in the wilderness is right there with you in your hiding place?
Shame says: hide. Stay small. Don’t let them see.
El Roi says: I already see. I have always seen. And what I see is worth loving.
Here is the invitation for this week: find the hiding place. Name it. Ask whose voice installed it and whether that voice speaks for God. Tell one safe person one true thing. And sit with the possibility that El Roi is already at your spring, already asking the questions, already waiting to hear your answer.
You are not too broken to be seen. You are not too hidden to be found.
The God who sees is already on the way.
Come, night travelers. You no longer have to hide.