Struggling with Hagar

AM Psalm 119:49-72 • PM Psalm 49, [53]
Gen. 16:1-14 • Heb. 9:15-28 • John 5:19-29

The Birth of a Nation, a landmark silent film released in 1915, is about the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed. It has long been hailed for its technical and dramatic innovations but condemned for the racism inherent in the script and its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.

I can’t help but find irony in the connection between the name of that film and Hagar, who is credited with the birth of a nation. The portrayal of blacks in the film is hard to watch and the treatment of Hagar, a black slave belonging to Sarah, is hard to read in the Genesis reading for today.

God has made a promise to Abram and Sarah. Sarah does not have faith that she can bring God’s promise to fruition so, failing to wait, she takes control of Hagar’s body, forcing her to have sex with Abraham to conceive a child. At one point, Sarah banishes Hagar who is pregnant. God speaks to Hagar and tells her to return to Sarah and “put up with the harsh treatment.” Some years later Sarah does become pregnant and then banishes Hagar and her young son to the wilderness.

I have been reading Wilda C. Gafney’s book, Womanist Midrash. She writes:

I read Hagar’s story through the prism of the wholesale enslavement of black peoples in the Americas and elsewhere; Hagar is the mother of Harriet Tubman and the women and men who freed themselves from slavery. I see Hagar as an abused woman. I see God’s return of Hagar to her servitude and abuse as the tendency of some religious communities to side with the abuser at the expense of abused women and their children. Frequently that advice is couched as “God’s will.” Ultimately Hagar escapes her slaveholders and abusers and receives her inheritance from God, and God fulfills all of God’s promises to her.

Abraham’s sexual use of Hagar has resonances in the sexual and reproductive uses of women’s bodies in the American slavocracy and in countless other global contexts across time…Sarah’s actions evoke both complicity with dominant-culture women against subordinated women.

We will not come to terms with the legacy of slavery in this country nor all the horrors that descend from it which continue to shape our world without engaging – rebuking and rejecting – the normalization and sanctification of slavery in the text and views of the authority of scripture that require uncritical acceptance. That will not be the end of white supremacy, in the church, in biblical interpretation, or in this country, but it will be an unhooding.

If we tell the truth, Hagar’s life matters to God in the framing of the story because she is the mother of a son of Abraham, her inability to consent to sex or impregnation or surrogacy, irrelevant in the text. The reason her black life matters to those who told her story in not the reason her black life and that of her son matter to the God who transcends the sexist and ethnocentric portrait in these texts. The cry, “Say her name” accompanies “Black lives matter” as a reminder that violence is often gendered as is the response and outcry which often follows.

All black life matters because black life is sacred, reflecting and embodying the God who dwells in the holiest of deep darkness.

Written by Kathy McGregor

Kathy is thrilled that Wilda Gafney will be the Tippy McMichael speaker at St. Paul’s in March of 2023.