A week or two ago, I was listening to Curiously, Kaitlyn, a podcast discussing children’s questions about theology with theologians, and the perennial problem of evil came up. Dr. Mika Edmondson was on to respond to a kid’s question about why God lets Satan do evil and cause suffering in the world instead of taking away Satan’s power and he and Kaitlyn Schiess touched on one of the practices Christians throughout time have leaned on for addressing pain and suffering while trusting in God’s goodness, that of seeing one’s self and one’s story in Scripture by relating to the figures throughout the Bible and their hardships and hoping in their same hope of comfort, rescue, and vindication from God.
This is a practice I myself have leaned on and the video segment brought me back to my preoccupation with the story of Hagar. Part of the reason I come back to Hagar and Ishmael’s story is that Hagar is seen as deeply outside of the story of Christian Scripture.1 In many ways she is marginalized by how we understand the arc of God’s story, such that to the writer of Galatians, Hagar is always and only representative of slavery and the Old Covenant, despite Abram and Sarai being the ones under the Old Covenant at the time. And even now her story is rarely brought up in Christian circles, except to mourn how Abram and Sarai took the duty of fulfilling God’s promise to them into their own hands, and the millennia-long consequences of that decision.
Despite all that, it remains true that Hagar will always be linked to father of the Israelite faith, will always be the first human recorded to give to God a new, unique name, it will always be clear that the Lord cared for Hagar, that God spoke to her, saw her distress, and preserved her and her son’s life.2 It will always be true that Hagar’s existence is evidence that even as God was establishing a special covenant with a particular people, he would not forget the rest of the peoples of the earth, that it always was and remains God’s plan to redeem and build relationship with all people everywhere if they would but respond to God’s call through Jesus Christ.
Hagar’s standing in Scripture has been circling in my head again because though there’s been some growth and healing of the Church’s LGBT/gender and sexuality conversation, there has also been a lot of recent doubling down in many denominations, not just on the basics of a theology of marriage but on harmful tangential beliefs and practices, despite being confronted by faithful Christians who are celibate or in mixed-orientation marriages that honor the broader Church’s understanding of Christian teaching.
Many individual Christians and Christian organizations lack the ability to uphold their understanding of the role of sex in Christian marriage without an ethic of exclusion and without holding onto blatantly false beliefs about Christian LGBT folks (yes, that’s called homophobia). The theology and harmful practices are inextricable to them, despite having clear examples in Side B Christians that such teasing apart is not only possible but necessary and life-giving. Instead many churches have slammed their doors on Side B Christians—on real people who have shown themselves faithful in life and in ministry.
Side A Christians have pointed this out again and again but it’s worth revisiting—the historical refrain of “love the sinner, hate the sin” has been a smokescreen for many Christians that has allowed them to not really love LGBT people at all. And this smokescreen has been especially confounding as these same Christians find themselves unsure or even hostile in the face of a “sinner” who isn’t even committing the sin that they’ve been accused of. Instead, many church folks find that they must create new categories of sins that aren’t found in Scripture to justify their continuing discomfort.
Maybe you, like me dear reader, have found yourself looking around to see where various denominations that on paper align with your theology of sexuality fall in their welcome of celibate queer Christians, hoping that one will be a safe haven to rest and heal, and have found yourself sorely disappointed and perhaps even betrayed. Maybe, like me, this journey has led to multi-year church searches, visiting one congregation after another and flinching every time a homophobic comment is made from the pulpit showing how believers in that community regard people made in the image of God. Or maybe you’ve sat through a totally unnecessary detour in a message or Bible study discussion, taken to malign people that you know are following Jesus with all their hearts including in the area of their sexuality.
Maybe—like me—you actually found a place that seemed welcoming, and had good but hard conversations, but found when it was time to use your gifts and experience to participate in discipleship, others outside the congregation put up enough fuss that pushing forward would have been more harmful than sitting silent on the pew. Maybe—like me—this has sometimes led to you feeling outside the fellowship of the Body of Christ, like you’re not really a part of the main story that God’s telling with his people, and deeply unwanted when you are no longer convenient and your presence no longer serves your spiritual siblings’ purposes.
I hope in this litany you are starting to see the parallels between Hagar’s position and the place some of us find ourselves in the Body, and why I see her as a kindred spirit, as a figure or type for those who find themselves loved by God, being seen by him and cared for by him, but still outside of the fellowship. If I were to encourage you from the perspective of Hagar’s story, this is what I would say:
Please remember that nothing can separate you from the love of God
Be shaped by the lovingkindness that God has shown you and not (only) by the misuse, abuse, and rejection you have faced. I’m not talking about refusing to recognize and callout mistreatment, but of the self-righteousness and pride that wants to make its home in our hearts when we are suffering because of other people’s immaturity and selfishness, and I won’t pretend that we don’t see this in Hagar’s story as well, that we don’t witness her seeking status while the woman who offered up her body and reproductive capacity with nary a word of consent in the text seethes in a corner.3 But reasonable bitterness and self-made vindication is not the end of what Christ calls us to, though it may be an emotional road we have to travel through to get to the other side. Even while we are in the place of hurt, it is imperative that we remember that we have been shown unreasonable care and unreasonable grace by God in Christ Jesus and it is that example of the Suffering Servant that we are being healed and grown into by the Holy Spirit.
I would also encourage you that Hagar is not alone as an outsider in Scripture. Instead she is the first of many figures who are outside of the direct line of fellowship God created in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and who’s full story of who God was to them is just off the page: Melchizedek, Balaam, the Magi, two Roman centurions... Not only that but there are others who started outside of the fellowship but who’s story became intimately woven with the people of God: Rahab, Ruth, the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius… In fact, one of the main threads in the New Testament is addressing practically and theologically how Gentiles, those who were originally considered outside the fellowship and outside the promises of God, were to be brought in and accepted through Jesus Christ.
All this is to say that you are not alone, either in the great cloud of witnesses or in our current experiences. We, your Side B siblings in Christ are standing with you, praying for you, and cheering on your eventual (and current!) success. And God does not intend to leave you alone forever, so while your heart is being shaped by his lovingkindness let it also be shaped by hope, a hope that encourages building friendships, discipleship, and community with other folks on the margins of the fellowship of Christ.
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:31-39 NIV
Genesis 16-18
Genesis 16:13 NIV 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.”
It’s worth it here to remind us that sexual relations with someone who is under one’s power and cannot say no is always sexual assault, yes, see David & Bathsheba, as well.
ah, thank you, Johana-Marie...this was beautiful and hard in all the right ways. Grateful for your brave voice!