Sermon Helper: Hagar

Starting now, I’ll be selecting sermon helpers from milepost100.com and digging to them for more insights or just interesting tidbits. This won’t be every week. I’ll pick the ones that I think stand out. 

The second Sunday of Lent in Year C

I didn’t link to the sermon from Cedric Lundy before, but I’m glad it was easy to find. He’s funny, he’s smart, and he brings a new point of view on inclusiveness, a broader one that we could all take a moment and hear. He jumps off from Hagar feeling like an extra in this Genesis story and relates it to an experience from his own youth of going to a movie with two friends and realizing those two are on a date. He looks at how the church has worked in America for some time now; where young people are put into the youth ministry and learn to see themselves as part of a group defined by age. So, they move on to look for the student group, then the singles, and so on until old age. Then he gets to the heart of the sermon, talking about the narrow societal focus we have for people in heterosexual relationships who have children before they are thirty.

Hang on, this is way more than just another preacher telling us to be inclusive. In the passage, Hagar sees where she fits in and doesn’t like it, and leaves for the desert. This is early in the Bible, so the nation of God’s people is just Abram and Sara, and now a pregnant servant. God isn’t even named yet, but when an angel appears to Hagar, she calls it “a god of seeing” or, maybe it’s “The God of seeing”. With that, she returns to this dysfunctional relationship despite there lack of a promise that it will get better.

It could be Hagar rethought her situation; she was risking death in a time when there were no support systems for single mothers, let alone escaped slaves. It could be she believed this angel would help her offspring be “seen” for generations to come. Cedric doesn’t comment directly on whether that worked out, but it’s obvious to me when I see ancient promises like this, unfulfilled. He relates this to the “sexual minorities” we have today when we let everyone remain somewhere in the system, but not as the central focus of it, to put it lightly. He doesn’t limit this to LBGTQ, rather it’s everyone outside of those perfect nuclear families.

Cedric is careful to clarify that he is not suggesting that we blow-up the current system and make it illegal to make anyone feel uncomfortable or police the use of language. What he is suggesting is a community where intimacy is not based on identification with a group that has had certain sexual acts performed in a certain way or time in our lives. Instead, considering that sitting down at a meal with people who are different is something that gives us strength.

I quoted him almost directly at points and added my own thoughts in others, so take the half-hour to listen and see what you think.