A Sermon for Foundry United Methodist Church by Rev. Shalom Agtarap

July 18th, 2021

Genesis 21:14

Focus Statement: When systems are not made for us, god gives us blessing, shows us  compassion, revives us with life-giving water — to go our own way! 

Opening Prayer —  

I am the daughter of Filipino immigrants, hard-working, intelligent, spirit-filled people  who migrated to California. While I am a cradle United Methodist, my sisters and I were  often the only kids of color in a sea of white churches that my father was appointed to.  In ministry, I am a brown woman, ordained in an institution that never sought to ordain  women, much more Southeast Asian women. And my job is to reflect on scripture  compiled without a Hagar in mind. It’s as though I am a plant, whose roots are watered  in another garden. They had to be! If I were to be of any help to the Filipino immigrant  local church that sent me to seminary, I would have to divest from white ways of  knowing, storytelling and preaching. If I were to honor the elders who stuffed $20 bills in  my pocket as they pulled me in for a hug, blessing me in prayer and pocket money, I  would have to learn to bring the gospel to life in ways that honored indigenous ways of  being. The quickest way to dishonor them, would be to hide the parts of myself they  knew and loved and celebrated, in the pursuit of bringing the gospel fully alive. 

A garden opened up in my time at Wesley Seminary, just up the road from Foundry, I  soaked up the water that flowed from womanist, mujerista and other liberation  theologies. But I didn’t know how to hold the tension of being a second-gen Filipino  woman learning theology in a predominantly black and white context.  God-talk facilitated and imagined by people who have lived experience of  marginalization and resilience makes all the difference to our collective liberation but I  still needed to fill in the gaps. I found myself at crossroads many times. Socialized as an  Asian American, I’m taught to not rock the boat and fit in wherever I can. To always  excel, but to do so with great humility. What are you? Where are you from? Where are  you really from? Are questions I’ve been asked all my life and it has only accelerated  since I began serving as a pastor in predominantly white denomination. Instead of  seeing my identities as a curse, however, the gifts of womanist theologies remind me I  come from a place that I can be curious about. That I come from a people. That I come  from a culture. None of these can be erased and all of them are integral to how I  experience the world, to how I understand God at work. 

Womanist theology, I have learned, is a gift of intersections. And a central character who  helps inform this theology is the witness of Hagar in Genesis. 

As Delores Williams wrote in Sisters in the Wilderness, a seminal work in womanist  theology, “there are striking similarities between Hagar’s story and the story of African  American women. Hagar’s heritage was African, from Egypt, scripture says. Hagar was 

enslaved. Black American women had emerged from a slaved heritage and still lived in  its long shadow. Hagar was brutalized by her slave owner the woman named Sarah.  The narratives of enslaved women in the United States and even narratives of modern  day workers tell of brutal or cruel treatment from the wives of slave owners and from  contemporary white female employers.”1 

Hagar continues to speak to us today. Dr. Wil Gafney comments Hagar’s story has a  little something for everyone from enslavement on this continent and elsewhere — to all  the resistance and revolutionary spirit that has ever risen up against oppressive forces.  “Hagar is the mother of Harriet Tubman and the women who freed themselves..I see  God’s return of Hagar to her servitude as the tendency of some religious communities to  side with the abuser at the expense of abused women and their children. Ultimately  Hagar escapes her slaveholders and abus