Feb 6 2019 Galatians 4: 21-31

‘Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.’

Sometimes something comes up in a reading that I just don’t like. This is one of them. This is Paul telling the people of Galatia that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave (Ismael) and one by a free woman (Isaac). The original story in Genesis is pretty crummy, where Abraham sends Hagar the slave away, despite fathering a child at the suggestion of his previously barren wife. Then she has a baby too, and it becomes clear that the previous idea of a child from the slave wasn’t such a good idea, so Abraham sends them away. 

Now Paul is telling Christians that this is good. We are free children of Abraham’s free child. We are not slave children of Abraham’s slave child. He likens the free child’s descendants to the Jerusalem above, and the descendants of the slave child to the current world Jerusalem. 

It all sounds pretty judgmental, harsh, exclusionary. And in fact, it has been used to defend Christianity as the true religion, stemming from the lineage of Isaac (free son), as compared to the Muslim connection to Ishmael (slave son). In fact, Islam, Judaism and Christianity all consider themselves to be children of Abraham.
But in this passage in Galatians, Paul is making the case that Christianity is freer and worthier than the descendants of Ishmael. I don’t know what that meant to the people of Galatia two thousand years ago but modern-day exclusionists use it to defend the ‘one true religion’. But if we’re all descendants of Abraham, we’re all children of the same God. 

And if you look at the psalm and Gospel reading, it makes no sense to use this text to defend putting people out. Psalm 72 is all about God listening to and helping needy, delivering the poor and crushing the oppressor. In the Gospel, Jesus heals the blind man. And going to leaders of my faith tradition, our current presiding bishop Michael Curry has a refrain, that if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God. 

Yes there are horrible snippets in the Bible, that if taken out of context look to be about exclusion, separateness, human judgment. And I’m no biblical scholar so I can’t explain what it meant then. I don’t know what pressures Paul was up against when he wrote those words. But given my faith in the God of Love, it cannot mean those things today. Or it should not be used to exclude, separate, discriminate, prioritize, judge. There’s too much of what Jesus says that is about inclusion, togetherness, justice, and nonjudgment. That beats everything.