God Calls Those on the Margins
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
She was an Egyptian slave in a foreign land away from her people and seemingly without anyone’s protection. But God knew Hagar and God called on her to be a part of [God’s] plan.
—Marjorie A. White, The Five Books of Moses
Womanist theologian Delores Williams (1937–2022) connects the call Hagar experienced in the wilderness to the experiences of African American women.
Although many themes in African-American women’s history correspond with many themes in Hagar’s story in the Bible, nothing links the two women together more securely than their religious experiences in the wilderness [see Genesis 21]…. Many African-American slave women have left behind autobiographies telling how they would slip away to the wilderness or to “the hay-stack where the presence of the Lord overshadowed” them. [1] Some of them governed their lives according to their mothers’ counsel that they would have “nobody in the wide world to look to but God” [2]—as Hagar in the final stages of her story had only God to look to….
For many black Christian women today, “wilderness” or “wilderness-experience” is a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her make a way out of what she thought was no way.
Williams points to God’s support for Hagar as an ongoing source of inspiration and courage:
In the biblical story Hagar’s wilderness experience happened in a desolate and lonely wilderness where she—pregnant, fleeing from the brutality of her slave owner, Sarai, and without protection—had religious experiences that helped her and her child survive when survival seemed doomed. For both Hagar and the African-American women, the wilderness experience meant standing utterly alone, in the midst of serious trouble, with only God’s support to rely upon.
As the result of these hard-time experiences and the encounters with God, Hagar and many African-American women manifested a risk-taking faith. Though she obeyed God’s mandate for her life, Hagar dared to give a name to the God she met in the wilderness. In a sense, this God is her God, and possibly not the God of her slave holders Abram and Sarai. No other person in the Bible names God. Many African-American women (slave and free) have taken serious risks in the black community’s liberation struggle. For example, in the midst of the violence and brutality that accompanied slavery in America, Harriet Tubman, with a price on her head, dared to liberate over three hundred slaves. She served as a spy and a general in the Civil War. She is said to have relied solely upon God for help and strength; she had no one else to look to. Thus we can speak of Hagar and many African-American women as sisters in the wilderness struggling for life, and by the help of their God coming to terms with situations that have destructive potential
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Heavenly Fire – Bradley Jersak
Evolving Imagery in Cultural and Biblical Context
Almost a decade ago, I came across the citation from St Athanasius (via creativeorthodox.com) that beautifully compares the resurrection of Christ to a fire that completely consumes death as if it were dry straw. The comparison reminded me of the range and frequent use of fire as imagery associated with the person or acts of God. A brief survey serves as a healthy meditation, not only on the various comparisons, but also how these evolve with our illumination by the Spirit, who is also linked with fire at times.
Ancient peoples would have experienced fire as destruction before they ever learned to employ it for light or heat, and when fire would fall from heaven as lightning or burst from the earth via volcanoes. Our forefathers connected the dots between destructive fire and the person and wrath of God. They assumed the fire that devours was sent by God as punishment, as we see in biblical stories like the end of Sodom and Gomorrah. When that fire is used against one’s enemies, it could serve as a powerful vindication that God is on ‘our side’ — as in 1 Kings 18 in Elisha’s showdown with the prophets of Baal or 2 Kings 1 when he calls for fire to kill Ahaziah’s troops.
But fire was not only seen as destructive. We have other passages where fire is employed for its cleansing properties. Malachi regards the judgements of God as a gold refiner’s furnace, purging the gold or silver of ‘dross’ or impurities. Similarly, Paul in 1 Cor. 3 describes the fire of God consuming all that is combustible in us … poor motives and faulty agendas, for example, as if they were wood, hay and stubble. But again, this is only so the gold, silver and precious stones of our true selves will shine brightly through the old tarnish. Hebrews 12 says that God himself IS this consuming fire. So in the end, the destructive fire is to be welcomed, even if seen as a ‘trial by fire.’
A third sense of fire is associated with the person and work of the Holy Spirit. We hear from John the Baptist that Christ will baptize with the Spirit and with fire, and while I suspect John was thinking of judgement, the New Testament sees that promise fulfilled with the outpouring of the Spirit in tongues of fire on Pentecost. This divine fire not only cleanses but empowers, and gives those who receive it the properties of fire (symbolically light and heat), which is to say, the Spirit inhabits us with glory, transfiguring us from glory to glory, so that we can stand in that glory which is the passionate love of Christ himself.
Some of the early church fathers used the image of a sword being forged in the intense heat that makes for the highest quality steel. Placed in the flames, it’s not that the steel would become other than steel, but while in the flames, it would bear the heat and glow with the light of the fire itself. So it is, they said, with those forged in the fire of God’s Spirit. Thus, the fire was not destructive, but rather instructive and constructive of our participation in the divine nature.
There are many ‘what about this questions’ that attend divine fire analogies. What about those parables of Jesus where unfruitful branches are cut off and thrown into the fire? Or when the wheat and tares are separated by angels and the weeds thrown into the fire. Rather than skirting the force of these texts too quickly, we need to undergo their message — their fire. Such parables remind us of the same point Lewis makes by using lion imagery for Christ. God is ‘good’ but he’s hardly ‘safe,’ much less ‘tame,’ if by that we imagine we can domesticate God!
But in saying this, let us also assert the first point as most important. God is good. God is love. And thus, for all its other properties, the Divine Fire is the unquenchable Flame of Love (also pictured by the Sun) — the One who radiates the Light and Warmth of Love to those coming in from the cold, dark night of winter.
