Sitting with Hagar, Hope, and Belief w/Trey Ferguson
Black Flourishing and Black Futures Series
Weeks ago I asked some wonderful friends to collaborate with me in dreaming of a Black future of flourishing.
and were at the top of my list because of how much I enjoy them personally and artistically. In collaborating, I asked them to bring a poem, an essay, whatever that means something to them and towards Black flourishing. Today’s post by Trey revolves around Hagar. For those who know me, they know how much the person of Hagar has meant to my faith, to understanding my Blackness, understanding the plight of Black women, and more. I have devoted years of my life in prayer, writing, and scholarship to understanding Hagar and her son Ishmael. In fact, here is a podcast I did with a friend Alicia Crosby on Hagar:With all of that said,
brings us a reflection worth sitting with:“You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless. Matthew 5:13 (NLT)
We have been believers. Not primarily because it’s been en vogue nor just because it was foisted upon our ancestors by the people who endeavored to keep them in bondage, but because of what we’ve seen.
The Bible tells the story of an enslaved African woman made known to us as Hagar. Some commentators and biblical scholars suggest that Hagar does not register as a proper name so much as it serves as a descriptor. ha-gar, meaning “the stranger” or something of the sort.
I do not presume to argue that Hagar was the phenotypical prototype of what we would currently recognize as a Black woman; however, it is difficult to miss some parallels between her story in Genesis 16 & 21 and the story of Black women (and Black people) in these United States.
Like Hagar, Black people have come to be known by names and descriptors they may not have originally chosen for themselves.
Like Hagar, Black people have been used as vehicles for nation building.
Like Hagar, Black people have largely been pushed to the margins of the narrative, where many people would be perfectly fine with only sprinkling us in to add context to the less than stellar parts of our divinely ordered histories.
And like Hagar, Black people have come to know the Creator apart from those who presumed to be the very spokespeople of that very creator even as they dehumanized us.
Whereas Abram and Sarai knew of a God of promises and grand plans, Hagar encountered and came to know the God who saw her mistreatment and issued those promises and grand plans as the solution to her plight. The God that Hagar encountered during her flight into the wilderness is the same God who heard Abel’s blood crying from the soil. The God that Hagar met fleeing from the wrath of her oppressors was the same God that, having heard the cries of the Hebrews in Hagar’s homeland of Egypt, met Moses in a burning bush and commissioned him in the work of liberation.
Hagar knew the God Who Sees Us.
And it is in this God that we have come to believe.
It was the God Who Sees Us who led Richard Allen and Absalom Jones out of the church that refused to acknowledge their full humanity and into founding the first independent denomination by and for Black people.
It was the God Who Sees Us that led Bishop Henry McNeal Turner to insist that “God is a Negro.”
It was the God Who Sees Us that led Frederick Douglas to recognize the wide gulf between the “Christianity of Christ” and the “Christianity of this land.”
It was the God Who Sees Us that led Ida B. Wells to take bold stances against the horrors of lynching.
It was the God Who Sees Us that moved the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to “redeem the soul of America.”
We have believed in the God Who Sees Us.
But what do we do when the God that we speak of no longer sees us?
What do we do when the God we call on no longer hears the blood crying from the soil?
What of a God who is no longer distressed by the cries of a people in anguish?
What do we do when the God we look to no longer sees us?
What can we make of a faith that has lost its flavor?
A lot has been made about the “exodus” from the pews. Plenty of research has gone into why the last three generations have seen declining church attendance.
I’m beginning to suspect that the simplest explanation is the one Jesus offered in his sermon on the mount: salt with no flavor gets tossed out and trampled. But at the end of the day? Salt does not go out of style.
We see a pattern repeated throughout the history of Christianity. As the powerful become more churched, the Church becomes less Christlike. We saw it happen in Rome, where the followers of a folk preacher from the shores of Galilee became the chaplains of an empire in less than four centuries. We saw it happen in the Reformation, where theologians who sought to emphasize the “priesthood of believers” became the fathers of new traditions aligned with new states. We saw it happen in the United States, where the descendants of those who sought religious liberty in a “new world” used their old religion to put more people in bondage.
And we are in jeopardy of seeing it happen again, as the descendants of those who followed the God Who Sees Us into prophetically calling America to account for her many sins against humanity begin to adapt a complicity with the status quo.
Some of the same churches we started when white Christians insisted that Black people held a divinely ordained rank of inferiority are now using the same passages and tactics employed to justify their bondage in order to justify the subjugation of women. Just as many Christians before us used the fear of the interracial marriages they viewed as illegitimate to justify their stances on segregation, many of us have used the legalization of same-sex unions to justify the homophobia we’ve inherited. We are in jeopardy of becoming as indifferent to the plight of immigrants as many Christians before us were to the plight of our ancestors.
Is the salt losing its flavor?
This is not an exercise in hopelessness. I remain as hopeful as ever in the God Who Sees Us.
This is an invitation to reclaim our heritage. This is a callback to the faith of our forebears in order to leave an inheritance to our descendents. This is an homage to Drs. James Cone and Dolores Williams so that our children will know they are free to reinterpret what we hand to them. This is a tribute to Jarena Lee and Francis Grimké so that our grandkids know that they are not limited by the perception of others. This is in honor of those who followed God out of bondage in the furnace of an empire in order to forge a new identity. This is the reanimation of the encounter Hagar had in the wilderness with God Who Sees Us.
Because of God Who Sees Us, we have been believers in the value and dignity of human beings.
Because of God Who Sees Us, we have been believers in the power of love over injustice.
Because of God Who Sees Us, we have been believers in righteous resistance.
Because of God Who Sees Us, we have been believers in God’s solidarity with the people facing the most pressure from the top.
In remembering the flavor of our faith, we can build better tomorrows.
When careless cooking renders God’s good creation bitter, it is the flavor of our faith that makes it wholesome.
*Talk to us in the comments and please go and get Trey’s new book here.
I love that you see the reason for church decline as the church loosing its saltiness as Jesus warned. Definitely something to ponder. Thank you for a thoughtfully written reflection!!!
This was fire. It was like a callback to the Hebrews hall of faith.