At Columbia Theological Seminary’s Chapel Service Sponsored by African
Heritage Student Association
December 6, 2022
Family and community foundations; heritage; identify, self-determinization, naming ourselves; generosity, cooperation, cooperative economics; investing in the present, in ourselves, and in future generations; imagination and creativity; and generational healing, and hope––when I hear these words and phrases, I think of legacy. The scripture named in the Call to Worship is Hebrews 11:6––most of us know it by heart–– “without faith it is impossible to please God, for faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen.” The ancestors catalogued in Hebrews 11 left us legacies—nobody in the list was
perfect, some were down-right troubling: Abraham, in my view, pimped out his wife to Pharoah; ill-tempered Moses murdered a man; Abraham and Sarah were oppressive enslavers/slaveowners; and the author of the faith-list could not let us
forget Rahab’s former life of prostitution. Aspects of the foundational legacies from which we create our own legacy often include generational trauma. Yet, we hold the hope and promise of divine presence and God-given power to be disrupters. I have reached an age of chronological maturity that I am receiving and deleting at least a phone message a day from some assisted living agency. This
daily annoyance cause me to think more about legacy. What am I leaving my family and the world? I wish I had thought about it much earlier in life.
My mother, Flora Ophelia Carson Smith, left her children much more than she had; the hill she climbed was steeper and the racial, gendered, and socio-economic challenges daunting. Her mother died when she was a small child. She negotiated half of her life before civil rights and before Brown v. Board of Education. My mother imagined me earning a PhD long before I could. She modeled
unconditional love of all human beings. I am her living legacy and a disrupter. My therapist identified me as a “poverty disrupter.” My mother and her generation of Black people were disrupters too: They built and attended Black schools that offered excellent education in the era of racial segregation and Jim Crow. I am an extension of my mother and more. Alice Walker wrote “our mothers and grandmothers [and other others] have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see, or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 241).
I think of the legacy of another mother, womanist theologian Dr.Delores Williams and her book Sisters in the Wilderness. She joined the ancestors on November 18, 2022. I read Sisters in the Wilderness in seminary, at Howard University School of Divinity. Williams, like me, was once a Seventh-day Adventist. Later she joined the Presbyterian Church. Sisters in the Wilderness was disruptive and radical in the centering of Black women’s surrogacy as a framework for reading Hagar’s story. Hagar, the enslaved girl of Sarai and Abram, met and named God in the wilderness. In her violated womb she carried the promise of God. Williams’ words shook my core: God is not always a liberator God, she boldly etched in black and white to be seen, again and again. God is a God of survival and quality of life. I, we as Black people, needed to say God is always a liberator. Williams told a hard truth. It was a historical and experiential truth that we, our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents knew, but did not, could not say out loud. Williams asked, “What is God’s word about survival and quality of life formation for oppressed and quasi-free people struggling to build community in the wilderness?” 1 “Can there be salvific power for Black women in Christian images of oppression (Jesus on the cross) meant to teach something about redemption?”
”How can oppressed people develop a positive and productive quality of life in a situation where the resources for doing so are not visible?” (emphasis mine). Sometimes God liberates, and sometimes God is with us helping us survive and achieve a quality of life, to identify resources, and survival and flourishing strategies. God is with us! Yahweh made this promise repeatedly in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible long before Matthew wrote his Gospel. God is with us! But God does not replace our efforts! God is with us! God sees, comforts, acknowledges, and ministers to our needs, but never replaces our agency. Williams wrote “Not only God, but also the community must work on behalf of its survival and the formation of its own quality of life.” God responds to “Hagar and her child in terms of survival strategies.” The Kwanzaa principles offer strategies for survival, quality of life, and thriving. They remind us that we must be strategic and take concrete action to achieve unmitigated freedom and quality of life.
God’s first strategy for Hagar was for her to return and utilize the oppressor’s recourses—otherwise she will die in the wilderness. Depend on God when absolutely no other provision is visible (do what you can and trust God to do the rest). “We must, like Hagar, obtain through our God-given faith new vision to see survival and quality-of-life resources where we have seen none before” (emphasis mine). This is our legacy to re-vision, imagine anew, to disrupt, and to be strategic in the struggle for justice, freedom, and quality of life for ourselves, our communities, and humanity. Asé, Asé, Asé.
1 I am quoting from the Kindle version of Sisters in the Wilderness.