June 27, 2020
Caldwell Presbyterian Church
Rev. John Cleghorn
Text: Genesis 16:1-16
Well, we are one step closer to part of our dream.
On Thursday and Friday, the demolition crew of D.H. Griffin made remarkably quick work of bringing down our old but Belk Hall. God willing, in about a year from now, we have a new place for us and our city to gather – a place to grow in our faith, to seek understanding, through meals, fun and fellowship, through presentations and speakers and, yes, to the hard but vital conversations that are sometimes needed as we grow together.
Some of you have seen the photos and videos I shared online. Others came over to take a look after the dust had settled. How different things look all of a sudden.
As someone who is optically challenged, I can appreciate what a new prescription from the eye doctor does. Every few years or so, it’s time for me to update my glasses, again. Those of you who wear glasses or contacts know the experience. When we first put on that new set, we can see things we didn’t see. Things we didn’t know we were missing. Things that were there all along – it’s just that we didn’t see them.
So it is in our nation, at least that is what we fervently pray. We as a national people appear to be ready to act on certain truths that have lived too long right under our noses. I’m talking about dismantling racism and the white supremacy and privilege that upheld it for 400 years.
But God also calls us to see things anew in scripture. As Reformed people, we believe God gave us a living word, not a static one. Scripture can teach us something new each time we look at it. God and the Holy Spirit move and breathe throughout these old stories and prophecies. But we’ve got to be willing, ready and able to see anew.
With that in mind, I thought we might take a look at the story of God’s servant Hagar in the book of Genesis. It’s about a tortuous relationship between three people. Abram, whom God had chosen to make a great nation. His wife, Sarai, advanced in age and mighty perplexed about her role God’s plan. And, Hagar, whose name means “foreign thing” or “sojourner,” who was clearly in servitude under Abram and Sarai.
Sarai grew frustrated that she could not bear Abram children. We can’t really know what was going through her mind. But the story is clear. She gave Hagar, the maidservant, to Abram to bear them a child. Then, when Hagar became pregnant, Sarai grew to despise her out of sheer jealousy.
But the Lord saw Hagar in her desperation and spoke to her. God reassured Hagar of her divine protection and how God would do amazing things through her. Hagar returned to Sarai and Abram, which took a lot on her part to say the least. Hagar bore Abram a son and remained with Sarai and Abram. Then the story goes on, following God’s partnership with Abram, whom God renamed Abraham, who is recognized as a patriarch in three great world religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Now you might see right away how the church, or at least some part of it, has read this story for generations. In some traditions, and particularly the white church, it’s a story about Abraham, the great father of three religions, whose saga makes up a large part of the book of Genesis. Yes, Sarai and Hagar play secondary roles in that reading. The male-dominated church has tended to focus everything on Abram. In that reading, Hagar, who is the real hero of the story, may not even get billing as a co-star.
But what if we use a different pair of lenses? A vitally important perspective that has emerged in just the last few decades is womanist theology. Some of you may know the local clergy couple, the Reverends Jerry and Veronica Cannon. Jerry leads C.N. Jenkins Presbyterian, one of the nation’s strongest black Presbyterian Churches. Veronica, who was a classmate of mine in seminary, has led a range of churches, both black and white, over the last decade.
But it is Jerry’s sister, the late Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, who is the most noted in the family. A native of Kannapolis up the road, she was the first African-American woman to be ordained in our denomination. That was in 1974. Over her career as a pastor and scholar, she advanced womanist theology in important ways. Upon her death, Union Presbyterian Seminary formed in her name the Center for Womanist Leadership. And we can congratulate our own Gail Henderson-Belsito for being selected as a member of its first board of advisors.
What, then, is womanist theology? It takes its name from the work of the great Black author Alice Walker. It embraces the mattering of Black women – and it does so with a particular audacity and courage. As Black women’s feminism, it privileges the intersection of color and gender. It doesn’t just read scripture passively. It questions the text. Womanism probes for what scripture can tell us about “power, authority, voice, agency, hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion.” [i] Scholar Wilda Gafney notes that womanism takes a particular angle on life but is rooted in love and is “committed to the wholeness and the flourishing of the entire community.”[ii]
What a fresh and welcomed lens, especially in light of the fact that there are 111 named female characters in just the Old Testament. Scripture cries out to be read with them in mind, not all the male figures and their perspectives. As important, as these days hammer home, our faith compels us to read scripture in solidarity with those of African-descent. For that is how we can hasten healing, justice and reconciliation.
What, then, might womanist theology say about Hagar?
We can start by highlighting that Hagar is near or at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to power. She is female, a foreigner and enslaved. Her one source of power is that she is fertile. Even then, she has no control over her body. She is in effect a sex slave to the affluent and prominent couple, Abram and Sarai.
As for Sarai, in forcing Hagar to lay with Abram, she perpetuated the norm of her day that gave men almost all the power. Then she used her own power and privilege as she jealously abused Hagar for doing exactly what she was ordered to do, all with Abram’s blessing.
Still, with courage and audacity, Hagar liberated herself, leaving the abusive household with nothing but her trust in God and her unborn child. How this echoes last century’s Great Migration, when so many Black folk fled the Jim Crow South to escape its oppression and abuse. How it echoes the story of so many women who must escape other kinds of abusive relationships.
In the desert, with nowhere to go, no power or social capital, no family or support, Hagar found herself by a well, seeking water, perhaps the only lifeforce available to her. Most of us could never imagine how alone and desperate she felt.
But God. But God, as Gail taught us to say. But God … and God came to her and promised to never leave her. God said to her, “Perhaps no one else sees you, but I see you. I have never taken my eye off you.”
Aren’t those words we all long to hear?
Then Hagar does something interesting, something womanist, you might say, something audacious, something no other woman or man for that matter does in all of scripture. She gives God a name.
El Ro’i (El ROY-ee), which means God of seeing. More specifically, Hagar named God, “I have seen the one who sees me.” And that experience surpasses that of any other character in scripture. Thanks be to God and how God can continually open our eyes to new truths in old stories.
* * *
And how is our vision these days?
How well do we see? How honestly do we seek to be seen by God and others?
When we tear down old buildings that open up land, new possibility and new perspectives on this old campus; when we reexamine our personal fitness for doing Mission and Justice work, as with the audit sessions Elder Helen Hull is leading; when we hold all of our Mission and Justice commitments up to the light to ensure they are advancing justice and not just perpetuating charity; when we march in the streets or pray at home for those who do; when we welcome the stranger and share radically what we have; when we try new lenses for reading scripture from the margins: are these right responses to the God who sees us?
Our work together is offered in the prayer that all of these and more are just and loving praise offerings to the God who seeks justice more than just rote worship. And that quest for what God wants is ongoing, never ending.
For the past few weeks, I have had something laying heavy on my heart and mind. As America seems to be trying to become something new, the country is putting away the monuments to the confederacy and its champions that have long been a thorn deep in the side of our Black siblings.
That conversation does not exclude us at the corner of Park and Fifth. It was there, at the height of Jim Crow days, when whites were doing all they could to rewrite history, intimidate Blacks and save the lost cause, that a fortune fell here, into the laps of the members of what was then called John Knox Presbyterian Church.
A childless, widow with no other heirs left a fortune to the young, little church. That fortune was made by the Caldwell family on an ante-bellum plantation 15 miles north on the Catawba River.
The members of John Knox Presbyterian Church received that fortune and renamed their church Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian. A church named to memorialize those who owned and enslaved other human beings, beloved dark-skinned children of God kidnapped from their homeland and forced to spill their blood, sweat, tears and lives to make a fortune for the Caldwell family.
Immediately after the civil war ended, we also know that the freed slaves were given land to start their own church. They did so with the help of northern Presbyterians, and it actually was the first to be named Caldwell Presbyterian Church. So the first Caldwell Presbyterian Church in Charlotte was a congregation of the formerly enslaved. Though it cannot be denied that the power of their former owner, who probably gave land for the church, surely influenced their choice of the name.
Many of us have known this complicated, tortuous truth for six or seven years now. We have been disturbed by it and lived uncomfortably with it. We have not finished determining what to do about it.
I believe that time is now. As a church that strives toward being anti-racist, as a church that seeks to follow God’s invitation by welcoming all, as a church that will literally become home to people of color in the next two years, as a church that God saved from extinction to do extraordinary things … it is time, perhaps it is past time, for truth and reconciliation. Truth, full truth, about what our name stands for, and reconciliation with whether we should hold on to it. Either way, I am sure God can bless us in this conversation.
So I humbly and respectfully ask the session, your elected leaders, to form a commission of members, black and white, to examine what we, what you as the congregation, should do about the blood-stained name that is carved into stone above the front doors to our church.
Almost a century ago, a past congregation changed the name of our church, aligning it with white supremacy and slavery. That church all but died, but for God. It’s time, friends. It’s time we took our own hard look at our identity. Names are meant to be holy and sacred things. They mark how we are known, most important, by God Almighty.
Hagar’s name for God was “the God who sees me.” Let us remember who we are and whose we are. Let us seek God’s guidance for how we say that to our city and the world. Amen
[i] Womanist Midrash, Wilda Gafney, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville. p. 7.
[ii] Ibid