Asa Hilliard A Child Of God
Author:
Wright, Jeremiah A Jr
Eulogy for Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard III
Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from Cod our Father and from Jesus Christ our Savior.
The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death; I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; oh my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Asa was born in a climate, a context and a country controlled by white supremacy. ....TRUE From its founding fathers some would say "fondling fathers" who defined Africans as non-persons, from its original government to its current government hell-bent on leaving every Black child behind. From his birth in the cradle of dehumanization to his death in the cradle of civilization, Asa lived under a government that like Rome in Jesus' day saw itself and sees itself as an empire.
The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge,TRUE but Asa, like Jesus, refused to be defined by an oppressive government because Asa got his identity from an omnipotent God.
Asa Hilliard was a child of God. A child of God, when it comes to identity, refuses to be defined by others.
Asa Hilliard was a child of God. Asa G. Hilliard III was a child of God. Baba was a child of God. "Sub" was a child of God. Nana Baffour Amankwatia II was a child of God, and in the language of "he mama" (as the Gullah and Maroons in the low country would say), in the language of the Reverend Dr. Lois Otha Williams or her daddy Bishop Lowe, in the language of the saints of the Church of God in Christ, Asa's religion of origin, it is put this way: "If anybody asks you who I am, who I am, who I am... If anybody asks you who I am, tell 'em I'm a child of God."
Now what does a child of God look like? You can see it in the thirty-three year life of Jesus and you can see it in the seventy-three year life of Dr. Hilliard. First there is the issue of identity. A child of God gets his or her identity from God.
Jesus refused to be defined by others. He knew what other people said about Him. He knew how other people defined Him. Jesus lived His whole life under Roman oppression. The Italians ran everything in Jesus' day from the local government to the Roman Empire.
From Pontius Pilate to Caesar (pronounced "Kaiser") Augustus... from the circumstances surrounding his birth, a decree from the Roman government caused Joseph to have to leave Nazareth to go to his Bantustan in Bethlehem to get a passbook to legitimize his ethnicity... from the circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth (in a barn in a township that was under the Apartheid Roman government that said His daddy had to be in), up to and including the circumstances surrounding Jesus' death on a cross, a Roman cross, a public lynching Italian-style...
From birth to death, Jesus lived under Roman oppression, but Jesus refused to be defined by an oppressive government. Jesus got His identity from an omnipotent God....TRUE... He refused to be defined by others and Dr. Asa Hilliard also refused to be defined by others.
Some of his own people tried to limit him to what they thought he ought to be doing in Nazareth. They asked, "Ain't this the carpenter's kid?" Some of his own colleagues tried to track him for failure.
His disciple, Nathaniel, just heard where Jesus came from: Nazareth? (The Red Light District in Houston? The projects in Denver? Manual Training High School for the Colored?) and Nathaniel said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" That was Nathaniel's question. Trying to limit the Lord.
His enemies had their opinions about Him. The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans. His enemies had their opinions about Him. Pon-ti-us Pi-la-te. Y'all call him "Pontius Pilate." In Italiano, Pontius Pilate looked at the Palestinians as peasants. His enemies had their opinions about Him. His Jewish enemies! Yup, Jesus had enemies among His own people. .true OMG, this is worse than the Neocon crybaby who was whining about some spraypaint on army recruiting offices. So Wright called the cruel and oppressive Romans, "garlic noses". Big fucking deal. It's the romans. It was 2000 years ago. They were cruel to Jesus, and most christians would agree that Jesus roman oppressors were worthy of insult[/b]
Why do people under oppression always seem to turn on each other rather than turning to each other? [/b]Could a part of it be the way they are taught to hate themselves and hate each other? What Reuben Fuerstein the Jew and Asa Hilliard the African call "socially mediated learning"
What Carter G. Woodson called the Miseducation of Africans in America, what Baffour Amankwatia called the making of a sheep dog? Not because of benign neglect but because of malignant intent. Does being fed a constant diet of self-hatred cause people under oppression to turn on each other? Jesus had folk who looked just like he looked. These were not Italians. These were Palestinians who were His enemies.
Those of us in the Christian church, when we read the sacred texts, we really get ticked, because we find out that one of the hardest pills to swallow is the fact that most of Jesus' staunchest enemies were "church folk." Not the "Bros" who hung out in the brothels and the bars, and the Jerusalem taverns, but the saints who hung out in the Synagogue and the sacred precincts of the Jerusalem temple! Amen, Pastor Wright. Jesus was more comfortable hangin out with prosititues, criminals, and the poor. Because he knew who the hypocrites were
Jesus' enemies tried to limit Him by what they said about Him and what they thought about Him, but Jesus' identity was intact because He knew He was a child of God and He refused to be limited by what the world said about Him or thought about Him.
And Asa? Asa was just like Jesus-"a sacred text," Wade Nobles says-"to be exegeted." Asa refused to be limited by what the world said about him or thought about him. Asa refused to be limited by other folks' low expectations of him.
