The Freedom Tree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvBNFNqeLos

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I grew up in Missouri City, Texas—a suburb southwest of Houston. A few years ago, the local government hired a public relations firm to design a new slogan and logo for the city. They settled on "The 'Show-Me' City."

Like many suburban teenagers before gaining a driver's license, my sense of mobility relied entirely on a bicycle. I rode to parks, across subdivisions to friends' houses, and to the mall eight miles away. That bicycle represented freedom—a fundamental human desire. Without freedom, we are unable to live fully as the beings God created us to be.

That sense of childhood freedom is intertwined with a specific tree I passed regularly on my way to school: a magnificent, ancient live oak known as the "Freedom Tree."

The History of General Order No. 3

Arborists estimate that the Freedom Tree is well over two hundred years old. It stood as a prominent landmark in 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger and his troops—many of whom were Black Union soldiers—arrived at the port of Galveston, Texas.

On June 19, 1865, General Granger issued General Order No. 3, officially announcing and enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. The order declared that all enslaved people were free, establishing an absolute equality of personal and property rights between formerly enslaved individuals and those who had held them in bondage.

In the Gulf Coast region of Texas, the agricultural economy depended heavily on rice and sugar cane—crops that demanded intense, grueling labor in flooded fields. Neighboring Sugar Land, Texas, became home to the Imperial Sugar Company, built on this history. When General Order No. 3 was issued, many plantation owners attempted to ignore the decree to maintain their forced labor force.

In response, General Granger and his troops traveled plantation by plantation to enforce the order. Approximately fifty miles inland, at the Palmer Plantation, Granger’s troops gathered the enslaved workers beneath the wide canopy of that ancient live oak tree and read General Order No. 3 aloud, enforcing their freedom.

Today, that live oak still stands on Misty Hollow Drive in Missouri City. Every year on June 19th, descendants of those who were enslaved at the Palmer Plantation gather beneath its branches to commemorate the moment their ancestors received news of their liberation.

Distortion and Exegesis: The Story of Hagar

As our nation observes seasons of reflection surrounding national independence, we are reminded that the promises of dignity and equality have historically coexisted alongside enslavement, dispossession, and systemic exclusion. Freedom has often been won across generations through struggle.

Scripture itself has at times been weaponized to defend systems of oppression. In Genesis 21, Sarah demands that Abraham cast out Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness. When Abraham hesitates, God instructs him to comply with Sarah's demand.

In antebellum America, pro-slavery theologians distorted this passage to construct a biblical justification for race-based chattel slavery and the forced separation of families. To reconcile their Christian identity with slaveholding, they mapped a racial framework onto Abraham’s household.

Pro-slavery writers linked Hagar’s Egyptian heritage to the "Table of Nations" in Genesis 10 and expanded the "Curse of Canaan" in Genesis 9 to encompass all descendants of Ham. By identifying Hagar as carrying a ancestral lineage of servitude, apologists framed Sarah’s casting out of Hagar not as a domestic conflict, but as the execution of a divine racial hierarchy.

During the nineteenth century, theories of scientific ethnology created a contradictory double standard: white supremacists claimed the historical achievements of ancient Egypt for "whiteness," while simultaneously racializing Hagar as a Black woman in theological texts to validate the social dynamic of white mistresses holding absolute authority over enslaved women.

Wilderness, Survival, and Resistance

However, pro-slavery apologists did not have the final word on scripture. Enslaved people working the fields read these same biblical narratives through a very different lens. They did not see a God who sanctioned their bondage; they recognized a God who saw their suffering.

Womanist theologian Delores S. Williams, in her landmark work Sisters in the Wilderness, reexamined Hagar's story from the perspective of the rejected and marginalized. Hagar experienced the complete loss of protection, family, and human dignity when driven into the Beersheba wilderness with only a skin of water.

When the water was exhausted, Hagar placed her child beneath the shade of a bush and sat a bowshot away, weeping because she could not bear to watch him die. In that moment of desperation, God heard the cry of the child and spoke to Hagar.

Williams observes that God did not send a dramatic chariot to remove Hagar from the desert, nor did God immediately overturn the legal codes of the ancient Near East. Instead, God opened Hagar’s eyes to see a well of water already present in the dust.

For those enduring chattel slavery, segregation, and systemic injustice, God’s grace is not always an immediate, structural Exodus. Often, God provides the inner stamina, spiritual authority, and resourcefulness needed to discover wells of sustenance in barren places—enabling the oppressed to survive, preserve life, and build a future on the margins of a hostile world. In this tradition, survival itself is a defiant act of resistance.

The Cost of Discipleship

This act of resistance aligns with the warnings of Jesus in Matthew 10. Jesus tells His disciples that a servant is not above the master, warning them that the structures of worldly power will often reject truth, marginalize the vulnerable, and penalize those who challenge systemic injustice.

Yet alongside this warning, Jesus echoes the promise given to Hagar: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul." Systems of tyranny may exercise physical control, but human dignity belongs ultimately to God.

In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul addresses the ethical imperative of faith, asking: "Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means!" To be baptized into Christ means dying to structural sin. We cannot claim divine grace while maintaining systems of exclusion and exploitation. Walking in newness of life requires leaving comfortable spaces to stand in solidarity with those searching for wells of life in the wilderness.

The Cross and the Freedom Tree

Theologian James H. Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, highlighted a profound paradox in American religious history. For generations, white Christians sang hymns about the cross of Christ while ignoring the extrajudicial violence committed against Black Americans on trees outside their church doors.

Cone noted that the Roman cross and the lynching tree shared a structural function: both were instruments of public terror used by imperial powers to break those deemed rebels, outsiders, or subversives.

Yet in the incarnation and crucifixion, God entered human history in Jesus Christ, choosing solidarity with the rejected and marginalized. Christ bore the physical and social reality of suffering, hanging on a tree at the execution site outside the city walls.

By dying on the cross, Christ stood in absolute solidarity with Hagar weeping in the desert, with enslaved human beings on auction blocks, and with all who are crushed by systemic injustice. Because God endured the cross, the ultimate tool of imperial terror was transformed.

The cross became the true Freedom Tree for humanity—a tree whose roots extend into the reality of human suffering, whose trunk stands against structural sin, and whose leaves offer healing to the nations.

Set free from systems of sin and fear, we are called to leave our places of comfort, drink deeply from the wells of God's grace, and gather beneath the liberating shade of the cross.

Amen.