Читать книгу Preaching Black Lives (Matter) - Gayle Fisher-Stewart - Страница 17
ОглавлениеACTS 16:25–26; ISAIAH 60:20–23
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.
Sometimes opportunities just show up and I had the privilege of being part of a pilgrimage organized by the Washington, DC, chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians to civil rights sites in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama. Those who participated were called “Ambassadors of Healing.”
While I had been to some of these sites over the years, there were new museums and memorials that I wanted to visit. Also, going with UBE presented a wonderful opportunity to be among Episcopalians and our friends; it suggested a spiritually centered trip.
One of the new museums we visited was the Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The museum was founded by the Equal Justice Initiative or EJI. It is designed to show how the legacy of slavery led to lynching, which led to Jim Crow, which led to today’s mass incarceration of people of color.
At the entrance of the museum, we saw videos and maps teaching about the domestic slave trade. In 1808, the “importation of slaves” was outlawed. Yet slavery still existed in the United States. As had been happening for many years, children born of mothers who were enslaved were also enslaved. Virginia became the place that provided the most enslaved people from their Commonwealth to the “deep or lower south.” Virginia had the largest domestic slave trade.
The domestic slave trade is often known as the Second Middle Passage, the first one being the trip from the African continent to the United States. This Second Middle Passage was just as brutal. People brought to Montgomery sometimes marched on foot for hundreds of miles and were kept in pens, sometimes with the animals, as they awaited being sold at auction. The Legacy Museum recreates these pens and, using holographic imagery, brings the experience of those enslaved to life.
In one pen, a young boy and girl appear, continually asking for their mother from whom they had been separated. In another pen, people appear and continually sing. Even as we looked and listened to the stories in the other cells, you continually heard the singing from the first one. Those songs and the singing, not only during that time but throughout the civil rights movement and even into today, were important and powerful.
Our group was fortunate to have tour guides at many of the sites who had participated in the various movements—some as young as eleven years old and others in their early or late teens. Now in their seventies and eighties, they provided a firsthand account of marching so their parents could vote, or not using buses for over a year so they could ride anywhere on the bus, or demanding equal access to all public facilities. They provided a firsthand account to the violence such seemingly simple requests elicited, including the deaths of their friends and loved ones. We were told this movement was a spiritual movement with political and economic consequences. It was led from the churches, not from the political parties or businesses. The movement was grounded in God’s justice and in God’s love.
In our reading from Acts, we hear a story of a young girl who was enslaved to two men; they made a lot of money because of her ability to see into the future. The two men did not see her as a human being. Like slave holders and oppressors throughout the ages, they only saw the money they could make by exploiting her talent.
Paul and Silas had been staying with Lydia in the city of Philippi. This young, enslaved woman followed them around, proclaiming that Paul and Silas were bound to God and indeed offered salvation. After a number of days, Paul was able to get the foretelling to stop. We are told that the woman was no longer able to tell of future events. The two men who had enslaved her were not concerned about her at all and were furious with Paul and Silas. They had Paul and Silas horribly beaten and thrown into jail.
And what did Paul and Silas do? They did what freedom fighters and Christians have done across time: they sang. On our pilgrimage we, too, sang—“O Freedom,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”
Paul and Silas sang. They prayed and they sang. Yes, they were caught in a political system, accused of violating the laws of the community. They were jailed by the political authorities of the city. They had challenged the economic system of the time that said it was right for two men to make money from the talent of another person, that it was perfectly right to enslave someone for personal economic gain.
Yet, Paul and Silas knew that all of this aberrant political and economic behavior, laws, and societal norms were a corruption of the spirit, a corruption of the soul. That’s what Jesus Christ had taught them. Jesus Christ had taught them a way to live that fed their souls, that created communities where all could be soul-fed. They knew going against the corruption of the world could get them killed, yet the liberation they felt from living in the way Jesus taught was so powerful, death did not scare them; death had lost its sting.
And that’s why the pilgrimage to these sites in Alabama was so powerful, especially being able to meet people who lived the movement. The civil rights movement was and is a spiritual movement, with political and economic consequences.
We are required by our love for Jesus Christ, who shed his blood for us, to work for and live in a world where all are free and souls are fed. The prophet Isaiah says it this way in chapter 65:20–23:
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
At the one end of the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, close to where the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights began, there is a park commemorating the march. One of the monuments is to Representative John Lewis. As a college student, Lewis was with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, and suggested the march as a way to press the politicians in Montgomery to ensure voting rights for all. The quote from Rep. Lewis that is on this monument says, “When we pray, our feet move.”
May our praying move our feet to continue the work for God’s justice right here and right now, so that everyone’s chains will be broken and the doors to the prison will be opened.
Amen.
