and sanctuaries, books and blogs, texts and tweets, it can sanctify its hierarchies and disparities as the word and will of God. The empire prepared to kill Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. It was to be a spectacle lynching. A spectacle lynching was when good White folk would make an event out of a lynching, bring their sweethearts, wives, children, and a basket of goodies to nibble while they watched the show. They’d often set their victims on fire (as Nebuchadnezzar planned to do), pose with their burning corpses, and later cut off pieces of them to take home as souvenirs.
Activist-archivist James Allen collected one hundred and forty-five photos of spectacle lynchings in the US. They are featured in the volume Without Sanctuary1 which I commend to you. The strategies of resistance required to outlaw lynching lasted well into the twentieth century. Sometimes resistance is an intergenerational struggle.
The most significant strategy of resistance employed by the three young people was the willingness to let the empire spill their blood. Sometimes resistance means being willing to die. Sometimes it means preparing to die. Sometimes it means dying. Sometimes it means rising from the dead—but I’m getting ahead of next week’s story. We are not far from the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination and martyrdom of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He and many others in the civil rights movement resisted not just segregation but White supremacy with their very lives. White supremacy is a colonizing force that transcends national borders and is every bit as much a manifestation of empire as any nation with imperial imagination and aspirations. The three young people prepared to die in resistance to the empire.
The Hebrew text moves quickly to a story of miraculous deliverance, but not so fast—there is more to the story. The Greek story picks up where the Hebrew one leaves off and fills in the gap. The young people responded to their impending extrajudicial killing with the songs of their ancestors. They sang to the God no empire could strip from them. They told the story of God’s faithfulness to their people. As the empire’s rage burned against them in literal fire, they used the breaths they thought would be their last to deny the empire power over them, over their story, and over their song, because our stories and our songs are tools of resistance. The empire set out to destroy this last act of resistance. But something happened when they refused to surrender their heart and minds, songs and prayers, poetry and theology, even if they had to lay their bodies down. God appeared in the midst of the resistance.
The resistance writers used the book of Daniel to tell their people that the empire would not be defeated with the master’s tools. They couldn’t defeat it with military might. They couldn’t defeat it with economic might. But if they kept their minds right and stayed on the God who delivered their ancestors, no empire would ever be able to destroy them, no matter what their political reality. In the words of the Gospel, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).
Our words have power. That is why fascists burn books, ban films, silence scholars, censure artists, and assassinate prophets. They bully and sue, intimidate and obfuscate, and they use their words to rewrite our stories, revise our histories, and stamp their image on our art and culture. And they lie. They lie about us. They lie about our culture. They lie about our history. They lie about God. With their lies they construct a god who is not God and expect us to bow down and worship it.
But these young activists on the page and the older activists behind the pen have shown us how to resist: Don’t let the empire tell you who you are. Don’t let the empire assimilate you into its culture. Don’t let the empire tell you your cultural and culinary practices are inferior. Don’t let the empire clothe you—body or mind. Don’t let the empire tell you who God is. Don’t let the empire use your life to advertise its glory. Resistance is not futile. But resistance is costly. We follow one who resisted empire to the cost of his life and we are called to do the same. How much more ought we be willing to put our lives on the line knowing the promise of resurrection than those young people, literal or literary, who were willing to go to a death from which they had no sure promise of escape? Amen.
1. James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000).
A SERMON TO MYSELF AND MY WHITE COLLEAGUES
MARK 5:34
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Sometimes the Spirit leads us to apparent contradictions. That being the case, I’d like to talk about listening; specifically, listening for Black lives. For a White preacher like myself, the challenge of this book, Preaching Black Lives (Matter) is an inherently thorny one. My people are the producers and beneficiaries of White Supremacist structures that demean both Black lives and the importance of those lives. This is not solely a historical matter. Consciously or otherwise, we participate in and reaffirm these structures every day. Therefore, we have a special moral responsibility to bring them down.
But all too often when we raise our voices to denounce White supremacy (if we raise them at all), we do so in ways that re-inscribe patterns of White supremacy. All too often, the very act of raising our voices draws attention away from Black witnesses, who are more capable than we to testify about the importance of their own lives. Speaking from a position of power, like a pulpit, only amplifies this effect of re-centering Whiteness. So we work at cross purposes, undercutting the very people for whom we aspire to advocate.
If we are silent, we tacitly support the forces of White supremacy, and the unjust profit they deliver to us. If we speak, we repeat patterns of White supremacy that perpetually privilege White voices. We are in a devil’s bind. What is to be done?
There is no easy answer, but we might begin by taking a cue from one of our own, a White man, indeed a very White man, who was nonetheless a foster child of the Black church,1 one murdered for his witness on behalf of those whom Whiteness demeaned:
It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.2
If we do not listen, we will not understand what is required, for Black lives alone can tell what justice they require. If we do not listen, we will never know our own blind spots. If we do not listen, and indeed, allow ourselves to be transformed by the voices we hear, there is no hope for us.
We who are called White must preach for Black lives. The sin that threatens them is ours, and our Savior will not excuse us if we fail to raise our voices. But if we are to preach for Black lives, we must first learn to listen for Black lives. Reading the witnesses of this book might be a good place to start. But for us, listening, rather than merely hearing, is no easy feat.
In
