“This nation has aspirational values that are the best of what humanity can be. There is a heart here that is good. And that means for as long as there has been a nation there has been a struggle. There has been a struggle between our deep belief in equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the dominant economic and white supremacist imperatives that permeate the structures of our society.”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, July 1, 2018.
Hear the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Hear the words of Ferguson Freedom Fighter Brittany Packnett: “Land of the Free … Terms and Conditions May Apply.”
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A week ago yesterday, 41 youth, 14 adults from All Saints Church along with Ed and Hope Bacon and a few others sat in a room overlooking the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the window stood a woman named Joanne Bland. 53 years before, at age 11, she had marched across that bridge and into the tear gas and the baton blows and mounted troopers of County Sherriff Jim Clark.
She paused at the window just for a second and looked at that bridge, and then she turned to us and began to speak.
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She told us how her mother, carrying her unborn child, had died in a Selma hospital while waiting for a blood transfusion because they wouldn’t put blood from a white person into her black body. She told us how her grandmother stepped in to help raise her, and how her grandmother started going to meetings of black people organizing for voting rights. Joanne tells the story this way:
“Grandmother started going to the meetings, and she would take us – Bo-Ring! We had to sit at the feet of these people while they strategized about how they were going to get this thing called freedom. Now personally, I thought they were the dumbest old folks in the nation because my sisters and my teachers had already told me that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. It was obvious these old people didn’t know. And whenever I would ask them to explain it, they could never explain it to where it was clear to me.
“Well one day we were on this street, Broad Street, about three blocks down, the drug store is still there today, Carter’s Drug Store. At that time Carter’s had a lunch counter and I wanted to sit at the lunch counter, but my grandmother said I couldn’t. She said colored children – that’s what we were called then – couldn’t sit at the counter. It didn’t stop me from wanting to sit at that counter. Every time I passed by, I see those white kids sitting there eating those ice cream cones and spinning around on those stools and I’d wish it was me.
“Well one day, my grandmother was standing in front of the store talking to one of her friends and I was with her. I did what I always do, started peeping in that window … watching those kids, wishing it was me. This time my grandmother noticed. She leaned over my shoulder, and she pointed to the counter through the window, and she said ‘When we get our freedom, you can do that too.’”
“I became a freedom fighter that day.”
“Because I understood instantly that freedom that Grandma and her old friends were going for, that was the good freedom. The one that let me sit at that counter. The freedom that Abe gave me was all right, but grandma … she was going to get me the good freedom.”
242 years ago, a group of colonizers declared that there were unalienable rights of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
242 years ago, a group of colonizers declared that this land should be the Land of the Free. AND that Declaration has always come with an asterisk – Terms and Conditions May Apply.
That’s because the United States has always been a land where our strong aspirational political and social ideals have been subservient to an economic imperative to amass wealth and a social imperative of white supremacy. And the story of this nation has always been the tension and struggle between the two.
Yes, we are the Land of the Free – terms and conditions may apply.
As we traveled with our youth through the South and Midwest, we saw it in the layout of the cities we visited. Montgomery, Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis – each with the same configuration. A river that would bring enslaved black bodies into the town, a railroad that
would take many of them to other destinations, a road named Market or Commerce Street lined with warehouses and slave pens where they would be stored until taken to the auction block at the end of the road where they would be separated from their families and sold to the highest bidder.
Yes, we are the Land of the Free – Terms and Conditions May Apply.
We see it in the in the human rights crisis on our border, where after generations of the United States plundering Central and South American nations of their wealth and creating government by gang-lord to keep the flow of wealth coming northward, when the people from these lands try to follow that wealth northward not to take it back but merely to have a life of safety and honest labor, we criminalize them and separate families once more.
Yes, we are the Land of the Free – Terms and Conditions May Apply.
We see it as we sit here this morning on ground that under the poetry of that Declaration was stolen from the Tongva Nation.
Yes, we are the Land of the Free – Terms and Conditions May Apply.
This nation has aspirational values that are the best of what humanity can be. There is a heart here that is good. And that means for as long as there has been a nation there has been a struggle. There has been a struggle between our deep belief in equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the dominant economic and white supremacist imperatives that permeate the structures of our society.
At our worst in this struggle, we deny its very existence. At our worst, we conflate the deep and beautiful ideals of the nation with the worst of our oppression. We deny that the same flag that is the symbol of those higher virtues is also the symbol of extrajudicial killings of young black and brown people on our streets, mass criminalization and incarceration, and an educational system that leaves far too many 11 year olds peering through school windows in neighborhoods of privilege at the good freedom they have yet to win.
At our worst in this struggle, we deny that the same flag under which Americans fought and died heroically to defend the world against fascism and the Third Reich is the same flag that we have covered ourselves in as we have used the dedication and courage of our soldiers to fight not for freedom but for the economic and white supremacist imperatives of this nation around the world in El Salvador and Iraq and countless other places.
At our worst in this struggle, we deny its very existence. And when we do, we as the church are on particularly treacherous ground on a day like today. Because if we deny that struggle, if we conflate the ideals of this nation with the amoral economic and white supremacist practices of this nation, then this observance of Independence Day as a sacred feast, which is problematic under the best of circumstances, becomes downright blasphemous.
If we lay the flag on the altar denying the tremendous breach between ideal and practice, denying that, as Dr. King said, that “America has defaulted on her promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” That “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” …
If we proclaim that we are the Land of the Free but deny that terms and conditions still apply, we cease to be the confessing church of the living Christ, standing at the throne and calling us as a nation to be touched, as Lincoln longed, by the better angels of our nature, and instead we become but one more agent of the state that crucified that Christ on the cross of “devotion to order rather than justice.”
At our worst in this struggle, we deny its very existence. We conflate the deep and beautiful ideals of America with the worst of our oppression. And at our best in this struggle … at our best in this struggle, we engage it with the deepest of commitment. And amazing things happen.
At our best in this struggle, we recognize that Frederick Douglass spoke Gospel truth when he wrote:
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will…. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
At our best in this struggle, we recognize that Fannie Lou Hamer spoke Gospel truth when she said:
“We’ve got to have some changes in this country, and not only changes for the black man and changes for the black woman, but the changes we have to have in this country are going to be for the liberation of all people – because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
There is a struggle at the heart of our nation and there always has been. And at our best in this struggle, in the moments in history where true progress is made, we engage that struggle with the deepest of commitment.
Joanne Bland became a freedom fighter that day in front of Clark’s Drug Store in Selma. And because of that, more than 53 years ago, 11-year old – think about that, 11-year old Joanne showed that deep commitment. She held the hand of her sister and stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Minutes later, after the tear gas was fired and the blows began raining down, she found herself taking refuge in the back of a car, her head in her sister’s lap, feeling the drops of sweat drip onto her face … when she realized it wasn’t sweat but blood from a wound on her sister’s head that would take more than 20 stitches to close.
242 years ago, a group of colonizers declared that there were unalienable rights of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that Declaration has always come with an asterisk – Terms and Conditions May Apply.
Joanne Bland knew it. And she became a freedom fighter that day in front of Clark’s Drug Store.
What will it take for us – not just a few of us, but all of us — to do the same?
It will take a deep commitment to doing the work, not a commitment to getting likes on Facebook, retweets on Twitter and pictures on the TV news.
It will take a deep commitment to doing the work, not a commitment to getting the credit.
It will take a deep commitment to doing the work, a commitment that is so sacrificial that it changes the hearts and minds of those who think there is no struggle, who see nothing wrong with us being the land of the free – terms and conditions may apply.
I am not just talking about the party in power and the man in the White House when I say that we are at a moment in our history where the economic imperative of amassing wealth and the social imperative of white supremacy are in such an ascendancy that even questioning the primacy of economic growth or white American exceptionalism has grave political, social and economic consequences.
And so, we are at a moment in history where we must decide that our commitment to this struggle is more important than all we might lose by engaging it.
We are at a moment in history where those of us who have been comfortable must decide that our commitment to this struggle is more important than our comfort.
Where those of us who have been respectable must decide that our commitment to this struggle is more important than our respectability.
Where those of us who have been safe must decide that our commitment to this struggle is more important than our safety.
Because so many among us are not comfortable, not respectable, not safe. Because power concedes nothing without demand and transformation never happens without sacrifice. Because the path we claim in Christ is one that leads to the cross and that cross is our greatest glory.
We are at a moment in history where the struggle is real and the struggle is before us. And we must get rested up, loved up, trained up, prayed up and organized up so together we can speak up and act up.
After Joanne shared her story with us, Jenny Tisi asked if we could give her a gift. And when she assented, our young people circled around her and sang. They sang MLK by U2.
And as they sang, drops once more began to fall on the face of Joanne Bland. Only this time they weren’t her sister’s blood. They were her own tears.
Wiping those tears away, she looked at our choristers and said, “You are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
We could be tempted to hopelessness right now. We could be tempted to despair. I know you feel it. I feel it too. This has been an excruciating week on top of an excruciating year on top of what for some among us has been an excruciating lifetime after excruciating generations unto centuries .
We are angry and we are grieving and we are afraid. We see so much that has been won in danger of being lost even when there is so much more freedom yet to win. Some of us are fearing for our ability to stay in this country. Some of us are fearing for our marriages. Some of us are fearing for our health care choices. Some of us are fearing for our very lives.
And yet together, we are the hope. Every generation engages the struggle anew. And every generation gets closer and closer to the dream being fulfilled. Every generation has new opportunities to meet ignorance with understanding, to meet oppression with compassion, to meet greed with generosity. To meet hate with the deep, abiding transformative power of love.
As another man who was beaten on that bridge that day, Rep. John Lewis, said this week: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Wiping her tears away, Joanne looked at our choristers and said, “You are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
She wasn’t just talking to them.
She was talking to all of us.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
It’s our turn now. Young and old. Together.
If you are an organizer, organize.
If you are a marcher, march.
If you can sit in a jail cell, then sit in a jail cell.
If you have a platform – even if it is just a few friends and colleagues – speak out.
If you are an artist – create.
If you are a singer – sing.
If you have money – divest and invest for this movement.
If you aren’t part of an oppressed community, venture into one, listen, learn, build relationships and be led by the people you find there.
And if you are part of an oppressed community, do the same thing and build those intersectional bonds of strength.
And for God’s sake, if you are eligible to vote – vote!
Find your lane and drive in it. And don’t waste your energy criticizing other people if the lanes they are driving in are different from yours.
Joanne is talking to all of us.
With God’s help, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
It’s our turn now. Young and old. Together.
No terms.
No conditions.
Just freedom … the good freedom … for all.
Amen.
