Transcription
[Music]
Eternal God, our spirit, thou who knows all, who has made every soul and every living being, guide us in this moment. We praise You for Your glory. Thank you that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
But we also recognize that when You call men and women to speak on Your behalf, You take the risk of putting treasure in an earthen vessel, treasure in trash, treasure in a vessel that is often weak, broken, and unworthy in our own eyes. But You do it that the excellency of the power might be of Thee and not of us.
So we welcome You to surprise us again for Your glory. In Your name, oh God, we pray. Come, Holy Spirit, come with preaching, teaching, and hearing power. Amen. Amen.
Good morning, All Souls. Good morning, a diverse spirit, growing, justice-seeking, knows-how-to-rock church. I hope Pastor, the folk don't get mad here, but I guess I'm leaving, so it really doesn't matter. But this is a compliment in a kind of off-hand way. I ain't never seen so many white folk that love to dance in all my life. And not only do you love to dance, y'all know [Applause] how you got rhythm. Amen.
Let's thank God for Reverend Susum. Excuse me, my dear sister, it's so good to be here in this place. I don't have time to go through all of my friends here; that would be the end of my time before you. But I have to take just a moment and thank Sharon Gro, who's been such a kind sister to come and stand alongside us in this work.
Ros Pelis and her husband, Yara Allen, Frank Jones, and my lawyer, pinned the hat. Now, she showed up 'cause she don't know what the hell I'm going to say, and she might need a lawyer. [Applause]
In the book of Hebrews, 11th and 12th chapters, you find some words there were those who, under torture, refused to give in. This is in The Message Bible. They refused to go free, preferring something better—resurrection. Others braved abuse and whips, and yes, chains and dungeons.
We have stories of those who were stoned, sawed into, murdered in cold blood. Stories of vagrants wandering in the earth in animal skins, homeless, friendless, powerless, and the world didn't deserve them. They were making their way as best they could on the cruel edges of the world in this all-out match against sin.
Others have suffered far worse than you, to say nothing of what Jesus went through—all of that bloodshed. So don't feel sorry for yourselves, for no matter what you are facing, you have not yet suffered unto blood.
This morning, I want to talk about bothered and baptized in the blood. Bothered and baptized by the blood. Pastor Paul found himself having to preach to a people who had seen a tea party takeover. Yeah, well, I'm in the wrong century, but let me see. They had seen the takeover of people who specialized in hate, yes, yeah, yeah, and hurting others. And they had great victories.
Now, the people he was talking to had seen victories as well, but now they were facing these new challenges. Things were rising up that they thought had already been taken care of. Some of them began to say, you know, back then in the 60s, I mean in the first century, we stood up, we fought. But now we've got a little something, and our little jobs, and our 401ks, and our nice houses, and our nice praise section church.
You know, we going to just accept what is, take what we can get. In fact, we might even decide to just turn back. All of this movement stuff is not really worth it, as long as we can have a nice place to come on a Sunday or Saturday and get us a little peace.
To this sentiment, Paul said, wait a minute, don't forget how you got here. Yeah, for you to be here in this church, yeah, some people were whipped and cut and murdered and ruined financially, but they kept pressing on and made it the best way they could by faith.
Those before you, they knew they were in an all-out war against sin, and they suffered unto blood. They shed blood, and you have not shed unto blood yet because you are still in the land of the living.
But Paul, in that sense, also said you should be bothered. You should be bothered when you see domination taking over. And we should be bothered. We should be bothered by the national disgrace that at the same moment we are the wealthiest nation in the world, we're the poorest nation in the world at the same time.
Yes, sir, we ought to be bothered by that. We ought to be bothered by the fact that the gaps between the rich and the poor are greater, and we know that God made this world sufficient for all of us.
Yes, we ought to be bothered when we see people blame Obama. There are some things we should blame him for. I don't agree with President Obama on everything, but we ought to be bothered by those who blame him and say that the poverty is his fault when the fact of the matter is, since the end of the 1960s, we've had a war on the poor.
Yes, A.O. Swam, MIT professor, says it's called attention violence. We stopped even calling the poor's name. We say cute phrases, and sometimes even those that call themselves liberal progressives use those same cute phrases.
We say we're trying to work to help those who are trying to make their way into the middle class. But some people are not trying to make their way into the middle class; they are trying to save what Jesus rode into Jerusalem on, and it rhymes with class.
We should be bothered in a nation that gives banks free money but raises the interest rate on college loans. Yeah, we should be bothered by people that take corporate welfare but do not want to give the poor welfare when welfare is in the Constitution. Promote the general welfare is what it says.
We should be bothered when we have 62 million Americans working at less than a living wage. Fifty-four percent of African-Americans make less than a living wage, and we are locking people up for fighting for 15 while corporate crooks are going free.
Yes, Lord, we should be bothered. We should be bothered when we know that 24 states have denied Medicaid expansion simply because they don't like a black man in the White House. That's the only rationale.
Now, it doesn't make any sense any other way because Medicaid expansion would give jobs. It would cover the sick, the working poor, including veterans. Eight million poor working people are not having health care today because of governors and legislators all over the country denying, mostly in the South and the Southwest, denying Medicaid expansion.
Thirty thousand people are dying every year, not because it was their time to die, but because a governor or a legislature would not give them health care. My Lord, my Lord, we ought to be bothered when bad police are trying to convict, assassinate unarmed black men and women, boys and girls on the spot, sometimes in less than two seconds.
We ought to be bothered that a heretical brand of religion is claiming that Christianity is anti-gay, anti-abortion, and pro-prayer. Well, down home, we used to say, yes, I know Jesus. Yes, I know Jesus, and I know Jesus for myself.
And I can't find anywhere where Jesus was an advocate of hate and meanness. Yeah, Jesus, it's not just another opinion; it's a form of heresy. Jesus, the Jesus I know, made love and justice and the poor the center of God's attention.
And we ought to be bothered when many pulpits are bought and turned into current-day false prophets and protectors of systems of exploitation, where pulpits and churches have become the chaplain of the state rather than the critic of the state.
We should be bothered. We should be bothered that candidates are running for president, and behind a lot of insults and reality TV-type debates, all of them are saying the same thing.
Don't you all mess around and say it's just Trump; that's a trick. You're being Trump. All of them are saying the same thing. If you get beyond the insults, I said this morning, I think it's a shrewd game that they're playing.
They create the insults 'cause they know that the media and the American public will lean into that and turn off our interpretive analysis. 'Cause all of them are saying, if you elect me, listen to them real quick, I'll give you war, I'll take your health care, I'll refuse living wages, I'll resist immigrants, I'll outlaw your sexuality, I'll take your money and privatize my schools, I'll control women's health, I'll destroy the environment, I'll practice voodoo economics.
All of them are saying it. Just 'cause you smile, just because you smile and find cute poetic ways to say meanness doesn't mean you're not mean. Assassins smile. Yes, they do. Yes, they do.
We ought to be bothered. But Pastor, as I stand here in this pulpit today, the one day before the March 7th, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, I couldn't come here and not say that what should bother us perhaps most in a voting democracy is that we are seeing right now the worst attacks on voter rights and the worst voter suppression than we have seen since the 1800s.
Touch your neighbor and say that ought to bother you. That ought to bother you. In a democracy, this kind of attack on voting rights, where extremists are cheating to stay in office because they know if everybody votes, they cannot win in the public square, it is here. It is sin.
Now, I know you universities don't like to use that word too much, but you better hold on to it 'cause every now and then you need to call something what it is. It is sin. The great prophet Isaiah, that my Jewish friends lift up, has a word. Isaiah 10, verses 1 and 3 says it like this: Woe unto you who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights.
Sin, sin, Paul said it. Sin, when you break up and hurt community, it's immoral, and we should be bothered enough to fight back. Yes, yes, we've had 15 debates. Listen now, both parties—I didn't come here to be partisan—both parties asking people to vote for them, but we've not had one hour in either debate, Democrat or Republican, where they have told us what they will do to protect the right to vote. Not one.
The Republicans don't want to talk about it; the Democrats act like they're scared to talk about it. They want to have a class conversation, but I stop by to tell you, you cannot understand America's class problem without connecting it to America's race problem. You got to put both of them together.
And it's time for America to have a grown-up conversation about race. Race is not just when you call me the N-word, and that's not just a conversation for the extremist liberals and progressives too.
Need to have a conversation about race 'cause the other day, I met a strange reality, and you all know me; I support everybody. But I met a racist gay person that was celebrating the Supreme Court doing what they did on marriage but then being okay with the Supreme Court voting against voting rights.
That's a [Applause] trick. Oh, amen. [Applause] This should bother us. The first reconstruction of the 1800s I write about in my book was stopped through a direct attack on voting rights.
The first thing black and white people working together in the first reconstruction did was they changed voting rights. They deconstructed the deconstruction in a movement called the Redemption Movement by putting in poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
The second reconstruction ended with an all-out attack on voting. It was called the Southern Strategy. George Wallace used it, Strom Thurmond used it, Barry Goldwater used it. Interesting, the one that Romney referenced the other day; that was strange.
Yeah, Ronald Reagan used it, George Herbert Walker Bush used it, Richard Nixon used it. They all called the Voting Rights Act the worst legislation against states' rights. They all supported racial gerrymandering and second primaries. They all worked to suppress and shift and stifle the power of the vote.
Lord, and now here we are in the embryonic stages, the adolescent stages of a third reconstruction that has been signaled by mass movements breaking out all over the place. Tomorrow, Monday, raise up 15, Black Lives Matter.
That has been signaled by the demographic shift that now, if 30% of the unregistered black folk in the South register and connect with Latinos and progressive whites, the Southern strategy in the solid South has broken open.
No longer will any person in any Southern strategy be able to control the 160 electoral votes in the former 13 slave states or control the governorships or the state capitals. Here we are in the very moment that we are coming to an election for the first time in a long time.
One vote will determine the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, plus governors, plus state legislators. At this very moment, when we have the power to build a third reconstruction, when we have the power to see fusion politics between blacks and whites and young and old and gay and straight and labor and persons who are concerned about a forward America, at the very moment, Pastor, that we have an opportunity like we've never seen, we are also seeing the worst attacks on voting rights since the 19th century.
My God, my God. The Shelby decision, June 25th, 2013, Supreme Court, 5 to 4, guts the Voting Rights Act. Citizens United was passed, and now the prediction is $10 billion will be spent in this upcoming election.
After Shelby happened, we had an avalanche of changes in 32 states, and all of those are states where the black and the brown vote was rising. North Carolina was the worst. They knew that 70% of African-Americans used the first week of early voting, so they cut that.
They knew that 50% of black people didn't have a strict photo ID, so they brought photo ID. They knew that 41% of African-Americans used same-day registration, so they ended same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting and straight-ticket voting.
We're seeing apartheid redistricting. My God, stacking, playing, and bleaching black voters, not just to keep black folk out of office, but to undermine the ability of blacks and whites and Latinos to elect candidates of their choice.
In fact, here's the new trick down South: they will actually redistrict and give black people an extra black senator or an extra black House member so that they can dilute the black vote in other districts where blacks and whites could get together and elect the progressive candidate.
My God, my God. And all this has happened while Congress has carried on a more than 975-day filibuster. Because when, after June 25th, 2013, it was the duty, according to the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, to fix the Voting Rights Act, for over 975 days, they have engaged in what Dr. King called interposition and nullification.
Strom Thurmond didn't filibuster the 64 Civil Rights Act for 36 hours. Yes, here we are today, and Loretta Lynch, a black woman attorney general, has less power than the Attorney General of the United States had August 7th, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was first passed.
She has no pre-clearance power. Here we are today when people can get elected through unconstitutional laws and get seated and sworn into office and pass legislation, and we are only able to challenge that after the fact.
And sometimes, Pender will tell you, it takes four, three, two, sometimes more years to challenge the attack on voting rights. It is systemic, systematic racism and classism at its worst in this democracy.
And my friends, it's not just a black issue. The attack on voting rights is an attack on public education. It's because the same people against public education are against voting rights.
Yeah, it's an attack on health care. It's an attack on workers' rights. It's an attack on women's rights. It's an attack on LGBTQ rights. It's an attack on immigrant rights. And we should all be bothered.
Yeah, any other country where people fought for the right to vote, there would be a mass movement in the street, especially in the nation's capital. Those of you in D.C. who know about taxation without representation, you should be organizing, marching, and sitting in the capital every day.
We should be fighting down South, and you should be fighting up here. It's our moral calling because we should be bothered by the blood, but we should also do it because we've been baptized by the blood.
Our foreparents knew that the fight for justice and equal protection under the law and voting rights was a righteous cause, a moral calling. They didn't march as Democrats and Republicans. Go read the record; you look at the pictures. They didn't have partisan signage. They marched as saints of God.
Yeah, they marched as All Souls. They marched as children of the universe. They marched as moral agents in a mean world, willing to die for the cause.
Yeah, and to see the Supreme Court undo the Voting Rights Act and to see the Congress refuse to fix it, and to see some of us willing to just settle for whatever they will give us is sin. It's a form of sin, that form of apathy.
It is like watching somebody go down to your grandmama's grave, dig it up, open the casket, throw the bones out on the floor, and just stomp all over it, and you just sit there.
Every right we have won was baptized in the blood. That's why during the movement in the 60s, when blood had been shed, preachers like Dr. King would take the podium at the funerals to interpret the blood.
Yes, huh, they would give a prophetic interpretation of the death so that even though the people were hurting and they were bothered by the blood, they would also decide to be baptized in the blood so that they would leave the funeral and stand and give their lives for the call.
That's why at the funeral of James Reed and the funeral of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Dr. King asked this question: Who killed them? Yes, then he said, not a few ignorant men. What killed James Reed and Jimmy Lee Jackson was an irrelevant church, an indifferent clergy, an irresponsible political system, a corrupt law enforcement hierarchy, a timid federal government, and an uncommitted Negro population.
My Lord, my Lord. Then he said, in essence, to honor the blood, let us leave the ivory towers of learning and storm the bastions of segregation.
You remember when he preached that sermon of those four little girls? Nothing is more horrible. I was just there last week, marching on the Birmingham State Capitol. I walked in the very basement where the bomb went off and blew up those four little girls.
I was there in 16th Street Baptist Church organizing, and that day, Dr. King preached. He said, though they died viciously, they died nobly. They are the martyrs of a holy crusade for freedom and dignity.
So this afternoon, in a real sense, they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the Gospel who remains silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.
They have something to say to every politician who has fed his or her constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to all of us that practice the hypocrisy of racism.
They have something to say to yes, even every Negro that has passively accepted the evil system of segregation. They say to us, their blood is speaking, and it says to us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution.
And we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them but about the system and the way of life and the philosophy that produced their murder. Their death, their blood says that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the American dream.
And I stop by this sacred space, this pulpit built by John Quincy Adams, who once said, vote your principle no matter what the majority does. I stop by to say that we need this spirit again.
Yes, we need to recognize our baptism in the blood. How dare the Tea Party with its spiked tea trample on our voting rights? How dare the Koch brothers and others spend pornographic and lewd amounts of money years after the Voting Rights Act was signed and after the blood on the bridge and Bloody Sunday?
How dare they use their money to finance political power to desecrate the very heart of our democracy? How dare they desecrate the grave and the memory and the blood of the martyrs?
We must resist this sin. Too many people have died, too many people have suffered, too many people have bled, and there's too much power in the blood.
And I believe this is what we should say to the world, Pastor, when asked tomorrow, why do you remember Bloody Sunday 51 years ago? Why do you remember?
We remember it so we can recommit and reconsecrate ourselves back to the movement. We remember it because we've not yet resisted unto death, but everything we have, somebody died for it.
We remember it, and we will do something now to say they didn't die in vain. We will not let what was won be taken away. America will be America again. We will restore our mighty dream.
We will never give up on the right to vote. Justice yesterday, today, and tomorrow is our battle cry because there is power in the blood.
And if it didn't stop them then, yes, we can stand now. Bloody Sunday, not just any Sunday, but Bloody Sunday, where bodies were put on the line so that the body of our politics in America could be changed to guarantee the protection of the voting right.
And it was the blood that gave life. I never understood this for a long time as I closed. Folk got killed, and others stood up. I didn't understand. My Jewish friends had to help me with that.
I had to read the Old Testament, and the Old Testament tells you, you see, the shedding of blood was shown on TV cameras all over the world. And instead of people running from Alabama, they ran to Alabama.
People came from everywhere and decided to make a stand, and the blood of the martyrs filled the pen of history with the ink that would be used by a former segregationist named Lyndon Baines Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act that was co-sponsored by a Republican and Democrat.
How, what, how did the blood do that? It was the blood that shamed the nation and forced people to do the justice that they had said they would never do.
Well, in the Old Testament scripture, it says there's life in the blood. Yes, there's life in the blood. There's life in the blood.
And that's where Moral Monday came from, really. If I would tell you the truth, Moral Monday happened when, in the first 50 days of 2013, our legislature cut 500,000 people's Medicaid.
They cut 900,000 people's Earned Income Tax Credit so they could give 14 families a tax break. They cut 180,000 people's unemployment. They took a billion dollars from education, made North Carolina worse than Mississippi.
But when they filed the bill the week of Bloody Sunday to roll back voting rights, we began to say if they are going to crucify the sick and crucify the poor and crucify the hurting and crucify our children and then crucify voting rights, every crucifixion needs a nonviolent suffering witness that will stand up against it.
Let us remember. So, my friends, I'm bothered, and I'm baptized in the blood. Let us remember that every privilege we have came through the blood of the slaughter.
Every voting right has come through the blood of the slaughter. Every opportunity has come through the blood. Every taste of freedom has come through the blood.
Every ounce of equality has come through the blood. The Voting Rights Act was signed in blood, and when you mess with it, because it's a blood document, it ought to bring us to life.
It ought to stir our souls. The Bible says their life is in the blood. James Reed said one time that we can never take a vacation.
I'm going back down South, but I came here this morning tired, but to make a plea to my Northern friends in D.C. Just like the abolitionists of old, we need you to stand up.
Yes, James Reed, when he left here, came down South. Yes, we need you to take up the cause. There ought to be a protest in the nation's capital. Maybe it ought to be led by All Souls.
Come on now, can I give an altar [Music] call? Since they killed Viola, one of yours, since they killed James Reed, one of yours, since y'all got this great band that can march you right on down there. [Music]
Maybe All Souls ought to start a movement, leading prayer into Ryan's office and McConnell's office. Maybe y'all ought to sit in, let them arrest you. Tell them you're not here as a Democrat; you're not here as a Republican, but you're here 'cause you've been baptized in the blood.
You're here as people of faith, and you're not going to let them take away what people died for. Maybe, maybe you ought to tell them we're going to sit here because the blood says we got to sit here until you restore the Voting Rights Act.
Let us remember the blood so that we'll work to beat back these extremists. Let us remember the blood so that not only will we commemorate. I'm tired of commemorating the past; we need to recommit ourselves to the past.
I'm going, I'm going to my seat, but I got to preach a little bit. Come on now, like I would down South. Come on now, and down South when we get tired, we say there's power, power, power in the blood.
There's wonder-working power in the blood. The martyrs gave their lives because there's power in the blood. Love is greater than hate because there's power in the blood.
Justice is better than injustice because there's power in the blood. Right is better than wrong because there's power in the blood. Compassion is better than corruption because there's power in the blood.
Giving Heaven's way is better than the greed of this world because there's power in the blood. All Souls, we can't give up now. There's power in the blood.
We can't sit down now. There's power in the blood. We can't let racism have the last say. Don't you hear the blood crying? Don't you hear the blood crying? Don't you hear the blood crying?
That power, power, power, wonder-working power. [Applause]