Sermon: Freedom Music

Feb 4, 2025 | Sermons

Sunday, Februray 2, 2025

By Rev. F. Vern Wright V

 

Freedom Music

Good morning! Raise your hand if your feeling a little beleaguered about national events right now. Look around. These are your people! Together we gather to form what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community. The beloved community knows that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere and it seeks to use the principles of nonviolence and civil disobedience when need be to achieve its aim of greater love and wholeness for the human being.

But in order for us to recommit to this beloved community I want to lift up some of our common pain a little, and explore freedom music tradition passed down from our brothers and sisters who survived one of the most terrible injustices in the history of the world, chattel slavery in the United States.

So with your forbearance, the looking beneath the bandaid. Your leaders and I have spent much of last week with the truly lovely work of wrapping our heads around how we might best protect our church form ICE raids… Thank you Dumpster Fire! We appreciate it!

Just so you know, we’re concerned that many of our Food Pantry and Thrift Store Clients will feel unsafe after the recent rule change for ICE and the executive order unconstitutionally challenging the 14th amendment which guarantees birth right citizenship. Instead of getting the valuable resources we provide, they will hide. We are concerned that anyone for who English is their second language, or whom might appear to be an immigrant, will be rounded up and sent to a deportation center if they are not able to prove their citizenship on the spot. And we know they will because that happened all the time under the first administration. We have printed up “Know your rights cards” And leaflets in many different languages to help educate people. We are also studying what the quakers are doing. I mean really studying.

On top of this, anyone who receives federal assistance, here or abroad has to worry about whether or not those funds will be frozen. When I was in theological school and was raising a family, I depended on SNAP benefits, and we depended on them so much, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to finish my degree without them. And if I needed them, a poor white working student family, what about an Ethiopian Refugee in a squalid camp one meal away from starvation? When you need federal assistance, you really need it when you need it!

If you are interested in what we might be doing on this level make sure you check out the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Their website is terrific!

The rights of trans and intersex people, and reproductive freedom, are also on the line. An executive order defining gender as exclusively male or female, and opening the door to open trans discrimination in the job force is a terrible blow. This administration has encouraged harassment of abortion providers by pardoning those who had been arrested for egregious offenses, and limiting the prosecution of future harassers.

Murray members Unite! we got our work cut out for us!  

As I mentioned last week, the livelihood of any federal employee who ever thought that diversity training might be helpful to counteract known and demonstrated racial, gender, or orientation bias is on the line. In fact, if any federal employee hasn’t received a “Trump Revelation,” they better resign. This is such a gross violation of labor laws, that it borders on idolatry- Revelation are you kidding me!

Murray members! We have our work cut out for us!

We’ll that’s a lot of things to be concerned about- have we pulled that bandaid, back enough? But however much we might feel beleaguered, what we feel now is nothing compared to what vast numbers of folk all over this country had to go through as slaves. If people survived the brutal Atlantic crossing that killed ten to twenty percent of all Africans, what they were subjected to when they reached this country scourges the soul. The separation of families, the systematic rape, the brutal beatings, the death camp conditions of much of the labor, the continued buying and selling of subsequent generations of Africans in this country brought here against their will, is horrible to consider. Let us not forget the true history of our nation! Let us not forget that this is not the first time people have sought to crush the rights and dignity of the human being!

And so we turn now to the freedom music of those for whom freedom was stripped. Slave owners who wielded ultimate power hoped to kill music and faith, but they could not. No matter how many were killed or maimed, or brutalized, it did not die. Instead, this music united people who spoke many different languages, brought from many different West and Central African cultures, and gave hope. The testimony provided by the White woman and her friends as they attended an African American religious service just after the Civil War demonstrates how overwhelmingly powerful it was. That power continued to shape our nation; as this music survived and lead to different forms of African American music, it made its way into all of our souls. It has marked all of us with a joy unspeakable, a joy unbreakable, with a love undeniable!

Today we turn, today we rest, today we who labor under tyrant wannabes, shall stand under the spiritual and emotional power of those who hoped even though there was no hope, those who loved, though love was sundered, those who helped one another even when the powerful, were killing them as fast as they could.

In Black History month, we with white skin skin here turn to this tradition not to appropriate it, but to be inspired by it and to learn from it. We need inspiration right now. We, no matter if we are black, white, latin X, no matter our love persuasion, or gender identity in this sanctuary, are under a lot of stress. We have so much work. We do need hope and wholeness! But whatever happens, it’s nice to know that some things cannot be taken. Sometimes its nice to remember that no matter what happens we will still be singing together, we will be hoping together and dreaming together.

Yes this is a safe space for us to sing and speak our minds. These dulcet tones shall counteract that grinding sound out there of dismaying things going on. From this safe space we will respond with the clarity of Jedi, the mindfulness of a master, and the steadfastness of saints. Others have done this before us. Now is our turn to do what is prudent, and necessary, to love and serve those who are most vulnerable right now. Let us claim our space and celebrate our freedom music, and may the joy of it ring out beyond these walls!

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