Composed by Bernice Johnson Reagon, copyright: Songtalk Publishing Co.
Refrain:We who believe in freedom cannot restWe who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Verse 1Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sonsIs as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons We who believe in freedom cannot restWe who believe in freedom cannot restuntil it comes
John 1:29 The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
“Behold the Lamb of God.” The Jews who had gathered around John the Baptist understood exactly what he was talking about. The proclamation of faith must be incarnational, because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us—we beheld his glory, so the Lamb of God signals that a spiritual transformation is upon us. This is more than a mere offering of sacrificial lambs, and goats and bulls.
The Word comes to each group, each nation, and each race in a special way. The entire third chapter of Joel, Isaiah 66:16, and Psalm 110:6 inform us that God will judge ethnicities/racial groups, the Greek translation of “ethnos” or races.
Why will God judge us as nations, as races? Because the Word, the Christ of God has come to us in our own skin, in our own experience, in our own tragedies, in our own stories, in our own music, in our own understanding of the cosmos. That’s how we can identify it, because as Dr. James Cone wrote in Black Theology and Black Power, it is a Word that takes on the drama of our situation, the reality of our suffering, our struggle, and our journey as a people.
When John said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” they understood this language and that is was a pivotal proclamation of a new reality. Leviticus 5:1 defined sin as guilt—“the guilt of those who do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify against something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.”
The sacrificial lamb and the sacrificial scapegoat were used by ancient Israel to deal with (1) guilt for silence in the face of evil and (2) guilt for participation in the very act of evil. In Leviticus 16:15 -17 the goat or lamb was slaughtered and its blood sprinkled on the altar to atone for sin.
In verses 21 and 22 a second animal or scapegoat was placed before the priest, he put his hands on its head and confessed the sins of the nation, and then someone was chosen to guide the goat away from the city, the community, to take it to a remote part of the wilderness where it could not possibly find its way back and leave it there.
The first sacrifice is removing the guilt of sin from the community. The second sacrifice involves bearing it, the sin away so that it is removed from memory and can never be practiced again. Jesus accomplished both as the Lamb of God and we can accomplish both as incarnations of the Christ of God, if we will complete the sacred work of bringing our nation to repentance.
This is a grave, serious matter and any proclamation of the Gospel that ignores it is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer categorized as “cheap grace”—which seems to be flowing like polluted water down a stream in American churches. Behold the Lamb of God. The collective burden of a nation, a race, an ethnicity must come to terms with the all-embracing efficacy of God through Jesus Christ. But how do different races find this efficacy? How do they get the burdens of their specific guilt, the heavy weight of their specific sins as a people, alleviated on the shoulders of the Lamb of God?
Marissa Alexander, abused by her husband, fired a warning shot at the wall to defend herself in her own home. She didn’t hit or harm anyone, yet the same district attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman, told her that she should have run out of her home, not “stand her ground.” The white jury in Sanford, Florida sentenced her to 20 years in prison—a sentence she is now serving. Drunken neo-Nazis who, high on meth shouted racist-transphobic slurs at her, and slashed her in the face with a bottle, which required 11 stitches, chased Cece McDonald down the road. She defended herself with scissors as a last resort. She was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
The man who killed Trayvon stalked this unarmed child who was walking home to his family, even after being directly told not to by a 911 dispatcher. He murdered Trayvon. Was not charged of the killing for weeks, received donations from white Christians to cover his legal fees, and used the same “stand your ground” defense that Black Marissa and Black Cece had used. Free to kill again. In a real show of white racist pride and cynicism his gun was returned to him in the courtroom with a smile.
The Bible is indeed God’s revealed Word, and in order for repentance, the collective and individual turning towards Christ that the incarnation and its proclamation requires, these sins must be spoken and confessed and repented of by the people of the context who are committing them. That’s what Jesus required, because he also preached repentance before faith.
Without repentance—without metanoia, the turning away from silence, from the collusion of knowing that evil has been done and allowing it to continue without protest, without outrage, without “Hell no--we will not let this go”-- if we do not pick up Ella Baker’s song, “we who believe in freedom will not rest until it comes,” then the sin of the white race against the people of Africa, known as Black Americans remains.
All of us, must free America from the sin of its misguided, moronic, demonic obsession with the ideology of white supremacy. It is an ideology born out of the negation, the godless philosophy that emanates from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the oppressor, the knowledge that puffs up and stand in opposition to God’s claim over the children of God.
This is the counterfeit knowledge that passes itself off as enlightenment in opposition to the spiritual reality of the Christ in us, which alone can free us to live in the spirit, the image of God, the form in which all life was created. These spiritual powers of darkness have encouraged those who oppress and suppress and seek to dominate others to use this reified knowledge to dispossess all creation of its beauty, its radiance, its glory and its wonder.
The great reformer Martin Luther wrote, “If you deal with all the intricacies and nuances of the Gospel of grace, of repentance towards Christ, and of a life of gratitude in anticipation of the world to come, and yet fail to deal with the evils of your time, then”—said Luther—“you are not preaching the Gospel at all.”
Both writer and prophet James Baldwin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that Black American African were the one group who truly believed in an Almighty Sovereign God (Cecil Cone), that could lead the scapegoat, which carries the sin of white supremacy and all its manifestations, out of the community, out of the nation called America so that we would once and for all be free of it.
Dr. King, revising a theme first set forth by Phyllis Wheatley, even went so far as to consider this our destiny, the very reason why God allowed some of us to come from Africa, to save this nation, this people misguided by one of the Tree of Knowledge’s ideologies, which like every fruit on that tree is deluded by a focus on material rather than spiritual reality, in this case the incidence of skin color.
Will we lead the sin goat, the scapegoat out of the camp so that our nation might yet be saved? Isaac Watts wrote, “Yes I must fight if I should reign, increase my courage Lord.”
Trayvon Martin is now before us as a typological Lamb of God, calling us once again to stand up and take responsibility for guiding America to repentance. His death, his sacrifice reminds us that repentance has not happened in America, and the salvation of this nation, and the majority who continue to live by the creed of racist “just-us” instead of biblical justice, who perpetuate attacks against our children, who fight against our right to vote, to work to have a decent livelihood, all that wickedness cries out as a stench before God.
Our enemies and their many terror cells are already at our gates, in our cities. Not all the military might in the world has protected us from the same. Corporate espionage and unscrupulous international interests threaten the economic survival of our nation as a world power. If we do not stand against this evil, if we do not make this horrendous crime a turning point in our passive acceptance of the annihilation of our own kind, then there is no hope for America, and the judgment God decreed in Amos 8:1-12 against Israel will become a reality for us.
Jeannine Amber of Essence Magazine wrote in a recent Time Magazine editorial—
"Certain events have a way of changing everything, reorganizing life into an unforgettable before and after. For Black parents, the new demarcation between before and after was the moment we watched George Zimmerman walk free after being tried in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17 year old. Before the jury announced its not guilty verdict, black parents understood what we were up against as we sought to protect our sons.
'We knew our boys, adored and full of promise, might be treated like criminals by police even though they had committed no crimes. We were painfully reminded of this danger by the deaths of other people’s sons, like Sean Bell, who was shot and killed on the morning of his wedding in 2006 by New York Police who incorrectly thought their was a gun in his car, or Oscar Grant, III, who was fatally shot in 2009 by a transit cop in Oakland, California, while restrained and facedown; or unarmed college student Kendrec McDade, who was killed in 2012 when San Francisco police saw him clutching his waistband and assumed he had a firearm. . . . .
"We may never know exactly what happened that night Zimmerman shot Trayvon, but black parents know this: A neighborhood-watch man saw a brown-skinned teenager—a boy who could have been one of ours—wearing hoodie pulled up against the rain and assumed he was up to no good. That suspicion set into motion a chain of events that left the boy dead. How do we protect against that?
'Do we tell our children to run if they are being followed? Or should they stop and turn around? Do we tell them to defend themselves, as Trayvon appears to have done or to get on the ground like Oscar Grant? Both tactics ended in their deaths at the hands of grown white male supremacists.
'Studies have shown that police are likely to shoot at an African American suspect faster than at a white one. What about the untrained civilian? Armed with bias and a handgun, how likely is he to see a threat where none exists? Before Trayvon, we had the Talk to guard our children against danger. After Zimmerman’s acquittal in his death, we realize with anguish there may be little we can do to protect them.'
So are we really ready to proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world? Are we ready to protest and write and march and picket and boycott and raise hell until our children are safe, until the scapegoat of white supremacy is once and for all carried into the wilderness of time until it becomes but a faint memory? Do we have the courage to assert our blessedness, to call for repentance concerning Black life in America?
Dr. Michelle Alexander in a recent viewpoint feature in Time Magazine wrote, “Trayvon Martin will not be the last black boy who dies or goes to jail or gives up on his life because he was viewed and treated a nothing but a problem. We are all guilty of being too quiet for too long. Let it be said hereafter that we were quiet no more.'
Have you reached a turning point? If the death of Oscar Grant, III was not your turning point here in Northern California, you now have another opportunity to get on board and proclaim to the world, “Behold the Lamb.
You as an incarnation of the Christ can carry this heinous sinful demonic ideology away, by your standing strong, because God in Christ is able to make you strong. Or will you go on chewing on the fruit of white oppression? Will we who believe in freedom, not rest until it comes?
Behold the Lamb of God! Who will watch, fight, pray, fight, watch and pray until Satan is cast out of our nation? Who will drag the sin-laden goat of white supremacy out of our our community, our country, our world? Are there any soldiers of the cross left in our midst, or are we content to play church while we are entertained by and with some fake "mamby-pamby Jesus" of the sewing circle (this last quote taken from sermon by The Rev. Peter Marshall)?
1 Kings 17:1 Now Elijah the Tishbite who was ofthe settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” (2) The Word of the Lord came to him, saying, (3)“Go away from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. (4) “It shall be that you will drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to provide for you there.” (5) So he went and did according to the Word of the Lord, for he went and lived by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. (6) The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he would drink from the brook.
In the beginning was the Word (the Christ), and the Word (Christ) was with God, and the Word (the Christ) was God.
Obviously John is talking about something else other than the writings in the Bible. He is speaking of a Word that has priority over the Bible. It is a divine Word, the Christ presence, the light that God is bringing to humanity that we might fulfill our original purpose, to walk as children of light, to be light and salt in the earth.
In the Bible we have written words, written revelations that relied on human authors to get it right, to make sure that not too much human personality, weakness and bias got through. They did a pretty good job of it, but they were human, what they said is time-bound, limited by chronos (chronological space-time), limited by their own personal experiences.
What Moses often said and wrote reflected his own personal frustration with Israel. His expression tends toward negative “shall nots,” harsh laws and teachings with numerous curses and punishments, stonings, exclusions from the community for all who fail to follow them. All of the revelations that created the Bible contain meanings, contexts, circumstances that no longer exist in the same form and are lost to us.
This is why the Word, the Christ, must become flesh, must set up tent in us. Knowing the Bible is a first and necessary step, but knowing how it reads gives us a foundation on which to understand the Word (the Christ presence) as it speaks to us through the Spirit. We, like Jesus become tents of the Christ-to seek and share a new and living Word, interpreted, revealed and renewing for our time and situation.
For that reason Bible study is necessary to discern to clarify, to separate progressive revelation from final revelation, to separate spiritual musings from revealed absolute truths. Without the Christ: words are just words
But the Word that John speaks of in this first chapter is not a written Word, but a spiritual reality—a transforming life force. It is the Word that God gave Peter when he told him, "Rise, slay and eat," and Peter had the temerity to challenge God, saying, “By no means, Lord, for I have never touched anything unholy and unclean.” After this vision returned three times and God had said the same thing three times through the angel, Peter was troubled. He was perplexed of mind as to whether this vision was really from God or not. How could a Word from God contradict what was clearly in the Book of Leviticus?
How could God’s word to him concerning going to and preaching to and receiving this Gentile as he would receive a Jew, so clearly contradict the laws and precepts as he had been taught them in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Common Ravens are omnivorous and highly opportunistic: their diet may vary widely with location, season and serendipity. In some places they are mainly scavengers. Not equipped to tear through large bodied birds as well as birds such as hook-billed vultures, they must wait for the prey to be torn open by another predator or flayed by other means before they can eat themselves. Plant food includes cereal grains, berries and fruit. They prey on small invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals and birds. Ravens are regular predators at bird nests, brazenly picking off eggs, nestings and sometimes adult birds when they spot an opportunity. They have been major foil in the State of California’s attempts to preserve the condor.
Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God’s creative, life-giving power in the world. All who receive him in this life, who fully accept him into their lives, get the opportunity to participate in this life-giving creative process. John presents the miracles of Jesus in a specific order to demonstrate the progression of God’s power and authority over every aspect of human life and finally with the raising of Lazarus, life itself.
The first miracle in the Gospel of John is revealed in the first chapter, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father full of grace and truth. John uses the imagery of the tabernacle, the tent of meeting where Israel would gather to offer praise and hear from and experience God as a community.
This tent was God’s MASH unit, a Mobile Army Spiritual House. Before the temple, before the shrine, before the synagogue, before the church, before the cathedral, there was the tent. The Word, the divine creative, energizing wisdom, power and might of God pitched its tent among us in the form, Jesus of Nazareth, revealed ultimately as the Christ of God.
This same Christ, this creative power of God, commanded the ravens, against their own natural predatory instinct, to gather food for Elijah rather than to keep it for themselves. God can intervene in the normal order, the normal outcomes, the logical sequence, the expected conclusions—and do something new, something different. God.
Once Elijah had pronounced the prophecy, no dew, no rain, nothing until God tells me different, he still needed to eat and drink. God brought the socio-economic condition, draught, famine, upon the entire nation. Elijah was not exempt from the trouble. But God made a way for him to survive in the midst of trouble. God re-created the consciousness of the ravens. He transformed their behavior and nature from predatory: greedy, eager to steal, to prey upon, to nurturing, generous, magnanimous in sharing. God desires to transform the behavior of "the ravens" in our lives and experiences. God will bring them to subjection to His plan for us, if we are subject to God's plan and will for our lives. Ravens can be many things in our lives, they prey on us, threaten us, seek to rob us of the goodness of life.
This is the power of the Word that God can release in our lives. It is a matter of faith, of acceptance, of allowing the Spirit to direct us and work through us.
After God tells us something new and different, the definition of strange, he does not give us long to act. While Peter still wondered whether or not this vision, this Word, this new understanding could be from God, the Spirit said to him, “Three men are coming to take you to Cornelius the Gentile.” Then there was a knock at the door. He was informed, “O yeah, that vision you had and have been questioning, well there are some guys at the gate who said their master just had the same vision.
After Peter had gone to his house, had preached, had witnessed the Holy Spirit come on Cornelius, his relatives and close friends. The circumcised believers, the first followers of Jesus, the Jews, when they saw what God had done were amazed, “for they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God.” He asked, "Can anyone here give reason why they should not be baptized (accepted into the church as persons of faith)? Can we?
Praise god for the first miracle of Jesus—The miracle of the Christ in human form.—Christ in you, the hope of glory. Amen.
For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” . ... “So I say walk in the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:14, 16).” No sooner had the church begun to grow than conflict emerged. Satan is never idle. With every success, every victory, every movement forward, we can count on the principalities and powers, the high princes of the world’s present evil, to send messengers of chaos, confusion and doubt and conflict. As more and more “unclean” Gentiles came to the faith, the Orthodox Jews who followed the way of Jesus had a concern. “They are not following the Law of Moses.” They did not follow the ritual cleansings. They did not prohibit homosexual relationships. They ate foods considered “unclean.” They did not circumcise their children.
The question is not whether or not conflicts will come but how do disciples of Jesus discipline ourselves, so that we can learn to deal with conflict appropriately. The discipline of Jesus is often neglected, but Jesus made it clear in Luke 9, “If you want to be my disciples, then forget about your biases, your preferences, your presuppositions, your personal comforts, forget about self-interest, “let the dead things, the things of this world, be of concern to someone who is obsessed (OCD) and hence dying with them.
They are not to be your obsession. I already told you, do not worry about what you shall eat, what you shall wear, where you shall live. Unbelievers focus on all this to the exclusion of real life. You don’t have to because God will take care of your self-interest. When you surrender them to God they become God’s interests. You know longer have to worry about them, because God wants you to live carelessly. It should seem to others that you don’t have a care in the world, only then are you living as my disciples—living carelessly.
Acts 15:1-2; 5-10 The Council at Jerusalem 15 Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” 2 This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question.
5 Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the Law of Moses.” 6 The apostles and elders met to consider this question.
7 After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you already know that God did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. 10 Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? 11 No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” 19 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Jesus concluded, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God (9:62).”
Living carelessly requires letting go of self-interest, of judgmental attitude toward others, in favor of embracing God’s interests, God’s love, God’s mercy. How can I do this if I don’t know what God’s interests, love and mercy are? How do I know when I am?
Paul writes an answer to the church at Galatia, a new mixed race Gentile and Jewish Christian community, “Walk in the Spirit: Live a life habitually controlled and guided by God’s spirit.”
Our discipline is not following laws, but making it a habit to surrender everything to God. It sounds simple but our flesh, our human nature will react negatively to this. It fears that if we surrender, somebody else will get ahead of us-somebody else will be noticed before we are noticed- someone may miss dealing with our issues, our rights, and our place in the kingdom of life.
Living carelessly is developing the habit of surrendering everything to God. How do we know when we have developed this habit? Paul answered: The whole law, the real goal that God has in mind for us is summarized in one idea, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
I was driving over the detour around the tunnel in old downtown Richmond, and as I turned south on Washington and headed for the sharp curve down the hill toward the beach, a sign posted by a neighbor read, “Drive as if your children were out here playing.”
Jesus said, “As you would have others do unto you, do also unto them.” Instead of the “me first and foremost” agenda, put the needs, the hopes, the aspirations, the concerns, the prayers, and the longings of your neighbors in place of your own.”
Jesus let us know clearly that to live with total disinterestedness, to live a life wholly focused on God and the well-being of God’s creation, would give us the careless life, the abundant life, the spirit-filled life, the life of peace and joy and faith and hope in the midst of every storm, every challenge, every conflict, every calamity. But it will also move us away from judging our neighbors as to whether or not they measure up.
Peter had to remind the church that God had already demonstrated that he fully accepted Gentiles as believers, as made righteous through Jesus Christ, even though they knew nothing of the law and did not and probably would not follow it (Acts 10-Gentile Cornelius). He then declared that they should not put a burden (adherence to the Law of Moses) on Gentiles when even they, as Jews, had never been able to follow it. Peter concludes that both Jew and Gentile are saved, delivered from the stain of the human condition called sin, not by following the law but by accepting the full love, forgiveness and acceptance of Jesus Christ.
If God has accepted us fully, even though we didn’t measure up, then God accepts them, too. God accepts every human being because of Jesus’ righteousness, not human righteousness.
Our prayer is that one day, Christians in our time will fully accept this truth, and will no longer insist that full adherence to the Law of Moses, the same error that these early Christian “Pharisees” made, is necessary to live in complete acceptance, love, faith, harmony and joy with God. Thanks be to God for his unconditional, all-consuming love.
