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)?
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