New Testament Reading—Luke 4: 16-21
Over the next four weeks or so, we will be doing a series entitled “Lenses of Faith.” In this series, we will be exposing ourselves to different perspectives and views of the world and in particular our country. Some of these perspectives will come to us through the medium of art. Others will come to us in writing, and still others will come to us through the spoken word. The idea is that, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with the diverse perspectives brought before us, we will each be enriched by the process of trying to look at the world through these different lenses as we seek to improve upon our own moral and spiritual vision.
Today, a number of voices are being presented to us. Through these works of art, we have a lens provided to us by our very own Mary Maxwell as she spurs us to reflect upon the costs and consequences of the war in Iraq. In the narthex, you will find handouts explaining the symbolism on the flags. This morning we also have the Rules of Engagement display in the narthex that will evolve week by week. This display will focus on the lenses provided to us by both the scriptures and the voices of Iraq war veterans. The display juxtaposes the rules of engagement soldiers are given for when to use force with the rules of engagement we are given in the scriptures on how to treat others. Finally, this morning we will also consider two other lenses that complement each other. We will be considering the scripture reading that Leslie read for us earlier and a reading from a speech by Frederick Douglass.
The speech by Douglass I believe will help us to reflect more fully upon the words of Jesus. In the reading from Luke, we see Jesus springing forth in the advent of his ministry from the heritage of the Hebrew Scriptures and prophets. In particular, we see Jesus embodying the ideals of the Israelites encoded in the laws concerning the year of Jubilee. It was in the year of the Jubilee that freedom and equality were restored to the land. The captives were released. The oppressed were set free. That was precisely the mission Jesus came to fulfill. In challenging the oppression and slavery of his day, Jesus, like the prophets before him, rooted himself in the ideals of the Israelite people.
Similarly, in challenging the oppression and slavery of his time, Frederick Douglass rooted himself in the ideals of this nation. On July 5th in 1852, Douglass was invited by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to speak before a largely white audience of five to six hundred people in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. At the age of 34, Douglass was then the most famous black American in the country and the leading orator for the abolitionist movement. He was an international celebrity having conducted a 21-month speaking tour in Great Britain. Black abolitionist William Wells Brown said that whites and blacks “had talked against slavery, but none had ever spoken like Frederick Douglass.” Douglass’s speech in Rochester is considered by some to be the greatest abolitionist speech of the 19th Century.
As Yale historian David Blight observes, Douglass’s speech employed an ingenious rhetorical strategy. After some self-deprecating remarks about his sense of inadequacy before the audience, he begins by lifting up the noble sentiments enshrined and celebrated by the national holiday. He says, “This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.” In speaking of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass then hints at the purposes of his speech saying, “The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever the cost.”
Tellingly, however, in this opening part Douglass speaks to his white audience of “your nation” and “your fathers.” At the time, Douglass, like most black people, “regarded the Fourth of July as a white holiday.” In fact, for a number of years, free blacks in the North along with white abolitionists had made the Fourth of July an occasion for protest, for highlighting the contradiction of a nation that celebrated freedom and equality but practiced slavery. So it was, that after establishing a rapport with his audience and praising the founding fathers and their values, Douglass shifts gears. He declares that he has come on that day to focus on the present, and it is during this part of the speech that Blight imagines even the good abolitionists in the audience squirming in their seats from discomfort. Douglass declares:
"Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."
Douglass’s speech continues with the portion found in your bulletin for today. It reads:
"Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view…Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any [one], whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just."
I suspect that, similar to the kind of discomfort members of the audience felt in hearing these words, an unease was also felt when the famous female author from India, Arundhati Roy, spoke in 2003 about the United States at Riverside Church in New York City. A key difference, however, was that Roy did not speak as a U.S. citizen, and so some might feel that she did not possess the same moral prerogative as a Frederick Douglass. Roy, nevertheless, addressed that point when she said:
"Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government…But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king."
When I first conceiv
ed of the Lenses of Faith series, I thought I would confine myself to voices in the United States, but then this speech by Roy made me realize the moral need, or rather imperative, for people in our country to listen to the voices of those from other parts of the world.
For us in the United States to truly live up to our own values and highest calling, we need to hear the voices of both the U.S. soldiers in Iraq and the people of Iraq. In fact, in listening to some of the voices of soldiers from Iraq, we learn that despite the language barriers, they themselves have been affected by hearing the people of Iraq speak for themselves. One soldier, named Hart Viges, tells the story of how his unit never once raided the right house in searching for enemies. On one occasion, when he pointed out to his sergeant, that the men they were apprehending on a raid were not the ones for whom they were looking, his sergeant responded, “Don’t worry. I’m sure they would have done something anyways.” As the two of them were talking, the mother of the Iraqi men being apprehended was crying before Viges, and Viges recalls, “You know, I can’t speak Arabic. I can speak human. She was saying, ‘Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.’”
The challenge I want to present before us in the coming weeks is that of opening ourselves up to hear other voices, to hear them speaking as humans, and to allow their voices and their perspectives to call us back to our own values. In his speech, Douglass, after having brought down his thunderous words upon the audience, again switches gears. He returns again to the principles cherished by a nation. He reminds the audience of the values of their faith. He quotes from the Psalms, and he voices the same values Jesus voiced when reading from the scriptures of Isaiah. In closing his speech, Douglass recites William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist poem “God Speed the Year of Jubilee.”
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall viley bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
When Douglass finished his speech, the crowd was grateful. Their prophet had called them back to their highest ideals and deepest aspirations. A journalist present wrote that as Douglass took his seat, the crowd roared with “a universal burst of applause.” Today, in our own time, may God speed the year of Jubilee. Amen.