recently, i had the honor of preaching the closing worship service of the 2021 Festival of Homiletics. i enjoy this gathering because it’s an annual week-long, interdenominational, interdisciplinary conference that’s all about preaching. conversations, lectures and workshops are punctuated by great sermons.
this year, i preached a sermon about vision and creating the futures we desire to see for ourselves and our communities. at the end of my sermon, i invited the virtual congregation to close their eyes and to hear my vision for healing, restoration and rebuilding. taking the form of a poem, i draw on scripture, sanctified imagination and sacred hope. this is a womanist vision that makes more space for Black womxn, those who love us, and those whom we love. whiteness is displaced from the theoretical, theological, and existential center, and there is a place for each person and each gift. as promised, links from this week’s bounty (music, articles, videos, etc. ) are found throughout.
i pray that you have a wonderful week.
++++
Calling all the healers.
The ones who are not afraid of the wounded and our wounds.
The ones who knows the secret salve recipes and have it lodges within their lips.
The ones who know how to tap into ancestral realms and conjure spirits from the great beyond.
Calling all the wailing women.
Who will turn their faces to the wall.
Who will not pretend that making a post makes up for the fact that our children have passed through fire.
Who will pray in the form of weeping, and whose real tears will alert Heaven to the distress here below.
Calling all the prophets
Who will say no more to the evil that has destroyed our people and our generation
Who will speak the truth in the truthful way.
Who will call the doers of evil to account, in the name of the Lord.
Calling the poets
The ones with life in their tongues. New words. Words that will call the healing waters forth, and will blow the winds of change into motion.
Your words, dripped in our dreams and baptized in our prayers,
will bring our new worlds.
Calling all the artists
The minstrels who will score the rebirth
The painters who will create the evidence that we started over and we rebuilt.
The culinarians who will sustain our bodies in ways that respect the earth.
The artisans who will help to tool our new creation.
And now that we are here,
let us disperse.
we have gathered and we’ve planned and we’ve prayed.
And now we must go searching for our people.
We’ve got a new world to birth.
A new church to build.
What we know has been undone. and we have holy work to do.
And now that we are here,
Let us now repair.
Let us now walk among the rubble, among the destruction.
Let us cry out, “who is still here?”
Let us look closely. What can we save? What can we salvage?
Let us close our eyes and open another sense, for there are those who will not answer and we must go find them. we lost them. but we cannot lose them if we love them.
And now that we are here,
let us speak those things that are not, as those they are.
let us speak that which we see.
We see
the Spirit sweeping through living rooms and coffeehouses, hair salons and dinner tables
the People finally understand that they are inherently holy.
they know that they are the priests.
and that the power is theirs, it is in them, through them and all around them.
We see
virtual gatherings led by Black women.
digital hush harbors, int he words of Dr. Sampson,
where the sisteren are safe from all forms of discursive, ideological, theological and certainly physical violence.
where their ideas and their words are honored,
and where the people hear them with their hearts and their heads.
We see
repentance and reparations.
a tumbling of the prison walls as we sing the spirituals we’ve inherited.
a turn away from policing and a turn towards standing at the gates of our village.
healing the hearts that have imbibed self-hatred from living in a strange land for far too long.
Go Down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.
We see
the dead, the ones who never should have died, we see them among us.
we see you, Emmitt and Trayvon
we see you, Jordan and Tamir
we see you, Sandra and Atatiana
we see you, George and Breonna
we see you, Daunte and Mah’Khia.
in our future, there’s a justice in which you would still be here.
We see
church buildings housing the housing insecure
pastors giving up their seats of power and seeking seats of purpose
the People bowing at the feet of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer and the Trans
fixing our hateful eyes and burning the letters of excommunication
closing our mouths and hearing how we’ve hurt you
We see
the children, dancing to the sounds they hear in their spirits
drawing all the pictures, playing all of the games
their laughter is the new mass choir
they’re teaching us how to be free again.
Calling all those who see it.
Those who would listen to this vision without attempting to silence or co-opt or parse it.
Those who add to their brilliance and their compassion and their hope.
Who see it and thus will create it.
“Behold,” says the Lord. “I am doing a new thing.”