With Fear and Trembling: In Honor of Jubilee Day

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring by executive order that the more than 3.5 million enslaved African American human beings in the secessionist Confederate states were legally free. Last Sunday, the NAACP Brazos County Branch hosted a Jubilee Day Celebration service in honor of that moment in our nation’s history. The public event, held at a Black church, Galilee Missionary Baptist, in Bryan, was attended by educators, faith leaders, law enforcement and civic leaders. The program was indeed celebratory, with contemporary gospel praise music, uplifting prayers, and a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, given by a Rudder High School student.

Sitting on the front pew with the clergy, I felt honored and humbled, especially given that I was the only minister who was not Black, and that the obvious camaraderie and deep fellowship that existed between those pastors, in whose company I was blessed to be counted, clearly ran deep.

At the center of a jubilant service was the keynote address, given by a retired educator, that gave the diverse cloud of witnesses gathered in that space an unapologetic history lesson. We were reminded about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the terror of slavery in America, and the continuance of racial injustice in the forms of Black codes and Jim Crow and the mass incarceration system. The keynote speaker connected the dots from slavery to the building of a detention center today in Dallas to house more convicts, pointing out the statistic that Black boys who do not learn to read beyond a fourth grade level are 40% more likely to be incarcerated. The glaring point was that racism and white supremacy didn’t go away with the Emancipation Proclamation, or with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or even with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency; rather, those still-unacknowledged sins of our country’s past simply changed forms, adapted to changing times and kept rearing their ugly heads into our present day.

Meanwhile, I had been asked to offer a “prayer for unity.” And that prayer would be offered right after the keynote presentation. So, when I was called on to pray, I approached the podium with the kind of “fear and trembling” with which the apostle Paul instructs the Church at Philippi to “work out [their] own salvation” (Philippians 2:12).

I had prepared a prayer, but as I watched the congregation stand up and hold hands across the aisle and over the pews, my hands and voice got shaky. I thanked the speaker for saying that Jubilee Day was not only a celebration, but a charge to do the ongoing work of dismantling racism and white supremacy. And then I spit out the words to a song I had written in the summer of 2020, when the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd had invoked what, at the time, felt like a fever-pitch cry for racial justice. The song was titled, “Before We Get to Harmony”:

There’s a rock inside my shoe, but I can’t feel it

A dead body in this room, but I can’t see it

And I could keep on going and pretend there’s nothing there

If the levees break and everything that’s mine is spared

It’s my right not to care

But if I choose to feel and if I choose to see

I’d have to own up to the distance between you and me

The pieces didn’t fall by happenstance

Where I keep passing go, and you aren’t given half the chance

It’s evident that

We’ve been telling lies, more than just a few

And innocence must die before we get to…harmony

Then I offered this prayer…

Everlasting, Ever-Loving God, Holy Wisdom Who has brought us thus far on the way, we thank you for freedom and praise you for liberation: freedom in mind, body, and spirit; liberation from any form of bondage that denies our dignity, wellbeing, and full personhood; freedom from all manmade systems of oppression; liberation from any death-dealing powers that would deny even a single person from living out the hopes that You, Sovereign God, have for us in this world.

But in the midst of our thanksgiving and praise, we also lament the sordid divisions that fester between us as neighbors in this nation—divisions founded on the sinful belief that I can only be somebody if someone else is below me. This afternoon we pray that you, Liberating God, would deliver us from that toxic myth of insiders-and-outsiders, of us-and-them, of pure-and-impure so that we would be delivered into your kingdom of equality and equity, of mutuality and neighborliness, and of compassionate community on earth as it is in heaven.

In short, we pray for unity. We pray for unity, and not uniformity. We pray for unity that celebrates our diversity, as each of us are made in the mosaic of your divine image. We pray for unity that commits to mutual accountability, questioning, and learning. We pray for unity that doesn’t leave anyone behind. We pray for unity that refuses to sacrifice individual members for the sake of the body, for we know that a living body thrives by preserving and protecting difference, and by valuing and honoring each of its members as essential to the whole.

By your grace, O God, and in the spirit of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s words, remind us that I am somebody because we are a body that needs everybody to survive. Unify us in justice, mercy, and love. Unify us in compassion, kinship, and community. Unify us in honesty, repentance, and joy so that true peace can exist between all of us for the sake of the whole world that you so love. Amen.

So, as we strive to become the Beloved Community that The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of, a unified people who see one another as friends and treat one another with justice, mercy, and love, may we work out our salvation toward that blessed end with honesty and integrity, with courage and compassion, with fear and trembling. Lord, in your mercy.