Over My Head…

Over my head I hear music in the air;

Over my head I hear music in the air;

Over my head I hear music in the air;

There must be a G-d somewhere.

-Negro Spiritual

Over my head, I heard a certain sound.  But it wasn’t music.  It sounded a bit like wind, a bit like distant thunder.  But unlike the wind, it did not cool my skin, but it gave me chills.  Unlike distant thunder, it did not promise the coming of a gentle cooling rain, but something more ominous and frightful.  Over my head, I heard a certain sound like a restless shuffling.  I heard the sound of spectators in the sankofa section of the cosmos, the great crowd of witnesses, the ancestors shifting in their heavenly stadium seats, some standing to get a better view because they could not believe their spiritual eyes.  Others craning to hear better because they could not believe their spiritual ears.

Over my head, I heard the sound of

Addie Mae Collins • Cynthia Wesley • Carole Robertson • Denise McNair • Emmett Till • Medgar Evers • James Chaney • Andrew Goodman • Michael Schwerner • Ella Baker • Fannie Lou Hamer • Septima Poinsette Clark • Daisy Bates • Rosa Parks • Ralph David Abernathy • Fred Shuttlesworth • Martin Luther King, Jr. • Coretta Scott King • Bayard Rustin • Asa Philip Randolph • Hosea Williams • Crispus Attucks • Nat Turner • Denmark Vesey • Phillis Wheatley • Benjamin Banneker • Richard Allen • Absalom Jones • Gabriel Prosser • David Walker • Dred Scot • Josiah Henson • William Lloyd Garrison • Frederick Douglass • Harriet Tubman • Sojourner Truth • Henry Highland Garnet • John Mercer Langston • Hiram Rhodes Revels • Reverdy Ransom • Octavius Catto • PBS Pinchback • Booker T. Washington • Ida B. Wells • WEB DuBois • George Washington Carver • William Wells Brown • Carter G. Woodson • James Weldon Johnson • J. Rosamond Johnson • Walter White • Whitney Young • Jack Johnson • Marcus Garvey • Langston Hughes • Countee Cullen • Arna Bontemps • Gwendolyn Brooks • Zora Neale Hurston • John Hope • Mary McLeod Bethune • Dorothy Height • Eleanor Roosevelt • Marian Anderson • Billie Holliday • Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. • Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. • Richard Wright • Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. • James Baldwin • Alex Haley • Paul Robeson • Jackie Robinson • John Hope Franklin • Ralph Bunche • Blanche Kelso Bruce • Edward Brooke • Ralph Ellison • Charles Diggs • Harold Washington • Coleman Young • Constance Baker Motley • Shirley Chisholm • H. Leon Higginbotham • Thurgood Marshall • Derrick Bell • Benjamin Hooks • Maynard Holbrooke Jackson • Mack Charles Parker • Lorraine Hansberry • Malcolm X • Jimmy Lee Jackson • Vernon Dahmer • Huey P. Newton • Barbara Jordan • Ron Brown • James Byrd, Jr. • James Anderson

… and hundreds of thousands of others whose names I will never know.  I heard them stand up, inch closer, turn in their seats to see if they heard correctly, that an African-American pastor said he would stay. home. on. election. day. rather than vote for the first African-American incumbent president, or for his opponent, because the President has stated his personal belief that all persons under the Constitution of the United States of America should have the same access to marriage, regardless of whether their intended spouse is of the same or of different gender.

Over my head, I hear these ancestors saying, “WE DID NOT GIVE OUR LIVES FOR THIS.”

Transgressive Love

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day (13 May 2012) and my sermon was titled “The (M)otherness of G-d.” Using Exodus 2:1-10- the birth of Moses- as the scriptural impetus for my Mother’s Day message, I showed that mothers are one representation/manifestation of G-d in our lives. In the text, I indicated three maternal archetypes: the birth mother (Moses’ mother), the adoptive mother (Pharaoh’s daughter), and the mother figure (Moses’ sister). The gist of the message was this: 1) mothers will find a way or make a way to see to it that their children have the best lives that they possibly can, especially in the midst of dire circumstances; 2) mothers will take risks when it comes to the care and well-being of their children; 3) mothers bridge the divide between who we are and who we are to become, keeping us connected to our origins as we reach out into our unknown future toward our destiny. Mothers do these things for their children as maternal G-d-figures in the lives of their children. G-d makes ways when we cannot see our way ourselves; G-d takes risks with us- we may choose to reject G-d, which is a risky proposition for G-d; G-d connects the dots on our life’s path so that our origin is connected to our destiny, again, even if we cannot see how.

I mention this sermon because in the second movement of the sermon text, I was compelled to include language which had not been in the sermon before Wednesday. Wednesday, 9 May 2012, was the day on which President Barack Obama stated his belief that same-gender loving persons should be afforded the same rights to marriage as heterosexual couples. Before Wednesday, there was really no compelling reason to include the language that I included. After Wednesday, there was no way that I could not say something to the church about a matter which had become a political, theological, and ecclesial hot potato for much of the African-American community, and especially for the Black Church. Almost immediately upon hearing the president’s position, certain media-prone members of the African-American clergy community expressed their disdain for the president’s stated position, and called him to task to explain how he could have so callously betrayed those who have supported him so strongly over these last four years. Their protestations were, and are, presumptuous and more than a little frightening, considering the legacy that African-American clergy share with oppressed peoples in this country. I will not enter this portion of the fray here. Others have presented positions which parallel mine with great eloquence (see here and here and here and here.)

My concern here is with a moment of pastoral care that arose in the delivery of this sermon that I was not actively cognizant of, but that my mentor pointed out in our discussion afterward. In pointing out that mothers take risks when it comes to rearing children, just as G-d takes risks with us, I indicated that mothers sometimes transgress the acceptable norms of culture, society, and even the church when they show unconditional love and acceptance to their children who may be too big or too small, too dark or too light (still a regrettable African-American phenomenon in some places today) or who love and are in relationship with people whom some believe to be the wrong kind of people: those who are of the same gender. My budding passion in ministry is the connection between biblical text and pastoral theology, and how reframing narratives that have been used in certain traditional ways can be constructive in helping us work through contemporary issues on which the bible may be silent, contradictory, or even misapplied. The story of the birth of Moses provides an example of two women and a girl who exercise agency in a climate where they were expected to have none. They conspire to save the life of a boy child whose destiny was to be an early grave. In so doing, they participate in G-d’s plan of salvation for humanity. Many mothers have had to find agency, courage, and will to transgress the prevailing norms of society, culture, and church to love their same-gender loving children, in spite of what their neighbors, bosses, pastors, or perhaps even husbands have said about the issue. They, too, have participated in G-d’s plan of salvation for humanity. This kind of transgressive love has been slow in coming in African-American church settings with regard to same-gender loving people, for myriad reasons, not least among them is a literalist view of scripture which has tended to often do more harm than good. (How many abused women were told in years past to return to the place of their oppression and “pray through” the violence? How many children have been victimized in religious settings, but the adults who were most responsible for protecting them were, through their silence, complicit in the victimization?) I was not thinking along these lines when I included that language in my sermon text, but my mentor picked up on it, and he indicated that perhaps there was a mother in my congregation who was able to see through my illustration that she could abandon any notion of rejecting and casting out her child because what was called for in her situation was transgressive love, not strict adherence to faulty interpretation and misapplication of scripture.

I was more than a little bit disgruntled that I had to address these issues on Mother’s Day. I did not feel I had enough time to craft a reasoned response. I contemplated not saying anything at all. But I remembered two things, 1) the promise that I made to G-d and myself upon entering seminary, that I would not simply abandon that which I had learned and earned in my theological education once I entered parish ministry, and 2) Dr. King’s statement about the true measure of a person being discernible in where they stand in times of controversy. Undoubtedly, those who maintain that homosexuality is “an abomination” and that same-gender marriage “is a threat to the very pillar of civilized society” will not be swayed by this idea of transgressive love from mother to child. I have seen too many impassioned speeches and manifestos in favor of continued legalized discrimination against same-gender loving people to believe that one or two blogs will change many minds. But as a pastor, if I can help people to find a way into the love ethic of Jesus when everything around them says that love comes with conditions, then I believe I will have done a service for G-d’s people and a good work for the Lord.