I wrote this little sermon/speech as a culmination for my Preaching and Protest class. As a class, we got to travel to Selma on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where we witnessed and were witnessed. If I’m honest, I think I (co)wrote this sermon for myself because I needed to inject some hope in my veins to keep me going as I near the end of my master’s program while still engaging the world around me, but I hope it encourages you too.
I have also posted the recording if you’d rather listen to it, but you can find the transcript below.
For the last year and a half, I have been going to Riverside Park at least once a week, sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, other times I’d go in the middle of the day, when you could hear children laughing and screaming in the playgrounds. Other times, I’d go there during the sunset to see a different light and hear the birds as they nestle for the night. In fact, I co-wrote the beginning of this sermon there.
For the last year and a half, I’ve cried at riverside park, I’ve laughed, I’ve walked, I’ve even danced, I've sat in silence, I listened, all as I tried to heal from the emotional abuse I experienced, holding the grief of displacement and illegality, heartbreaks and cancers, I’d come here to breathe after another news cycle where nation states chose the god of money again, over the human lives of Palestinian kids. I’d come here because I didn’t know where else to go. I’d come here because I needed a witness — and a witness I found.
Over the last few months, we have seen how this current administration continues to revoke visas and green cards, deny entry into the country, and honestly, anything else they want to do to any person whom they have deemed against the state. Dr. Willie James Jennings writes, “When the state is confused, they torture people to alleviate their confusion.”
This is the case for the student activists who are speaking out against the genocide in Palestine, and this is the case for immigrants who experience the United States as undocumented residents. They are experiencing the torture of not knowing what will happen next, the psychological and physical pain of family separation, and the removal of autonomy and agency.
The protests across the nation-state of the United States are never-ending, and rightly so. The protest signs are against ICE, police presence on university campuses, against the support of the nation-state of Israel, and against tyranny.
It is easy to see these movements as separate from the history of this country, but family separation isn’t a new concept in the building of this nation-state. From the decimation of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the domestic slave trade, the Great Migration from the South to the North (and other parts of the country), through segregation, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and unjust immigration laws, through colonial borders that hold so much power, family AND land separation are pillars to this nation-state.
According to Capital B, a nonprofit news organization, there are an estimated 5.29 million Black migrants living in the United States, and the risk of detention and deportation is particularly high because many Black American communities already face intense scrutiny by law enforcement. According to the ACLU, despite only making up around 7 percent of the non-citizen population, Black immigrants represent over 20 percent of those in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds. Not to mention that we don’t have enough data for numbers regarding gender, sexuality, and disabilities.
I understand why we focus on our own communities sometimes, and I also understand that systems of white supremacy are always at play, so for Black people especially, anti-blackness is something we are hyperaware of, even in justice movements. Add being a queer Black person or a Black woman, and some of these spaces aren’t safe for us. Including the non-black immigration justice movement, which did not acknowledge its antiblackness until its recent history.
Yet, I hear the words of Jesus in John 13: 34-35 - I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ (John 13:34-35 NRSV)
But Jesus is not speaking of a love that is rainbows and butterflies, Jesus says, “as I have loved you.” And what I know about Jesus is that Jesus’ love was never silent in the face of oppression, in the face of empire. This love multiplied food miraculously, breaking the imposed tax on that amount of food, this love turned water into wine, interrupting the Roman economy, this love healed the ones whom the law had deemed to be outcasts providing an avenue to not have to live in hiding anymore. This love believed empires could be interrupted, so much so, it cost Jesus their life.
Do not misunderstand me, I don’t believe we must sacrifice ourselves, not when Black and brown bodies and lives have been sacrificed on the altar of empire and white supremacy for so long. Surely, I am not glorifying the death of Jesus; I’m simply implying that nation-states, that empires, have used violence and continue to use violence because radical, which is to say, rooted love is an interrupting love, and it’s the opposite of tyranny.
Still, I’m not negating that what lies ahead could cost us our lives. I think of the words of Dr. King, in his famous speech, Our God is Marching on! “I must admit to you that there are still jail cells waiting for us, and dark and difficult moments.” Dr. King knew the struggle wasn’t going to be easy, even after they had marched the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans. Current times prove his words and witness to be true.
So how do we move forward? Who are we remembering? Who has walked before us? Who has survived the end of the world over and over? Who has resisted? And what is the cost?
Unsurprisingly, I found my answer at Riverside Park.
I co-wrote this sermon with the trees because even when they aren’t blooming, they are alive, and they have a story to tell. They have witnessed me for a year and a half, and I wonder how many other people and how many stories they have witnessed. Maybe they, too, were present when Dr. King gave his speech at Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination. Maybe they, too, heard the chatter from the people walking by, and they, too, became hopeful for the end of wars and racism. And in my imagination, I wonder if James Baldwin ever took a stroll there too, or Toni Morrison? And the trees witnessed it all.
Colonial and western narratives have stomped on our sacred imaginations. They’ve tried to steal our ability to dream, to create, to become. But the land—oh, the land—she remembers. She has witnessed it all. She has witnessed us all. She has carried our joy and our grief, our resistance and our renewal. She continues to fight for life. The land has not forgotten, and neither must we.
So today, let us learn from the land, let us learn from one another, let us learn from radical Love, and let us learn from the trees, that have witnessed and refused to crumble under the weight of nation-states.
May we remember that the world has ended many times over for Indigenous peoples all over the world, at the hands of modernity and capitalism, the world has ended for Black people way too many times, at the hands of the state. The world has ended for a five-year-old child whose dad has just been deported. The world continues to end every day in Gaza, and because the world ends, we MUST march on. We must believe and act in rooted love.
May Spirit give us the spirit of the trees that continue to grow, that communicate and strategize underground in the middle of the city unseen by any of us, who continue to provide shelter for the sparrows and robins, who continue to dance with wind, reminding us like Alice Walker, that hard times require furious dancing, may we be granted the spirit of the trees who provide oxygen for our lungs, and who have the courage to witness, may we too have the courage to not look away, to witness death and life, and life, and life.
Amen and Asè.
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