“Transforming Freedom”
a sermon by Carol Howard Merritt, Pastor
Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 29, 2008

Text: Romans 6:12-23

While serving a small church in Cajun Louisiana, we begin to notice that the population around us is getting older. And yet, many people are unaware of the resources that were available for them, and one of our members had become a victim of a crime against the elderly.

So, I join with a couple of other members of the congregation to begin a council for the city called SALT (Seniors and Law Enforcement Together). I am working with a group of older community leaders and the police to help the elderly get the services and resources that they need. Figuring that one of the best ways to reach out is to contact the churches, I begin to call all of the congregations in the phone book. In the midst of the calls, I meet Prophetess Perot. A couple weeks later she asks me to preach at her revival at the House of Prayer, and I accept.

I have no idea what is in store when I drive up to the tiny clapboard house. The building has been transported from a plantation and its walls are soaked with history. Houses of Prayer were the one place on the plantation where slaves could meet, without any oversight or fear of their owners. The House of Prayer was where the Bible was read and preached, where revolutions were planned, where hope was reignited. Within those walls, in that safe place, men and women told their stories. They could cry about the beatings, they could whisper the truth about the rapes. The sanctuary was a refuge in every sense of the word.

Upon entering, I find out that the walls are now filled with posters. The words of Martin Luther King, Jr. are written on them, next to the words of the biblical prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. I read them as the heat from the room encloses on me and the smell of fried tilapia fills the air.

The series of services is not a revival in the sense that they are out to save anybody. It’s a week to revive the pastor. All the speakers and singers are there to encourage the congregation and the prophetess in their work. The gathering is made up mostly of women, and when we talk, I find out that most of them are professional cleaners.

The deacons have starched white coats on. They line the walls to make sure everyone is helped. I am thankful that I wore a dress, and my husband is in a suit, otherwise we would feel quite out of place.

We begin the service with singing praise choruses and spirituals. And there’s so much I could talk about—how the prophetess enters twenty minutes late and is seated in a large wicker chair, how the singers are a family act who traveled about from revival to revival–but I need to get to the point, so I’ll skip all that and tell you about the deaconess who gets up to pray.

She’s beautiful. Thin, black, with perfect posture. I’m about 27 at the time, and she’s the same age, but somehow she is far more poised. When she opens her mouth, it’s almost startling, because there is some sort of power behind her words, a force of authority and determination.

She prays through every part of her body, that her mouth, and nose, and ears, and hands, and feet will all serve God. It’s poetry. It’s a prayer form that I’ve tried to copy a hundred times since I first heard it, many times down that aisle. Except for one part, when she referred to God, at first I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t figure out what she was saying.

And then it hit me. She was saying, “Massah.”

Oh no. It can’t be. I thought. And she said it again. And again. She’s my age. She grew up in the same country that I did. She’s smart. This can’t be.

I had this gut-wrenching urge to plead with her, “You can’t do that! You cannot refer to God as your Master. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t. You are God’s daughter. You are not God’s slave.”

I know the address because I’ve read through histories of African American prayer. It is haunting to read it there, in those pleas from 150 years ago, but it feels outrageous to hear it here.

I don’t say anything, of course. It isn’t my place, for I did not grow up worshiping in my ancestor’s house of prayer. And I don’t have the same notions of freedom.

“All theology is local,” says Dr. Angela Sims, an African American professor at St. Paul’s School of Theology. “There are two sides of a shared story…. We have to reorient ourselves. We have to remember that there were two groups of people who were on vessels that left west coast of Africa, crossed the Atlantic to come to the Americas. On the top of those decks of ships named ‘Jesus’ and ‘John the Baptist’ and other names were individuals who stood looking across imagining a brave new world. While in the holes of the same vessels were individuals chained as human cargo whose concept of freedom was drastically different from those who were aboard those vessels.”

But, Dr. Sims reminds us that from the hellholes of those ships, in the midst of any living hell, life can still exist. Individuals can take the worst of a situation and still have moral courage, and a moral agency that can benefit this generation. 

This is such an exciting time in Christian thought, because people, who have experienced freedom in some profound ways, who have come to know Jesus Christ as their liberator, they are telling the stories, from their perspectives, and it is benefiting a generation.

Theology is local. Freedom for the deacon, living in that particular context, where many people looked back on plantation life with a sense of longing was different for her. Slavery was palpable in its historic presence within those walls. Considering the economic situation of the women surrounding us, considering the intense level of racism in the community, the oppression was real. The prayer was somehow coming from the belly of that boat, and yet it was also a prayer of liberation. It was somehow wrapped up in the history of slavery and freedom. It was somehow tangled up in the narrative that is found overarching the Bible, the story of people finding hope in God, and being lead to the Promised Land.

“Freedom” is one of those words that is so common for us, especially in the United States. We have our first amendment freedoms, where we have the right to free speech. We often evoke the cause of freedom for ourselves, or freedom for others as a reason for war.

We use the word, often without thought. It has become so much a part of who we are as a nation, as a people. As progressives, we are always looking to expand freedoms for as many people as we can. Thinking as broadly as we can, we have expanded the rights and freedoms from male property owners, to men, to women, to African-Americans, and we are always working to broaden freedom, while trying not to trample the freedoms of others.

We strive to have freedom for things--like good, strong public education and decent medical care. And we work for freedom from things—freedom from pollution, freedom from poverty, freedom from social injustice. 

As Christians, we keep all of these things in mind as we use the word freedom. As we understand that Jesus Christ is our liberator. And all of this in mind, we turn to Paul’s masterpiece. The book of Romans, where he speaks about the freedom from sin. You can read where Paul was trying to work out many of these ideas in the book of Galatians, where his theology is quite raw, but here, he has captured the poetry and the beauty of his thought. And he presents his theology of sin and grace with these important, palpable metaphors of slavery and freedom. 

We have been set free from the bonds of slavery and sin. We have been given the gift of freedom and grace.

I’ve seen it happen so many times in our personal lives. There are deliberate actions that we engage in, when we exaggerate about a coworker in order to make them look bad. Or nurse resentments and anger until they get stronger and stronger, instead of letting them go. We have chemical dependencies that we’d rather not face. We are unfaithful to our loved ones, or greedy with our wealth, or uncaring to those in need. All of these things that we can hardly keep ourselves from doing.

And then there are a thousand things that we do even though we know that they will harm others or harm ourselves.  There are systemic sins. When we buy a shirt, and find out that the workers that sewed the shirt together were only being paid nine cents an hour and they had to work for twelve hours a day. We may not have deliberately, directly contributed to the sin, but we were contributors to a broken system.

Or when we read about how our food comes from across the globe, and we think about how much petroleum it takes to ship things. And we sit down at dinner with a plate full of guilt, knowing that we cannot grow our own vegetables in the backyard.

Or when we pass by the homeless in our streets, and it seems that there are more of them this year than there were last year. And we begin to lose hope, because it feels like the poor will always be with us.

Or when we read the statistics—we read how many people in our city have AIDS. It becomes too much. The problems are too big. There’s nothing that we can do to fix this machine that we are a part of. We feel powerless and all wrapped up in sin.

And yet, we read Romans. There is a much different story there. There is a hearty acknowledgement of sin. But there is also that redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. Our hope is in nothing less than that gift. Even though we are bound to a history and a system in which we may have been victims, or we may have been oppressors. Either way, we know that have not always loved our neighbors as we love ourselves. Even though we find ourselves working out our faith, we cling to the promise of Romans. There is freedom and liberation in Jesus Christ. There is a freedom from the bondage of personal sin. There is grace in the midst of systemic sin. And there is great hope that we will be liberated, with the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.

That is what the deaconess was saying, I think. In that prayer, when she called God her Master. She knew her history. And she knew the bonds of economic and societal oppression. She knew what it was like to be discriminated against.

But she also knew that she would not be a victim. She was not a slave to any man. Her master was God.

And so I pray this morning, that God will give her freedom. That God will release her--that God will release all of us from the bondage of sin and oppression. And that we will have new hope, and new life, and new liberation, through Jesus Christ.

To the glory of God, our Creator;
God, our Liberator;
And God, our Sustainer.  Amen.