Sometimes writing a news story is not sufficient to convey the importance of an event. This is one of those times.
The emotion of what I witnessed in Little Rock, Ark., today cannot be conveyed in a cut-and-dried news story. It requires interpretation.
The scene was the Statehouse Convention Center in historic downtown Little Rock — the city known for white supremacists blocking the Little Rock Nine from integrating Central High School in 1957.
The occasion was the annual gathering of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, created in 2003 and named for the pastor emeritus of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, now deceased.
The timing was one month into the presidency of Donald Trump, who is waging a campaign against all people of color, overturning civil rights protections and firing federal employees — a huge proportion of whom are Black — by the tens of thousands.
An ice storm had paralyzed Arkansas the day before, and some roads still were not passable. The temperature outside was 22 degrees. The deck seemed stacked against us.
Freddie Haynes and Jeremiah Wright get some amens.
We had gathered in a conference center ballroom to hear a message from Jeremiah Wright, one of three founders of the Proctor Conference and the pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even casual observers will know his name because once upon a time he was pastor to Barack Obama and became ensnared in public controversies in 2008 when Obama was running for president. I won’t take the space here to rehash all that; you can read about it at the link in this paragraph.
Wright, now 83, is a larger than life figure in the Black church in America. Not only did he grow Trinity Church from 90 people to 8,000, he advanced theological education for Black Christians and elevated the training of Black pastors.
What most folks don’t know is that in 2016, Wright suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed, dependent on a wheelchair and with a weakened voice. So it was that rather than preaching to the conference himself, he enlisted another co-founder to preach his sermon for him. That son in the ministry is Freddie Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
Thus, before the expectant crowd, Wright sat bent over in his wheelchair, draped in a clerical stole, and Haynes stood at the pulpit to proclaim the word. He joked that Wright had said he could “Haynes-ize” the sermon if he wanted, but added there’s no way he would mess with a masterpiece.
The biblical text was from Daniel 3. That’s the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refusing to bow down to the golden idol King Nebuchadnezzar had created. In a rage, the king sent the three Hebrew boys to die in the fiery furnace. Yet the three were protected by God and not harmed.
“This sermon was delivered one day after Trump’s White House posted an image of him adorned as a king.”
This sermon was delivered one day after Trump’s White House posted an image of him adorned as a king and celebrated a Trump executive order that says he alone gets to interpret the law.
The reason for selecting this text could not have been more clear. Wright paired it with Psalm 46, with the explanation that this psalm could have been the song Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego sang as praise to God in the fiery furnace.
Wright asked Haynes to read the Daniel passage from the Anglicized Catholic Version of the Bible to capture the poetic language: “If our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.”
The Hebrew boys — whom Wright repeatedly called “Palestinians” — “walked around in the midst of the flame singing hymns to God and blessing the Lord,” the text says. They prayed, “Deliver us in accordance with your marvelous work and bring glory to your name, O Lord, that all who do harm to your servants be put to shame. Let them be disgraced and deprived of all power and let their strength be broken. Let them know that you alone are the Lord God glorious over the whole world.”
He then tied the Daniel text to Psalm 46 by asking: “Who is this God whom they say is our God whom we serve? Psalm 46 teaches us that our God, the God whom we serve, the God 200 years before the birth of Jesus and the God 2,500 years after the resurrection of Jesus is our refuge and strength. A refuge, as you know, is a place where we can find shelter from the storm. Our God is a God who is our refuge. Our God is a God who is our strength. David describes God as what? The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? Our God is a God who is our refuge and strength.”
Psalm 46, like several other psalms, includes periodic insertions of the untranslatable word “selah.” That word, Wright declared, is an instruction to those reading or singing the psalm to rest, to stop for a moment.
“We have to pause. We are to think about it. And as my grandchildren remind me, we are to marinate on what God has said. The psalmist says, when we are confronted with (evil) realities, we are to selah, rest, stop, think about what we are saying, think about what we have seen, think about what we are hearing, marinate on it.”
The God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego is the God who makes wars cease to the ends of the earth, he said. “The war in Gaza, the war in Palestine, the war in the West Bank, the war in the Sudan, the wars in Southern Africa, the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war in Ukraine, the wars in Europe — our God whom we serve makes wars to cease to the end of the earth.”
“God doesn’t always fight your battle for you, but … God will fight your battle with you.”
He recalled the writing of James Baldwin: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.”
The Lord is a warrior for righteousness, Wright said. “Aren’t you glad you have a God who is in the fight with you, a God who will not lead you to fight the MAGA folk all by yourself?”
“Aren’t you glad we have a fighting God? God doesn’t always fight your battle for you, but this reminds us that God will fight your battle with you, the Lord of hosts is with us.”
The Bible is a book that tells of the change possible in people’s hearts, he said. “The psalmist wants us to know that God knows our good days and our bad days. God knows our best days and our worst days. God knows the things we got right and things we got awfully wrong. … God changed us. We can sing with Tremaine Hawkins, “A change, a change has come over me. He changed my life and now I’m free. They should have a book on that song. God knows there are many hymns and gospel songs written and some with that theme. Think about it, selah on it for 10 seconds. What a wonderful change in my life has been wrought since Jesus came into my life. I never shall forget what he’s done for me. He loosed the shackles that set me free. I was sinking deep in sin far from the peaceful shore, very deeply stained with sin, sinking to rise no more. But the master of the sea heard my distressing cry, from the waters lifted me. Now safe am I.”
“Don’t forget God changed us from something and that something was not pretty.”
“Don’t forget God changed us from something and that something was not pretty,” the pastor urged. “What the psalmist is saying here is even more powerful. God is not only a God who fights for us. God is a God who forgives us. He fights. He forgets our sins. God himself says, I will remember their sins no more.”
And when all seems to be lost, God can bring about change, he said. “God was able to place a fertilized egg in Sarah’s postmenopausal body and bring forth a mama’s boy named Isaac. God was able to get in between the armies of Pharaoh and the people of the promise. God was able to open up the Sea of Reeds so that the children of promise could walk through on dry land while at the same time closing up the waters so that Pharaoh’s army got drowned. God was able to have a ram in the bush on a mountaintop, which is not where rams are supposed to be. God was able to, God is able to keep us from falling. God is able to take a crooked stick and hit a straight lick.
“God is able, is able to give us just what we need to fight unbeatable falls. God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all we can ask or imagine. God was able to take some ordinary caregivers and house cleaners that shut down the Montgomery bus system with its segregation ethos and racist onus.”
He then began a litany of Civil Rights heroes whom he said God “was able to work through” to bring change.
“God is able to be the same God today as God was on yesterday. God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all we can ask, hope or think. So let us go from this place determined to continue the fight until victory is won because God is able to give us victory through that same Jesus that God raised from the dead early Sunday morning. Our God is able.”
Freddie Haynes and Jeremiah Wright join the crowd in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
That was the end of the sermon, but we weren’t done yet.
On the giant screens in the room, a video started playing. It was a younger Wright preaching vibrantly at Trinity Church and leading the choir and congregation in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black National Anthem.
By this point, everyone in the ballroom was on their feet singing, and the videographers in the room blended scenes of us singing with the archival footage of the church in Chicago singing. We were one voice across time.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.
It was a moment to be cherished. A moment I’ll never forget. And it was bread for the journey.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality.