When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...
Since Moses was in Egypt land, Gods people have been struggling for justice while singing freedom songs. Theology can be clarifying. A good sermon has its place. But nothing is more essential for the ...
God of all nations and peoples, Lord of all places and lands, who didst form man of the dust of the ground, and make of him a living soul, we praise thee for the infinite variety of thy human creature...
Exodus 3:7–10, Isaiah 58:6–10 , Amos 5:21–24, Luke 4:16–21, James 2:1–7, Psalm 9:9–10
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent th...
The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...
In his excellent book, Woke Church , Eric Mason shares a personal account of watching people being sold into slavery in real-time with his family: “CNN released an exclusive report in October 201...
I read that Thornton Stringfellow, pastor of the Stevensburg Baptist Church in Virginia, had made one of the most popular arguments for slavery when Baptists in the mid-nineteenth century were decidin...
Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times will scarce believe that it has been s...
Micah 6:8, Exodus 22:21-22 , Isaiah 58:6-7 , Matthew 22:37-39, James 2:1-9 , Psalm 103:6
We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love. Years ago, before the emancipation of slaves, Fre...
In this excerpt by Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, explains the origins of racial identity and difference, necessitated by a slave-based (American Christian) socie...
A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...
This prayer may be offered with or without the congregational response. Due to its length, consider using two or more liturgists to lead the prayer. VOICE ONE: God of Creation, God of Life, In your j...
Few voices captured the brutal reality of enslavement as powerfully as Sojourner Truth. Truth endured profound mistreatment and indignities as an enslaved woman. A severe beating left her reliant on a...
For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a mea...
Let us pray. Almighty, powerful, creator God So often we think we know best. We confess to you our sin alongside the sin of all humanity. We have tried to master creation rather than care for it. We ...
What Paul does is transform the master-slave relationship by insisting that both masters and slaves have the same heavenly Lord and are accountable to him. The emphasis is on mutual responsibility und...
Pastor: For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was no...
One of my favorite Bible illustrations of someone willing to go against the norms of society to befriend another based on love and forgiveness is found in the New Testament book of Philemon. It is a m...
In order to justify colonialism, an idea like white supremacy was needed. The concept that whites were chosen by God and superior to people of color, who were less intelligent, less deserving, and sav...
Leader: God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. All: Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? Leader: The LORD...
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you a...
What do you say to someone who is suffering? And what do you say when it is not just that they are in pain, but that they are being harassed and singled out for violence or slander because of their fa...
Ideas are a matter of life and death. Take slavery, for example, which deems some peoples as inferior to others and regards people as objects to be used. Eugenics similarly witnesses to a whole set of...
What do you say to someone who is suffering? And what do you say when it is not just that they are in pain, but that they are being harassed and singled out for violence or slander because of their fa...
The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general ...
Perhaps no statistic reminds us more graphically of the distortion of power in our world than this: there are twenty-one million slaves in the world today. They labor as brick makers, coffee harvester...
As [Timothy] Keller said, “To not be political is to be political.” American churches in the early nineteenth century did not speak out against slavery because that was what we would now call “getting...
Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a slaveholder and judge in Charleston, South Carolina, was five years old in 1797 when the sight of an enslaved person being whipped seared her conscience. Like many whit...
Lord, you know we are a hard-hearted people. We are prideful. We are stubborn. We are disloyal. We are like the people of Israel who were freed from slavery in Egypt by your powerful right hand, but t...