Daily Lesson for November 26, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Nahum chapter 1 verses 2 and 3, and 6-8.

2 A jealous and avenging God is the Lord,

   the Lord is avenging and wrathful;

the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries

   and rages against his enemies. 

3 The Lord is slow to anger but great in power,

   and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. 

6 Who can stand before his indignation?

   Who can endure the heat of his anger?

His wrath is poured out like fire,

   and by him the rocks are broken in pieces. 

7 The Lord is good,

   a stronghold on a day of trouble;

he protects those who take refuge in him, 

8   even in a rushing flood.

He will make a full end of his adversaries,*

   and will pursue his enemies into darkness. 

Yesterday we visited Montgomery, Alabama and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which acknowledges America’s history of racial terrorism against blacks and other minorities. Among the thousands of victim names at the Memorial, we found the name of Porter Turner, Irie’s great-uncle who was lynched by the KKK in Dekalb County, Georgia in 1945.

The specter of that lynching and the thousands of other murders at the hands of white terrorism in America have hung over black families like Irie’s for generations. The Memorial is a significant step in remembering the horror of lynching, and hopefully beginning to come to terms with its legacy of brutality, terror, and social control. 

This, too, was America.  Even in 1945 — just days after the end of WWII, a war fought and won in the name of liberty and justice against totalitarian brutality and dehumanization. 

This week is Thanksgiving week. And I am drawn to recall yet again a line from Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation issued amidst the horrors of the Civil War in 1863.  Lincoln summoned the nation to give thanks.  We almost all remember that. But he also summoned it to repentance — something we too often forget.  The nation was to give thanks “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”.

Slavery was our national perverseness and disobedience, and Lynching her ugly daughter. Lynching was born because what in his sermon upon Lincoln’s assassination Philips Brooks called “the Spirit of Slavery” refused to die. That Spirit of perversity and disobedience disobedience outlived the Civil War. It outlived WWII and the Southern Freedom Movement. And it still lives today. It lives anywhere and everywhere we refuse “humble penitence” for the sins of our nation. 

It’s Thanksgiving week. There is much for which to be thankful. Yet gratitude is only one part of the summons. The other is penitence, it’s acknowledgment, and remembrance, and reparation for the perverseness and disobedience of the past, and the foresworn end of the Spirit of Slavery even in the present that we might, in the words of Lincoln’s Proclamation:

“implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

So may it be.