Being around Shelle’s bubbly personality and the great members of the choir is fun and uplifting. I hope to be back in the choir soon, it’s too much fun and friendship to miss!

But I have to confess I’m afraid to return. Not because there is a rumor I will have to sing a solo; my fear arises out of a conversation with Shelle about our having been in choirs that sang Happy Birthday to members in as discordant a fashion as possible. We talked about how fun it was to hear such awful noise, because it makes you squirm and feel very uncomfortable. My fear is that Shelle will be adding this tradition to our choir rehearsals!

The discord that choirs bring when they sing Happy Birthday out-of-whack is in fun.

But there are lots of things that strike discord in our lives that are not fun. This month we have been commemorating Black History Month, a time when we remember ordinary and extraordinary African Americans gifts of deeds of valor and courage, deeds of love and compassion, deeds of marvel and glory, these are not discordance, but, harmony. The discord comes because as a part of these remembrances we have to face the mistreatment of African Americans and its dissonance with the promise of our nation’s founding to see and treat all as created equal.

The purity of the sound of that promise is harmonious; even today it rings right and true. But the unfolding of reality has often been far from that promise, resulting in a long sustained discordance, and it makes us squirm and feel uncomfortable.

There have been a lot of African-Americans in our history who have offered much to remember including: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, Jr.

That’s quite a list to be thankful for. Of course there are many others too.For a moment I want to focus a little bit on one lesser know Black man in our history and then discuss where God can be found in America’s promise and in our hearts in relation to racism.

In 1770 at this very time of year the first shots of the Revolution rang out in what is known as The Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, led a protest that escalated into a crowd throwing snow balls at a British soldier. Support troops arrived. Tension mounted. Shots were fired. Five men died, including Attucks who was known to this country’s founders as “The first to defy, the first to die.”

Attucks was lauded as a true martyr and until the signing of the Declaration of Independence Boston celebrated Crispus Attucks Day, after the signing Boston celebrated the 4^th of July.

The Fourth of July wasn’t the first event to overshadow Crispus Attucks’ martyrdom as the first to die in the cause of Revolution. There’s a famous print of the massacre by Paul Revere. It shows the runaway slave being mortally wounded – the first to die for the cause– not as the person of color that he was, but, as a Caucasian.

A few months after the massacre the soldiers who fired on the crowd were tried. The lawyer representing the captain of the guard was John Adams, a soon to be revolutionary and future president. Adams’ successful defense of the captain included “playing the race card.” Adams argued that Attucks and the other protesters were no more than “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes (sic) and molattoes (sic), Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.”

Ugly stuff, that. Of course we all know it gets uglier. Blacks in America were bought and sold and treated as chattel – enslaved– for another ninety-five years. Then for the next ninety-five years Blacks had to endure cruel treatment under Jim Crow laws in the south and unnamed forms of racism in the North.

Make no mistake about it today, even today, citizens no less Black than Crispus Attucks, endure racism. My seminary days were spent in St. Louis, which is said to be the most segregated city in America. I had the displeasure of observing segregation; towns were divided with Blacks in one part, Whites in another. Black neighborhoods tended to be poorer– some were so desolate they looked like a war zone.

I see some segregation here in Florida, not as much as in St. Louis, but, some older neighborhoods are segregated. I even read that a wall built during Jim Crow for segregation still stands in Melbourne as a reminder of the overt racism once ingrained in the culture.

African Americans raised in poor neighborhoods often have little choice but to have the inequities imposed on the generations before them continue on, as not enough effort has been made to lift the poor out of despair and into more hopeful surroundings.

Missing are equal chances at good jobs; good colleges and modern medicine, as Black babies die in this country at Third World rates. We have made it so doors to better places are allowed to be opened by African Americans, but, we have not unlocked the doors or given the keys to the poor among us so they can open them.

In fairness I think it is easy for someone from the real west coast to criticize. Missouri and Florida were slave states and African Americans have rightfully made both places home. Folks here face the problem of Blacks and Whites living together. Oregon, though has few Blacks.

The town I lived in had little opportunity to prove they’d treat African-Americans well. Frankly, Oregon is segregated, relatively few people of color live there. This is not by chance, it’s a part of their history. I once bought a house in Oregon that had an old unlawful clause in the deed preventing a sale to people of color.

Even today that town in Oregon still remains unwelcoming. Last time I was there I saw the familiar ugly racist name “Sambo’s” at a restaurant. People can quibble about the quaintness of the word and how it reminds them of a cute little story, but there is no getting around the fact the word is an ugly racist epithet.

Crispus Attucks would have been derisively called Sambo. And I dare say that African Americans visiting that small town in Oregon find the “Sambos” sign derisive. So while I can criticize Revere and Adams’ and St. Louis and Florida for racism, as much as I hate to say it, it was not far from the front door of my old church and house back in Oregon.

I don’t really know how talk of racism makes you feel. My guess is most of us are getting a bit squirmy and uncomfortable. I know I am. Who likes to face the ugly stuff of racism?

Well, believe it or not our discomfort is a good thing, the source of that goodness and our uncomfortableness is our Creator’s lure and call that exudes not just from our bible, but from the primary founding document of this country The Declaration of Independence that Crispus Attucks helped bring about.

The fact that Jefferson had slaves, and that Adams derided Blacks cannot keep the fundamental truths of The Declaration of Independence from guiding us today. When it comes right down to it we really do “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those truths are so valuable to us we squirm with discomfort when we hear our neighbors are being alienated from those rights, whether in Oregon, Missouri or right here in Florida.

Those truths ring true and we feel great discomfort with the discord inequality brings to anyone. The ever present Christ within makes us uneasy with inequality. Christ lures us to an awareness of the self-evident truth that we are all created equal, that we have unalienable rights. Racism toward Crispus Attucks, racism in the rest of our history, racism anywhere in the country, and racism in our community today is in disharmony with these truths.

Despite what you may otherwise hear Jefferson and many other founding fathers were not fundamentalists, indeed many, including Jefferson, were Deists, that is they thought creation was created by God and then left like a perpetually wound clock to run on its own. They believed God was not actively present in the world, however, before leaving us to our own devises God was understood to have created us equal and endowed us with certain unalienable rights.

I think as Christians we can agree with Jefferson on at least this count: our Creator did indeed create us equal, and endowed us with rights that cannot be taken from us. But where the Deists differ from most of us here today is that Scripture indicates God has not left us and from that divine presence we sense God crying out incessantly that we are equal and that we should experience in full our inalienable rights.

There’s Biblical warrant for this. Genesis 1 tells us that God created all of human kind in God’s image: “male and female” God created them (Gen 1:26-28). And God blessed them. It doesn’t say some of humankind was blessed, but that all of humankind was blessed. It doesn’t say that some are created in God’s image, but that all are.

In Galatians it’s made even clearer that Christians are to see all humankind as equal. Paul writes: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28)

These biblical truths resonate within us, and we feel great discomfort with the discordance inequality brings. Racism toward Crispus Attucks, racism in the rest of our history, racism in our community is in disharmony with these truths.

Our discomfort is a good thing. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. It’s Christ within and without that makes us squirm and want Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for all our neighbors.

Life is an inalienable right. Our country does not adhere to many of the ten commandments in its laws, but it universally sanctifies one: “You Shall Not Kill” (Ex 20:13). We all are entitled to life by God’s law, and America’s laws aim to prevent life from being taken away without due process. This has not always been so on our soil.

Crispus Attucks had his life taken, so did the millions of Africans and African-Americans who died in the holocaust of slave ships, slave ownership, mob violence and the unjust justice of racism. It’s Christ within that makes us squirm at this horrifying deprivation of life. It’s the Christ within that tells us red and yellow, black and white all are precious in God’s sight, and that Life is an inalienable right.

Liberty is an inalienable right. We are to be free. Exodus is a major theme of the bible. God helps to liberate those who are not free.

When Jesus prophesied in his hometown he emphasized that he came to fulfill these words from Isaiah about freedom: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim the release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:18).

Jesus wants us all to be free. Our country’s constitution guarantees our right to liberty. It’s the Christ within that tells us red and yellow, black and white all are precious in God’s sight, and that Liberty is an inalienable right.

And Pursuing happiness is also such a right. God wants us to be happy. In the invocation that I read from Ecclesiastes it is clear that God’s aim is happiness for us. God longs for no more sounds of weeping and cries of distress. God’s call is for a world where “[t]he wolf and the lamb shall feed together [and] the lion shall eat straw like the ox . . .” It’s a world where no one will hurt or destroy (Isaiah 65:19b-25). All of humankind is lured by God to be happy.

In 1 Thessalonians we are told to “Rejoice always . . . for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ for you” (1 Thess. 5: 16) . It’s the Christ within that tells us that red and yellow, black and white all are precious in God’s sight, and that Pursuit of Happiness is an inalienable right.

Deep in our souls Christ vibrates the unmistakable pure harmonics of the music of equality for all, and the music of undeniable rights for all. The founders of our nation captured the essence of this music and brought it to the surface to vibrate through the two hundred and thirty-two and half years since our nation’s birth with the beautiful words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When we hear of inequality, of the denial of these rights it strikes a resounding discord that makes us squirm with discomfort as that news is in disharmony with God’s way and the words of both our Bible and our Declaration of Independence, the very document this country was founded upon. That is a good thing, a very good thing indeed. That discomfort has served to move us to change from a country that thrived on slavery, to a country that abhors it. That discomfort has served to move us from a country that tolerated Jim Crow to one that will not tolerate it.

That discomfort serves to move us today to disdain racism and other discrimination and oppression – and to strain to move away from it. And as odd as it may sound that discomfort is a part of our own pursuit of happiness, for as the Psalmist tells us “Happy are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times” (Ps 106:3).

The Declaration of Independence and the very country it served to found are full of the promise of equality and important rights, and regardless of our no doubt differing views on how far the nation is from fulfillment of that promise, we can all celebrate the promise and the birth of the nation that has moved closer and closer toward it, even while suffering from the pain oppression of others causes all of us.

God’s call can be heard in the words of the Declaration of Independence, God’s cries can be heard in the mistreatment of African Americans in our history and even today.

God’s tears make us squirm.

God’s call makes us move away from oppression and celebrate its demise. Black History Week brings both God’s tears and call to the forefront of our lives. That’s a great thing since it keeps us moving toward justice and righteousness and shalom.

Amen.

Note: I gave an earlier version of this sermon in the summer of 2005 at Lincoln City, Oregon.

Scott Elliott Copyright 2008