Preaching During a Pandemic

Acknowledgments

In addition to thanking our families, friends, colleagues, and supporters, we would like to thank Niall Kennedy, Joshua Charles, and the good people at Peter Lang Press for their work in bringing this project to fruition. We would also like to thank Michael Gipson, who started this project with us, and for the Communication, Culture, Race, and Religion book series. We also would like to thank the contributors for their submissions and patience as we put this book together during a pandemic. We also thank the Black Church for still finding ways out of no way to serve and minister to the people of God.

Andre

Kimberly

Wallis

Introduction: The Black Pulpit Speaks

In this second volume, we have curated some of the most extraordinary African American sermons (and spoken word) delivered during the first six months of quarantine based on New Testament scriptures that specifically address the COVID-19 Global Pandemic and/or America’s civil unrest Pandemic. Currently, the only collection of sermons (by different preachers) that addresses either a global pandemic or a specific American crisis is Martha Simmons’ and Frank A. Thomas’ edited volume, 9.11.01: African American Leaders Respond to an American Tragedy. Their book addresses the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil where close to 3000 people lost their lives from the attack on the World Trade Center Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the plane crash of United Airline Flight 93.¹ Simmons and Thomas categorize nineteen sermons under four sections: (1) Preach In Times Like These, (2) Prophesy In Times Like These, (3) Persevere In Times Like These, and (4) Proclaim In Times Like These, all to give a message of hope that reminds us that we are overcomers. Simmons argues, “time and again, when evil has spoken, the African American pulpit has also spoken. In all of its diverse forms and diverse faiths, it has spoken. With unyielding belief in the divine who neither slumber nor sleeps, it has spoken. ←1 | 2→With an unwavering belief that right will not always yield to might, it has spoken.”² Thomas claims,

Evil has many faces; terrorism might be one and patriotism can be another. Evil can lurk not only in the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, but also in President Bush and the U.S. Congress. Evil can show up in any country, at any time, strike in any party or government … Evil can center in individual people, such as Hitler, and in entire social institutions, such as courts, police, banks, schools, and churches, as in the case of the American sanctioning of the slave trade, apartheid, Jim Crow, and the genocide of Rwanda.³

To address the evil and systemic racism that Blacks have endured since slavery, we wanted our contributors to have the freedom to address the civil unrest that we experienced during the first six months of the shutdown (March–August). In 2020, police killed a total of 18 unarmed Black people. Out of that number, police killed 11 between March and August (Robert D’Lon Harris, Dion Johnson, Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis, Maurice S. Gordon, Shaun Lee Fuhr, Fred Brown, Mycael Johnson, Donnie Sanders, Breonna Taylor, Barry Gedeus, and George Floyd), six were killed between September and December (Andre Maurice Hill, Marcellis Stinnette, Jonathan Price, Kurt Andras Reinhold, Anthony Jones, and Mickel Erich Lewis), and two were killed in January (Jaquyn O’Neill Light and William Howard Green).⁴ Police killed Green while handcuffed in a police car.⁵ He died in police custody after he was already apprehended, which means he was no longer a threat, and there was no justified reason for an officer to reach for a gun.

By the time the nation imposed a Safer at Home mandate in March 2020, we had just witnessed the February 23, 2020, vigilante killing of Ahmaud Arbery, which immediately reminded us of the February 26, 2012, killing of Trayvon Martin, and the August 28, 1955, killing of Emmett Till because they were modern-day lynchings. The African American community was outraged over this lynching, and the time it took for the three white male vigilantes to be arrested. Then, just as soon as the quarantine began, we were hit with the killing of Breonna Taylor on March 13, 2020. It was the unimaginable realization that a black ←2 | 3→woman could be asleep in her bed and wind up as the fatal victim of a botched police raid. Taylor’s horrific death sparked nationwide protests (and during the summer international protests) over the way law enforcement police Black bodies. People chanted #SayHerName, to highlight specifically the violence done against African American women by police officers⁶ Nearly two months later, when Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, the world witnessed Chauvin torture George Floyd by placing his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9-minutes and 29-seconds while he was already faced down on the ground in handcuffs. The world was outraged, and this egregious act against George Floyd ignited global protests for police reform and racial justice. Many of these protests lifted the names of unarmed individuals previously killed by police.

Naturally, between the COVID-19 pandemic and the heightened civil unrest, we knew that African American preaching would speak truth to power even in America’s current condition. But we did not know what those messages would be, what text preachers would choose, how they would rhetorically shine a bright light on our current condition, or even who would respond to our call for sermons. Additionally, we wondered if we would collect clear examples of womanist preaching and discover the use of womanist rhetorical strategies in the sermons by (male) womanist allies. Would preachers employ the rhetorical strategies of radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-love, or critical engagement? These are the phrases that Stacey Floyd-Thomas uses to describe the tenets of Alice Walker’s four-part womanist definition.⁷ In ←3 | 4→The Womanist Preacher: Proclaiming Womanist Rhetoric from the pulpit, Kimberly P. Johnson claims: