Allan Appel photos
Rev. Barber: “God’s good news must be good news for the poor or it ain’t good news."
At Sunday's Dixwell UCC service.
There’s a real danger that Ancient Rome — with its celebration of opulence and derision of the poor — still lives, and another name for it is America.
That was one of the sobering observations offered at a Palm Sunday service in Dixwell by nationally renowned preacher and poor people’s advocate Dr. William Barber.
Barber’s much-anticipated sermon was titled “The Danger of Trying to Worship God Without a Conscience.”
In a voice by turns booming and whisperingly confidential as if he were revealing the true not yet heeded meaning of scripture, Barber addressed a rapt group of 200 – congregants, students, neighbors — inside the sunny main sanctuary of the historic Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ at 217 Dixwell Ave.
He spoke in part about how the Roman politician and orator Cicero called the poor the “dregs” whereas Jesus said: No, no, the poor are the very center of God’s concern.
In Ancient Rome one percent were all right, and the rest not. Private grandeur starkly beside widespread public squalor.
Sound familiar?
Barber’s appearance and his inspiring stem-winder of a sermon, replete with fascinating Biblical scholarship (you could learn that “anointed” in the Hebrew Bible is used 61 times) along with North Carolina humor, was also by way of announcing the establishment at the Yale Divinity School of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, with Barber at its helm.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove with Dixwell Moderator Cliff Graves.
Barber is best known as a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and the head of a movement that is heir to the turn-of-the-20th century Social Gospel movement of which Martin Luther King and, before him, Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rausenbusch were a part.
“It’s the application of faith and the Gospel to the practice of social justice,” said Rev. Jerry Streets, the long-time leader of the Dixwell church and also now a colleague of Barber’s at the Yale Divinity School.
“The center’s mission is to institutionalize decades-long moral movement work to confront injustice with a moral framework, train the next generation of moral leaders, and produce morally grounded public policy solutions to the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, and the distorted narrative of religious nationalism,” according to the center’s press release.
The center was established in January when Barber began teaching there. His long-time colleague in the work and one of the center’s assistant directors Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove said he and Barber had made a tour of a dozen seminaries, as a part of the Poor People’s Campaign, including Yale, beginning in 2018. Valerie Eguavoen and Roz Pelles are also assistant directors of the center.
“We learned there was a genuine interest in public theology to be part of the training,” Wilson-Hartgrove said.
The idea is to train faith leaders around a “fusion framework” to create a moral public policy agenda, he added.
The public policies that need to be addressed in New Haven, he added, are the same as elsewhere: unaffordable housing, lack of living wage jobs, the poor living in the worst environmental conditions, among others.
That’s the moral part.
Rev. Barber.
The fusion part is to teach how, for example, the homeless in New Haven and struggling Kansas farmers’ issues have to be addressed together and systemically. “The fusion builds momentum for transformation change.”
“He’s going to preach the good news, that Jesus has shown a way to live better,” said Wilson-Hartgrove.
Here are a handful of highlights from the erudite, wide-ranging, bold lesson, which you can hear in its entirety live-streamed here, and below:
What is conscience? To help answer that Barber quoted the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy: “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” Then he added Mohandas Gandhi’s famous Seven Social Sins: Wealth without work; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; religion without sacrifice; and politics without principle.
When you feel like giving up the fight: Barber recalled the moment that Frederick Douglass, on hearing that the Supreme Court had held for slavery in the Dred Scott decision, was on the verge of quitting the abolition struggle. His friend Harriet Tubman spoke to him only a few words: “Frederick, is God dead?” That pricked his conscience and he continued on in the fight.
What’s God’s good news? “God’s good news must be good news for the poor or it ain’t good news. Jesus was a radical interruption [to the Roman powers-that-be] to say you can’t worship the Lord without transforming the system.”
Personal religious breakthroughs: If whatever conversionary or salvific experience you’ve had doesn’t produce commitment to change, it isn’t genuine. “It’s got to be more than hallelujah or having a good time. I tell my students we’ve got too much bumper sticker [Christianity] going on. Any form of Christianity that doesn’t teach it [transformative social change] is no Christianity.”
What about Congress these days? “Often Congress opens the day with a prayer and spends the rest of the day preying. What do we do when so many in power are without conscience? Then politics becomes a form of exercise, policy violence.”
The bad news history: How did people who claimed to be religious annihilate Native Americans? They tried to worship God without a conscience.
MLK’s Insight: Toward the end of his life Martin Luther King said that the South’s greatest fear is that poor whites and poor Blacks would get together to form a voting block.
The pandemic: During the pandemic 330,000 people died for lack of health care. And the rich got richer. What is wrong with the conscience of the nation! We changed the names of the poor to “essential workers” to get them to work [in many dangerous situations] and then don’t support them with health care. That’s an absence of conscience.
Rich and Poor Disparity: Four hundred people today earn $97,000 an hour while most people struggle near minimum wage. That’s not Ancient Rome but here. Here 700 people die a day from poverty, 250,000 a year. “If it’s upon me, then it’s upon all who speak in my name!”
Violent Deaths: Maybe the Holy Spirit is telling us [like Emmet Till’s mom], “Don’t close another casket. And then force the nation to deal with its conscience.”
Barber concluded, as is customary, with directing his listeners to think soberly on the meaning of life occasioned in the ensuing days by the example of the Jesus story: “I’ve decided life is too short to live without a conscience. On that day when you die your titles, accolades, and power will not matter. But whether you had a conscience will. Will someone be able to say [when you have died] because of you someone had a better life.”
Click here for the new center’s site and its list of lectures, round tables, and other activities.