The Responsibility Of The Redeemed

**This sermon was delivered on June 7, 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom He hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy (Ps. 107:2).

There is an old song that the church sang that said, “If we ever needed the Lord, we sure need Him now. I need Him every morning, I need Him at night, and I need Him at noonday, when the sun is bright.”

“We need Him when we are happy, we need Him when we are sad, we need Him when we are burdened, just to make our hearts glad.”

We do need Him now to make our hearts glad, and to give up some peace during this turmoil.

The events over the past week are heartbreaking. We watched a man asking for his breath for his life, and he was given more pressure by a knee. He became another casualty of a senseless death at the hands of one that supposedly was there to serve and protect. We had not got out of our system the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, who was running for his health and it became a run that ended his life.

We were still reeling and rocking from the death of an EMS young lady, Breonna Taylor that was gunned down innocently in Louisville because the police had the wrong address of a drug dealer. So, the cup was already full, and then the Minnesota moment happens, and things just erupted.

Then our sadness was compounded by the behavior of those who went to the streets under the banner of protest, and it became something far from the intent of the protest. What was supposed to be a march of honor and community concern, was turned into dishonor and community chaos.

King was right - riots are the language of the unheard. And might I add - is the language of the underprivileged and the oppressed, and those who are tired of promises that are empty and the repetition of the same old thing. Riots are the explosion of those who were already on a short fuse.

And all this pain happens during an unknown virus that is causing death, unemployment, confinement, and fear. So, we are being attacked by what we do not know and understand, and we are attacked by what we have known all the time and have not found a vaccine. And so, the heat of hurt and anger, and the repetition of the same thing that keeps happening, it just boiled over. It boiled over not just among the brown, black, but the fair-skinned as well.

- But we know that two wrongs will never make a right!

- Right is right even if no one is doing it, wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.

- You do not need religion to have morals. If you cannot determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion. If you just understand the secular meaning of doing unto others, (not the biblical meaning) as you would have then done to you.

There is a generation or two who are not necessarily appreciative or do not give reverence to the history, struggles, and the price that was paid for Civil Rights. Therefore, they are angry and energetic but do not know how to channel that anger and energy in a positive context. And they do not place the highest value in understanding the plight.

And then there is that generation that knows about the struggle, the history, and the price. They lived it, saw it, and have seen and enjoyed the fruits of that labor, and we wondered what happened given the advances and the distance that we have come. Given the lessons and the accomplishments, why are we still living in an Emmett Till era?

We join Mays when we think about it. Mays said it so well, “We have mastered the air, conquered sea, annihilated distance and prolonged life, but we are not wise enough to live on Earth without war and hate.”

How can we have made all these amazing advances on Earth, in society? How can we be so bright and brilliant over here, and yet living in the dark ages of what we thought should have been solved by now?

How can we be so good with machines and technology and so bad with human contact?

It was in that movie Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks; you know it revolved around the real possibility that those 3 men could have died in space because the heat shield was blown off during the launch. And the entrance into Earth was a risky one; it was life and death. One of the NASA engineers says to Gene Kranz, who was the man that called the shots at the center, if the crisis could be the darkest hour in the history of NASA? Gene responds with an epic response, “No sir. This is going to be our finest hour.”