Blessed Frederick Douglass, Prophetic Witness

Today, the Episcopal Church commemorates the blessed memory of Frederick Douglass. Many of you know and remember Douglass from his autobiography that we teach here at ESA. I’ll begin this morning with a brief sketch of his life and then go on to talk about why the Church commemorates Douglass for what it calls “prophetic witness.”

Douglass’s story is both typical and exceptional. It demonstrates both the absolute dehumanization of the American slave system as well as the universal theme of the triumph of the human spirit.

Douglass, like many slaves, did not know who his father was, because his father was probably a white slave master. Like many slaves, he was separated from his mother at a very young age. Like many slaves, Douglass learned to read and write in secret, since formal education was forbidden to slaves. Like many slaves, Douglass’s story recounts the physical and psychological torture that slave masters used to defame and deface the image of God in other human beings. This is sadly and particularly true in the story of Douglass’s grandmother, who was essentially put out to pasture to die in the woods like an animal, alone and afraid. Douglass’s story is the story of human sin, of evil wrought by humans toward other humans.

Yet Douglass was also exceptional in many ways, since he managed to engineer an escape to the North and to freedom unlike so many of his fellow slaves. With that freedom, Douglass intended to become an influencer, dedicating his life to the freedom of others. And he did; he traveled widely, wrote and gave many impassioned speeches defending the cause of human liberty. He attended and spoke at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention arguing for women’s right to vote.

He took a stand against segregation in public transportation and schools. Eventually, he put pressure on Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. He continued to work diligently during Reconstruction against the KKK and other white supremacist systems that had emerged after the Civil War to attempt to re-enslave African Americans in different ways.

Douglass’s work in all of these areas speaks to the hope that an alternate way of life for African Americans, women, and other oppressed peoples would emerge from the patriarchal white supremacist culture, a culture not just of the south, but of the entire nation.

It is these elements of Douglass’s life and work that the Church honors him with the title “prophetic witness.” In the Bible, a prophet is one who has his or her face turned two ways. In one direction, the prophet calls out systems of oppression and evil that are contradictory to God’s character. In the other, the prophet expresses that God has hopes for the world that will come to pass despite human wickedness. The prophets of the Bible, in other words, speak two sets of words at once: words of judgment, and words of hope. Or as another popular phrase puts it, they afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.

This is exactly what the prophet Isaiah does in our passage for today that Leah read a few moments ago. On the one hand, he pronounces a dire word of warning for those who are “complacent,” for those who “feel secure.” These words are for those in power and those with wealth and influence. They are the ones in Isaiah’s time who are oppressing the people without power, wealth, or influence.

Frederick Douglass often turned to Isaiah when trying to find words to describe the profound sense of betrayal and confusion felt by those suffering under the white supremacy of the economic and political systems of his own day.

And Douglass, like the prophets of old, knew that the religious systems were corrupted by power, greed, and supremacist ideologies as well. The popular religion of America, Douglass affirmed, was white supremacy. He stated it clearly, plainly, and prophetically, in a passage that actually speaks about the post-slavery world in which the lynching of black Americans continued for many, many years, well after Douglass died in 1895. He says: “Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”

And yet, somehow, and often inexplicably, the prophetic face is also turned in the direction of hope. Isaiah affirms that, in contrast to the power and influence and wealth of the privileged stands the Lord’s justice, whose fruit is peace, quietness, and confidence forever. This confidence is not just that things will turn out okay in the end; it is a “confidence that God is working out an alternative world of well-being and justice and peace and security in spite of the contradiction” (Bruggemann).

To speak these kinds of prophetic words requires courage and hope. As a prophetic witness, Frederick Douglass was branded with the worst kinds of character assassinations imaginable. He was continually undermined by those in power, since his words threatened the very substance and source of their power. Yet he was also willing to affirm, in the face of this hatred, that “when a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world.”

In this way, Douglass performs the most courageous act of all: to affirm that the way of God, though assailed on all sides by violence and fear, makes us free, as Jesus says in our Gospel reading for today.

Knowing the truth and telling the truth sets us free. The truth is, on the one hand, that the systems of the world are oppressive and violent; and the truth is, on other hand, that God’s justice will prevail.

Friends, I will leave you with this thought, however. There is a danger in writing a sermon like this; it’s the same danger we often face in teaching slavery or civil rights. The danger is that we box up our prophetic figures, like Isaiah and Jesus and Frederick Douglass, and we teach them and honor them as they appeared in the past. We forget that their prophetic witness continues to be important and needed because the same demons they fought in their own lives often resurface with different faces in our own day.

We may be tempted to assume that Douglass’s critique of white supremacy died somewhere along the way in American history, maybe with the Civil Rights movement. But nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, as Professor Kenyatta Gilbert of Howard University says, that now, right now, “we live in death-dealing circumstances that marginalize [and] victimize those persons who are already vulnerable.”

But if the demons of the past are still present with different faces today, and they are, the prophetic witness of the past is also still present, giving both faces of its message to us. As Isaiah says, we still need to tremble in the face of our complacency and complicity with systems of oppression. And yet we still need to hope that, as the Psalmist says, righteousness and peace are the way of the Lord.

The power of Jesus was a power that compelled and drove Frederick Douglass to the incredible witness of his speeches, writings, and actions to combat white supremacy in his own day--but not the Jesus of the slaveholders, but rather, Jesus the liberator; Jesus the one who frees both the oppressed from their oppression, and the oppressor from their oppressive ways.

Even though the slave masters blasphemed and profaned the name of Christ, Douglass maintained a faith that the power of the prophetic message articulated by Isaiah, and lived by Jesus, could, in the power of God’s Holy Spirit, continue to transform the spirit of violent conquest into the spirit of peace, mercy, and righteousness.

May it ever be so, not just in the past, but in the present, and in the future.