Preaching is a vital part of the worship experience. Worship is not an escape from the world; however, for many African Americans, whether in the traditional Black church or the Euro-American (White) church, it is through the worship experience that Black Christians are able to either hear about or create a world in which they are valued—one where they are able to live into God’s love for all God’s people. Through the worship experience, and particularly, the preached word, African Americans hear and experience the way life should be on this earth; a life that is in congruence with God’s will for creation. It is through their understanding of God that they are able to live into their trust in a God who, in all too many cases, has been depicted as White and merely tolerant of those who, it was once claimed, did not descend from Adam,26 and were unworthy of salvation—at least White salvation. As Frederick Hilborn Talbot writes, “It is through preaching that Black people are given hope as they struggle against oppression in society; as they gather to hear that God is incarnational and is present in their struggles; that God loves them, and shares in their common life and pain.”27
Annie Woodley Brown offers that the Christian Church has been and continues to be caught between the knowledge of good and evil as opposed to being the countercultural voice against evil. Rather than being the face of God where all are valued and everyone is loved as one’s neighbor, the Church has fallen prey to the secular world’s embrace of racism.28 Not only has it embraced the sin of racism, the Church was at the taproot of racism in this country and that sin needs to be called out in preaching. There is a saying in the Black church that if it isn’t preached from the pulpit, it isn’t important.
The manure of racism fertilizes the ground in which “God’s gonna trouble the waters” to experience a different way of viewing the world into which the incarnate Jesus was born; a world in which Jesus came to turn it right side up; a world in which God’s people recognize that racism is the antithesis to God’s creation. It is into this world that the preacher steps, who after having already prepared a sermon, sometimes has to tear it up, and begin anew. Another unarmed Black man or woman has been shot to death by a police officer. Or perhaps, the waters need to be troubled because White supremacists have burned yet another Black church. Or, another Black man has been freed from prison because of new DNA evidence that proved innocence. Or, Black children have been suspended from school because their natural hair does not conform to white standards. Or, perhaps the preacher is just tired of seeing Black bodies used as fodder for the criminal justice system or corralled in ghettos created by unjust housing and economic policies. The list can go on and on. Preaching is soul work, and preaching racial justice challenges even the best of preachers. Preaching, according to Frank Thomas, is “terrible and dangerous. It is terrible because if we do our job well, preaching troubles and shakes the foundations of the world. True preaching dares to speak truth to powerful forces that have their own ‘alternative facts’ and do not want to be challenged.”29
Preaching is difficult, particularly in times when the Church and the country are polarized. The preacher can be the most polished, the most charismatic, the most dynamic, and still, preaching can cause butterflies, cause angst. Preaching about race is traumatic, teaching about race is traumatic, even with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is traumatic because it is difficult to determine how the sermon will be accepted, if the sermon will be accepted, and whether or not the sermon will move the hearers to do something. Crafting a prophetic sermon that speaks to both those who are in positions to change the status of the marginalized and those who are marginalized takes skill.30 Regardless of whether or not the race of the preacher and those in the pews match, what for some is viewed as politics can either bring the congregation together or tear it apart. However, womanist theologian Katie Geneva Cannon reminds us that “preaching is a divine activity” and when we look at race and racism, that divine activity calls for the Word of God “to be proclaimed or announced on a contemporary issue with an ultimate response to our God.”31 There is a proviso when preaching a word that disrupts, when preaching becomes dangerous: it “risks challenging those in power,”32 and when that happens, be prepared for the preacher to be approached about preaching politics. Yet, preaching done right has the power to free the oppressed from the constraints of a racist society and renew hope in what could be. Preaching done right has the power to transform those who hear the word proclaimed if only temporarily.33
Preaching has the power to be a corrective, says W. Scott Haldeman:
[Preaching] provides Christians with an opportunity to leave behind—for momentary and fragile periods—the structures of inequality and violence that pervade our lives and to imagine—and, even more, to experience—an alternative mode of being, a place and time where justice and peace are known, where a communion of love is tasted, ingested and so . . . embodied. . . . [T]o invoke poet warrior Audre Lorde, [preaching] makes us dissatisfied with anything less in our everyday lives.34
What is it like to preach Black Lives (Matter) if the preacher is White and the congregation is Black or the reverse? Is preaching racial justice easier if the preacher’s race and the congregation’s race are the same? Would there be a need to preach Black Lives Matter if, for example, the congregation and preacher are both Asian? What if the congregation and preacher look the same but are culturally different? If the preacher and congregation are White, is there a risk to the preacher when preaching about the racial issues that plague this country today? What is gained? What could be lost? Who would care?
One of the issues facing the Church today is how to attract and keep young people. While providing insight into African American millennials, Frank Thomas,35 the creator of the first and only PhD program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric in the country, offers that the Church must be relevant to this group to keep their attention. Young people are concerned with the “emergence of mass social movements. If the church does not address race . . . or is not thoughtful or skilled in addressing [this] issue, Millennials will consider church not relevant to their needs and struggles.”36 For all too many African Americans, the ability to survive a police encounter is top on their list of priorities. Black Millennials, in particular, go to church with the expectation that they will hear a word that encourages them to believe in the ideals of this country that lift up life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.37 If Church does not engage the issues that affect young people’s lives, we will continue to see them disconnect. Further, while people of color comprise only one-third of US millennials, the fact is that they comprise over one-half of Christians who are millennials and while they love the Jesus of the oppressed, rarely do they hear from the pulpit anything close to becoming active in the fight for justice.38
To preach boldly requires that one break from what is the norm of preaching in many churches: preaching sermons that are laced with a condemnation of homosexuality, that lift up heteronormative male leadership, and focus on Jesus as