This message of liberation galvanized the southern freedom movement, South African liberation movement and liberation movements around the world. It is a dynamic message that changes the status quo and rearranges our relationship with God and others. It is a justice message of non violence. It is a message that reminds us that we are not entrapped by history; we have the collective power to free ourselves from the bonds of a tyrannical state. It reminds us that we have the power to make a new history and a new world. The view of our collective power challenges the notion that history begins and ends with the Empire.

Ruby Sales goes on to outline with a number of specific examples the differences between Empire Christianity and liberation Christianity. Then she says this near the end:

Our job is to have these conversations that help Black Christian Conservatives remember so that we as a community do not fall prey to demagoguery. For those of us who remember, we are called upon to stir within Black Christian conservatives the reminder we serve a God that brought our us out of the tyranny of enslavement and southern apartheid. This same God enabled Black southern sharecroppers and their allies to bring down southern apartheid, one of the most powerful governments in history, without firing a shot.

There is a great spiritual and social danger of not remembering this God and what God has been with us and for us. When we forget we allow other people to reconstruct God in their own image and to make us believe that their God of hate and injustice is our God. When we bow down to their God, we bow down at the altar of the Empire.

Finally, it is important to remember that our ancestors, these magnificent and ordinary people had a vision of God that broke with the enslavers' view of God. Their view of God moved them to a theology of agape that enabled them to say in the midst of enslavement.:" I love everybody, I love everybody, and you can't make me hate you; you can't make me hate you."

[Complete text is found at http://www.crmvet.org/comm/04elect1.htm]

(All sing:) "O Freedom...before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free....No more cryin'....No more dyin'...."

When you imbibe the blood and flesh of Jesus, you receive power to live a life that calls others to this freedom.

Amen.