Knowing Where You Stand
Slavery, Jim Crow and the logic of Grace.
The following was a sermon given on June 9, 2025 as part of the final “preaching slam” of the Iowa Preachers Project in Charlottesville, VA. Four others and I preached on the epistle for Pentecost, Romans 8:14-17. Except for the final preacher, we were all given one verse to focus on. Mine was Romans 8:15: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption.”
The thing about slavery is that you don’t know where you stand. You don’t know if you belong. My Dad grew up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana and moved to Michigan in his 20s, along with many other African Americans in search of work. Every so often, he would travel to Louisiana to visit his mother. In the 1950s, this wasn’t an easy feat. His sister, my aunt, was a great cook and would make a basket full of fried chicken for the trip because he didn’t know if he could stop at a restaurant to grab a meal. If he grew tired, he couldn’t stop at a motel, so he would pull over on the side of the road until a cop told him to move along. When he made the journey back to Michigan, his mother would make a basket of fried chicken for the trip.
Slavery and Jim Crow didn’t make you feel you belonged. You were always second-class, if that.
Paul tells us that we didn’t receive a spirit of slavery. There are spirits out there that seek to divide, to tell you that you aren’t good enough and need to do more, or worse, that you will never be good enough. You don’t have to deal with racism to be familiar with the spirit of slavery. We live in a world that tells us to perform and to be better or to get in line and it’s never enough.
But all is not lost. Paul also tells us there is another Spirit out there. The Spirit of God, the one that arrived in wind and fire on Pentecost is not a spirit that divides or grinds us down. The Spirit of God brings people in and tells them they belong. We belong through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who began his ministry saying the Spirit of God was upon him to preach good news to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, and free the captives. The Spirit of adoption means we belong, we know where we stand in Jesus. The Design of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which is our creed that’s not a creed tells all of us at Christ’s table that we belong. “At the Table of the Lord, we celebrate with thanksgiving the saving acts and presence of Christ.”
In God’s Spirit, there is are no “Whites Only” signs, but we are one in Christ. May God continue to free us from spirits of fear and know that we are adopted children of God, taking the words of Isaiah the prophet to heart: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;I have called you by name; you are mine.” Preach the good news of Pentecost. We belong to God. Thanks be to God. Amen.