When writer and social critic James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time in 1963, he made the very first and last words of the book a stanza from a song of the enslaved: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!” Through this framing of today’s reading from Genesis, Baldwin reflected on love, the racial calamity of Jim Crow America, and Christianity’s role in creating and – possibly – remedying the situation. 

Baldwin begins with his childhood, when, in response to the limited options presented to a Black boy in Harlem, he put his energies into church. After rising quickly in his community, and becoming an exceptionally young preacher who rivaled his own father’s preaching skills, he became jaded about the compromises involved in being a pastor of an institutional church. He sensed himself a hypocrite, as if he were leading people into a religious stupor that prevented racial and economic justice. He wanted, 

…to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and, beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life (39).

The faith that he began to move on from, that he thinks all Christians must move on from, was based on the idea that down at the cross one finds salvation in willful ignorance. He talks about communing as a teen with Jesus, “my dearest Friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain we struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out” (34). This is salvation in not-knowing, and Baldwin thinks purposeful oblivion is part of the root of the racial catastrophe of white supremacy – that the problem is not just that white people generally don’t know Black people, but don’t want to. It’s not just that they don’t know the havoc they wreak on Black communities, but that they actively avoid finding out. Baldwin links this problem to an immature understanding of Jesus, the cross, and salvation. Salvation is ignorance in the imagination of so many white Christians because they seek being saved, not from their sins, but from the discomfort their sins would cause them if confronted.

Baldwin’s solution was a kind of love that embraces this confrontation. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” he wrote (95). The only kind of liberation available to white people, nervous about what may happen without racial justice, but horrified by what will happen if it is achieved, is liberation for Black people. Those of both races who are conscious of this, “must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others” (105). 

Baldwin identified Christianity as the chief roadblock to this kind of love. The transition from Jesus’ teachings to the rise of institutional Christendom, and its embrace of state power, paved the way for the kind of white Christianity in America that burned crosses and preached about heaven while making life hell for Black people. “The energy that was buried with the rise of Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it,” he wrote (44). This entails self-examination; a return of Christianity to the “sunbaked Hebrew” put to death by the government; and discarding what now seems sacred. Short of that, he implies that we can no longer depend on God’s patience. We may experience as divine wrath the undoing of what was preserved in the Noah story. Baldwin concludes with, perhaps as an apocalyptic warning, the ominous words of the prophetic spiritual that might be upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!

We invite you to pray with Baldwin’s assertion that real love in times of racist oppression demands examining oneself, religious community, and nation, as well as his claim that “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

Allow yourself a few moments to sit with the ways in which our communities are capacious enough for beauty and goodness on the one hand, as well as complicity in structural sin on the other. Acknowledging both, shift your focus to the ways they fail to engage the racist signs of the times. Since we so often cling to our group’s virtues, press past the urge to justify what we fail to do by invoking what we do. This can be difficult. It is hard to critique ourselves or the ones we love, so let us embrace that love, and desire for everyone’s full flourishing. With the wisdom of Baldwin, let us name that that part of this love means doing the difficult deed of calling ourselves to account, of confronting our indifference or sloth when the times call for immediate attention. Try, if you can, to recount the brutal litany of the names of Black people needlessly slain: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Atatiana Jefferson, Tyre Nichols. Imagine them asking your community of worship what you are doing to resist the racist police state. How do you answer? 

Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, more commonly known as Rev. Sekou, is a public theologian, musician, activist, and author who has engaged the public on white supremacy in a more instructive way than the USCCB. Educated and given his name by civil rights activist and pan-Africanist Kwame Ture, Sekou served as Scholar in Residence at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Education and Research Institute. He went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, not to witness conditions, but to dig latrines. “There is something deeply theological about shoveling shit,” he said in his book Gods, Gays, and Guns (114). Haiti “is not a test of our faith but a test of your grace,” he said to God, “Show yourself…” (118). 

Sekou’s words could apply to the U.S. today in its racist backlash to Black liberation. Just as the spiritual Baldwin invoked (God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!) had a different idea than comfortable white onlookers did about what a covenant might look like, so Sekou offers a different vision of God’s grace than the U.S. bishops. This became even more clear in 2017 when Sekou showed up to lead nonviolence trainings for clergy in Charlottesville, before the largest (overtly) white supremacist gathering in generations, the Unite the Right riot. For a month, he trained Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, though no Catholic clergy joined in to confront the white supremacists. Sekou is currently Theologian-in-Residence at a church in Seattle, writing his dissertation on a liberation theology of Ferguson.