Morning and Mourning in America
This week, after the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America, and Kamala Harris as the first Black, South Asian, and woman Vice President of the United States of America, it is morning again in America.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that, after a bitter election and baseless allegations of fraud from former President Donald Trump, the inauguration of Biden and Harris felt like a new day in America. Once commonplace pleasantries between Republican and Democratic congressional representatives were this week an almost unbelievable ode to a nearly forgotten past era, before the meanness and hatred unleashed during the past few weeks and years.
When white supremacy and racism are repudiated from the highest office in the land, it is a new day in America, a transition from the charlatan preachers and so-called Christian leaders who once filled the halls of power only to bow to the powerful and veer far from the Gospel of Jesus that is grounded in love, forgiveness, and truth.
In his final benediction at the inauguration, African Methodist Episcopal Rev. Silvester Beaman spoke of “mourning the dead,” “giving justice to the oppressed,” “seeking rehabilitation beyond correction,” and “making friends out of enemies.”
“Neither shall we learn hatred anymore,” Beaman continued, quoting loosely from the Biblical prophets Isaiah and Micah, “... We will lie down in peace, not make our neighbors afraid.”
Beaman acknowledged the enslaved African Americans who built the White House, the Indigenous Americans whose land was taken from them, and the recent immigrants whose lives and liberty had been threatened almost ceaselessly for the past four years.
Beaman did not say Jesus’ name, but he preached Jesus’ Gospel, with words taken from the Bible itself, including Jesus’ own first sermon.
It was a glaring contrast to the prominent Christians, many of them Evangelicals, who had sanctioned cruel rhetoric and policies against millions of Americans, from victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, to LGBTQ Americans and military veterans, to women, to people of color, to Americans living in poverty. They had done so as part of a cruel exchange, a bargain for political power and judges on the Supreme Court, supposedly to put an end to abortion, while the former President they called “Pro-Life” oversaw the deaths of 400,000 Americans due to Covid, something he still called the “China flu” on his final day in office, an epithet that led to disparagement and mistreatment of millions of Asian Americans.
To hear Beaman’s prayer was a resounding comment on a new day in America, particularly for American Christians. Americans have not heard this kind of Christianity from government leaders and prominent speakers hardly at all in recent memory, with few notable exceptions, including leaders in the Black church, like the Rev. William Barber II, who led the inaugural prayer service this week, and Rev. Raphael Warnock, Pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s former Atlanta congregation, and one of Georgia’s two new senators.
It’s important to emphasize, though, as Beaman’s soaring rhetoric reclaimed a gentler and more honest American Christianity, and poet Amanda Gorman led us into a brighter American future in “The Hill We Climb,” that this new day in America is merely at its dawn.
As former President Ronald Reagan claimed almost 40 years ago, it’s morning in America. The claim of a new day is barely at its dawn, the sun peeking out at the edge of the horizon, with trees and meadows and buildings and people in the distance emerging out of their shadowy forms.
Morning in America is perhaps more apropos today in January 2021 than it was in 1984, because, there is a glimpse of a different, newer, more just country just over the horizon. The new day in America does not mean the foes of white supremacy, hatred, anti-semitism, fear, anger, and divisive rhetoric have been vanquished, nor does it mean that the bloodthirsty lust for capitalism and greed and power has any less hold on America.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s an alternative narrative emerging in the morning of the first day. This alternative narrative, this new day, emerges on a morning that cannot be separated from the mourning in America, with more than 400,000 dead due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new day began with the new night, on Tuesday evening, when Biden and Harris asked Americans to take a moment to turn on their porch lights and ring church bells to honor the hundreds of thousands of American dead.
Again during his inaugural address, Biden asked Americans to pause and be silent to honor the dead. To pause and mourn, a practice with which this President is all-too-well acquainted, after the tragic deaths of his first wife, daughter, and later, his son, Beau.
I’m reminded, in this early dawning of a possible new day, of the mourning story of the Hebrew Bible, in Ezra 9-10. Ezra the scribe writes: “At the evening sacrifice I got up from my fasting, with my garments and my mantle torn, and fell on my knees, spread out my hands to the LORD my God, and said:
O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens.
As Ezra wept and confessed, he was joined by what the Bible calls a “great assembly of men, women, and children, who also wept bitterly.” Only at that moment did they make a new covenant again with God who throughout the Bible makes and remakes covenants with God’s people, always willing to forgive and to begin anew.
The story of renewal and new life for God’s people begins with mourning, as it did for Ezra, as it did for Noah, as it did for the women who found the empty tomb at the Mount of Olives.
So, we begin again today in America, chastened and mournful, not ignorant of the realities of sin and death, but resolute that joy has come in the morning amidst the mourning.
