THE CALL OF SHECHEM: LIBERATION DEMANDS DECISIONS
A Journey Through Black History, Faith, and Our Wall Against Erasure
Intro: WHERE I STAND
Before going further, I should say something about the ground from which I write.
I am not a theologian. I am not a professor of history. I do not write from a seminary chair or an academic history department. I write as a living, breathing observer of the Black experience, inside and outside of the Black church.
Since my birth, I have been immersed in the lessons, traditions, and culture of Black Christianity, particularly within the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I did not encounter the Black church as a subject to be studied. I grew up within it. I have watched it teach, nurture, discipline, organize, comfort, challenge and sustain Black people through enormous changes in American life.
I have lived long enough to have watched some of what is now called history while it was still happening. I have watched institutions change, language change, laws change and political assumptions change. I have watched Black people adapt, organize, argue, worship, build, lose ground, regain ground and teach another generation what the last one learned.
And for more than three decades, the microphone of OUR COMMON GROUND has given me another kind of education. I have spent those years in conversation with scholars, theologians, historians, economists, activists, attorneys, journalists, political thinkers and people doing the work on the ground. I have had the privilege of asking questions of people whose scholarship and work have shaped how we understand race, history, power, faith and the Black experience. I listened to them. I challenged them. They challenged me. Sometimes I agreed with them. Sometimes I did not. But those decades of conversation taught me to listen for connections that do not always announce themselves.
That is the ground from which I write.
I do not claim the historian’s expertise or the theologian’s training. My credential is different: more than seventy years within the lived culture of the Black church, more than three decades of sustained conversation with people who have studied, documented and shaped Black thought, and a lifetime of paying attention.
And paying attention matters now because what concerns me about this moment is not any single government action. Federal workforce reductions are one matter. The dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs is another. Changes in civil rights enforcement are another. What happens at the Smithsonian and other institutions charged with preserving the nation’s history is another. What disappears from a government webpage is another. What our children are taught, or are discouraged from learning, about slavery, race and the Black struggle in America is yet another.
Each can be examined separately. Each has its own history, policy arguments, defenders and critics. But experience teaches me to place things beside one another and ask what they mean together.
That is the question I am asking.
I am not claiming that every action originated from the same motive, that every person implementing these policies shares the same intention, or that America has suddenly returned to some earlier century. I am asking what happens when, at the same historical moment, Black presence within important public institutions is being reduced, mechanisms created in response to documented racial exclusion are being dismantled or redefined, and the history that explains why those mechanisms became necessary is itself being challenged, diminished, or reconsidered.
If commitment requires discernment, as Rev. Sapp so eloquently presented, then discernment requires evidence.
So let us look at the evidence before us.
” I’ll Be Listening For You ! “
THE CALL OF SHECHEM: LIBERATION DEMANDS DECISIONS
A Journey Through Black History, Faith and Our Wall Against Erasure
PART I — SHECHEM: MEMORY, DISCERNMENT AND DECISION
This morning, Rev. Dr. Lee H. Sapp, Senior Pastor of Greater St. Paul AME Church in Boynton Beach, Florida, took her congregation to Shechem.
Rev. Dr. Lee H. Sapp, Senior Pastor, Greater St. Paul AME Church, Boynton Beach, Florida
Her purpose was Christian spiritual guidance and leadership. Her sermon was titled, “Shechem Means: It’s Decision Time”. She preached about our covenant with God, the choices required of discipleship, and the commitment necessary to move a church and its people forward. But as I listened, I heard something deeply familiar in the Black Christian experience. I heard one of the ways Black people have survived in America.
Rev. Dr. Sapp described Shechem as “the place where destiny turns on a choice.” It was, she said, “a place of decision, the place of covenant, and the place of commitment.” But before Joshua called upon the people to choose, he did something essential.
He recited their history.
Joshua was speaking to a generation that had inherited something it had not personally struggled to obtain. They had not witnessed everything he had witnessed. They had not endured everything the generations before them had endured. As Dr. Sapp reminded us, they had “missed all the hard stuff.”
So before Joshua asked them to decide where they would stand, he reminded them how they had arrived where they were.
That struck me.
For Black people in America, remembering has never been simply an exercise in looking backward. Memory has been one of our instruments of survival. We remembered who we were when the society around us insisted upon defining us otherwise. We remembered people whose names were omitted from textbooks. We remembered what happened when official histories softened slavery, distorted Reconstruction, excused segregation, or treated the Black freedom struggle as an appeal for generosity rather than a demand for rights already promised.
And much of that remembering happened in the Black church.
The Black Christian church stands planted and rooted squarely in the history of Black struggle. It gave sanctuary to the weary and frightened, but it also became a meeting house, schoolhouse, organizing center, information network, and staging ground for resistance. The gospel gave us a language for salvation, but Black people also heard in Exodus a language for liberation. Testimony carried experience. Sermons carried history. Elders carried memory. Churches carried people.
Memory became infrastructure.
That is why I cannot think about the current effort to alter, diminish or remove portions of Black history from America’s public institutions merely as an argument over what belongs in a museum, what words appear on a government website, or what children encounter in a classroom.
Erasure interferes with transmission.
If a generation inherits the achievement but does not know the struggle that produced it, how will it recognize when that achievement is threatened? If it knows that Black Americans became a significant presence in the federal workforce but does not know the long struggle against employment discrimination that helped make that presence possible, what will it understand when that workforce is dramatically reduced? If it encounters civil rights protections without knowing the conditions that required them, how will it evaluate their dismantling? If it inherits the vote without knowing what people endured to obtain and protect it, what meaning will it assign to that inheritance?
Dr. Sapp’s sermon moved from memory toward something else. Shechem was not a place where the people were gathered merely to admire their history. As she said of Joshua, “He didn’t call them there merely to remember history. He called them there to make a choice about their future.”
That is the point at which her sermon followed me beyond the sanctuary.
Because there comes a time when knowing what happened is not enough. Memory must help us understand what is happening. Understanding must sharpen our discernment. Discernment must tell us when a decision can no longer be postponed. And decision must become commitment to the work that follows.
Dr. Sapp put it plainly:
“Commitment requires discernment.”
So before deciding what this moment requires of us, we must first discern what is happening.
Black federal workers are being removed from institutions in which generations fought to secure a place. Federal policies and enforcement mechanisms created in response to documented racial exclusion are being dismantled or redefined. Historical sites and government webpages have been subjected to review. The Smithsonian has been directed to reconsider how portions of the American story are presented. Language concerning slavery, race, and discrimination has been challenged by the administration as ideological, divisive, or inconsistent with its interpretation of American history.
These actions are not identical. They should not be carelessly collapsed into a single claim about motive.
But discernment requires that we ask whether their consequences are unrelated.
Because Black people have learned across four centuries in America that erasure does not always begin with the disappearance of a people.
Sometimes it begins with the disappearance of the evidence that explains what happened to them.
Rev. Dr. Lee Sapp: The full sermon and Greater St. Paul (Boynton Beach, FL) service of Oct. 4th
Continue to Part II — The Evidence Before Us
Continue to Part III — We Have Been Here Before
Continue to Part IV — The Decision Before Us
