On Saturday night at 10 p.m., Sen. Raphael Warnock was on Capitol Hill, fighting to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that would appropriate nearly $550 billion to rebuild the nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels and more.
On Sunday morning at 10 a.m., the Rev. Raphael Warnock was on Martha’s Vineyard, preaching a booming, mellifluous sermon to nearly 1,000 congregants at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs about rebuilding a different sort of highway — a spiritual one, constructed in the desert, to connect all people.
“In the black church, we say God makes a way out of no way,” Mr. Warnock said on Sunday. “God’s infrastructure program. That is not subject to a filibuster.”
For the reverend senator from Georgia who also currently serves as senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the two paths are deeply entwined in his vision for the country, creating a “moral topography” best embodied in both a robust physical and spiritual infrastructure.
That’s why it’s fitting Mr. Warnock himself needed an act of God — and the literal manifestation of that infrastructure plan — to even make it to Martha’s Vineyard Sunday, taking a highway, red-eye plane, automobile and a 3 a.m. Patriot Boat water taxi from Woods Hole to the Vineyard before he arrived in the Tabernacle pulpit.
“I’ve taken a lot of journeys and gone a lot of places to preach,” Mr. Warnock told the crowd. “I think this was the first time I took a boat.”
Sunday’s two church services in Oak Bluffs began in front of a packed house at Union Chapel, as Mr. Warnock and the Rev. Cathlin Baker — longtime friends from Union Theological Seminary — introduced Rev. Otis Moss 3rd, the senior pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.
Reverend Baker is the minister at the West Tisbury Congregational Church, where Reverend Warnock has preached every summer for the last decade.
The three friends spoke about their enduring bonds, connected through geography and generations, bringing them from Chicago, Atlanta and New York to preach on Martha’s Vineyard.
Mr. Warnock told a story about Otis Moss’s grandfather, who walked more than 18 miles to vote against the ardent segregationist, former Georgia senator Herman Talmadge — only to be turned away from the ballot box. The senior Otis Moss told his children he would vote in the next election. He died a year later.
“Even in the midst of these dark moments, as we’re trying to claw our way back from these two pandemics,” — Covid-19, and Covid-1619, as Mr. Warnock called them — “don’t you ever lose hope,” he said. “Know that I sit in Herman Talmadge’s seat.”
The Union Chapel crowd erupted, with the reverend nearly bringing down the historic, octagonal roof.
Reverends Warnock and Baker then processed over to the Tabernacle, where they joined the Rev. Julie Staples and Mark Miller, an acclaimed music director, organist, vocalist, composer and professor, in a combined Sunday church service, hosted by the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury and the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association.
Mr. Warnock looked — and sounded — no worse for wear, enrapturing the crowd, which ranged from clerical peers across the country to his two young children, with a stirring sermon that combined a religious, and now political, vision for equity, carrying on in the tradition of his forebear at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In the book of Isaiah, Mr. Warnock preached, God says that all valleys shall be exalted, all mountains made low, all rough places made smooth and all crooked places made straight. But that vision for equity comes just as rioters stormed the capital, a pandemic tears through communities of color and the land of the free has the leading incarceration rate in the world, Reverend Warnock said.
“The reason we are experiencing such an ugly backlash, such bigotry in this moment, why viruses we thought we had defeated have in fact mutated...it’s because when you are accustomed to privilege and power, parity and equity might feel like oppression.”
As the reverend spoke, his volume rising with every word, the Tabernacle crowd did more than listen, nodding, clapping, whooping and speaking along, coming together in its own manifestation of that very multicultural vision articulated in Isaiah.
To help illustrate the present moment and the roots of recent violence, Reverend Warnock preached about how his grandmother, a “strong somebody,” cut off the head of a snake and the body continued to writhe violently — not because it was living, he said, but because it was dying. He compared that dying snake to the reverberations and backlash being felt today, in the fight against a system responsible for racial oppression.
But it takes integrity, he said. The integrity that forces the crooked places to be made straight, the integrity to ensure voting rights across the country, and the integrity for oppressed people to live in a country where they don’t have to assert basic truths, like the “I am a man” campaign among Memphis sanitation workers or, more recently, Black Lives Matter.
And it is also about the integrity of elections and leadership, Mr. Warnock said, invoking a metaphor about the V-shaped flight of geese. While the leader does most of the work, it naturally falls back in formation when it gets tired to let another lead.
“It is a non-violent transfer of power,” Mr. Warnock said. “Geese understand that an individual’s location is not as important as our collective destination in the midst of a pandemic.”
He added: “We don’t have as much sense as a goose. We need to stand together. Live together. Fight together.”
The book of Isaiah also says that the “glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” Mr. Warnock said he has come to understand those words differently in recent years.
“When I used to read that sentence, I was just mesmerized. I said, wow, what powerful words. God’s glory is so great and so powerful that when it shows up, all flesh will see it,” Mr. Warnock said. “I don’t think that’s what it is saying at all. I think Isaiah is telling us that God’s glory is so great, so powerful, so beyond our human imagination, it so transcends and surpasses our little boxes and our experience, that it takes all flesh coming together in order to see it.”
Mr. Warnock left the Island shortly after Sunday’s service, grabbing a 1 p.m. flight back to Washington.
The Senate’s bipartisan, $1 trillion infrastructure bill was passed on Tuesday, Mr. Warnock among the 69 senators voting yea.
Comments (6)
Comments
Comment policy »