11/28/21 “Promises Made, Promises Broken, & Promises Kept” by Nancy Petty
Jeremiah 33:14-16
One of my dearest and best college friends was a guy named Harry. Harry and I met at the Baptist Student Union. Although Harry was a sophomore when I entered Gardner-Webb as a freshman, we quickly became friends and, some would say, quickly took over the BSU at Gardner-Webb. We had ideas, lots of them; and the energy to go with them. Both of us had grown up in small towns where church and faith had been central to our lives. And although we were at a Baptist college, it was the BSU that gave us that familiar feeling of the small Baptist churches we had been raised in.
As my junior year and Harry’s senior year was coming to an end, Harry and I made a promise to one another. If we weren’t married by age 40, we would marry one another. Now, I realize that the age we set probably said something about our promise. I knew in my heart I was making a promise that more than likely I couldn’t keep but as someone once said, “Sometimes when we make promises we don’t always know what they mean.” It would be an understatement to say that my promise to Harry was complicated. When being who you are and what you want doesn’t seem remotely possible, it’s easy to justify a half-hearted promise. In 1984, a woman marrying a woman didn’t seem remotely possible. So I made a promise on the basis of wanting what so many of us want: a lasting and loving relationship.
Throughout our lives, we make promises: to ourselves and to others. I promised myself just four days ago that I wasn’t going to eat dessert at our Thanksgiving meal. It turned out to be a broken promise. In 1991, as I was working in a church and still living in the closet as a gay person, I promised myself that I would never go to another church as a staff person and be in the closet. In 1992, I came to Pullen still in the closet. Another made and broken promise. It took me four months and a confession to Mahan Siler to mend that broken promise. Most of the time, we make promises with good intentions. I don’t know anyone who makes a promise on their wedding day to honor and be faithful to the person they are marrying who doesn’t intend to keep that promise. The fact is, we, as individuals, make promises, break promises and sometimes keep our promises.
This fact is true not just for us as individuals. It is also true for our nation. America is a nation of promises made, promises broken, and sometimes promises kept (although these days America’s promises kept seem rare). To so many people living in the United States of America, we are nothing more than a nation of broken promises. We need to look no further than America’s broken promise to people of color. This country promises opportunity, but cuts opportunity short for Black people. Just ask Jacob Blake about America’s broken promise. Jacob Blake surely had heard from teachers and pastors and graduation speakers and politicians the promise repeated that here in America “you can become anything.” Surely he had heard stories from his grandfather who had been at the first march in Washington, and traveled through Selma to Montgomery, and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and stood with others for the rights of open housing in Evanston, Illinois that here in America “you can become anything” – the promise of opportunity. Yet Blake was nearly killed by police for making the relatively benign decision to leave his care and break up a fight.
Caleb Gayle, a Black journalist, writes: “I used to think that in my house, I’d be safe, so long as I didn’t leave the house looking like the “threat” some white people fear, I could be fine. But then Breonna Taylor did that. She chose to be in her house, yet she was the target of a deadly ambush by police officers.” Gayle writes that the real message of America to Black people is: You can become anything. But you can’t have nothing. The broken promise of opportunity.
America is a nation of broken promises. Listen to the litany of some of America’s most egregious broken promises.
Juneteenth and the Broken Promise of “40 Acres and a Mule”: For many Black Americans, Juneteenth is a day of celebration. Observed on June 19th, the holiday commemorates the day that the last slaves were freed in the United States in 1865 – two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln ordered their independence with the Emancipation Proclamation. There was certainly a great deal to celebrate: liberation, centuries of strength and resilience, and significant cultural, artistic, and scientific achievement. But the day is also a reminder of the systemic oppression and relentless suffering the Black community has endured both in slavery and in freedom as well as countless broken promises of justice and equality. Union General William T. Sherman’s plan to give newly-freed families “forty acres and a mule” was among the first and most significant promises made – and broken – to African Americans. Without property, money, or an education there was no clear path toward economic independence.
It should be noted that the General was not an abolitionist, and his idea was not his own. The “40 acres and a mule” was presented by a group of Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, who told the General and Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor.” While the order was briefly adopted, it was short-lived. Two months after its adoption, President Andrew Johnson – who owned slaves – overturned the order. A broken promise.
Broken Treaties with Native American Tribes: In exchange for the surrender and reduction of tribal lands and removal and resettlement of approximately one-fifth of Native American tribes from their original lands, the United States signed 375 treaties, passed laws, and instituted policies that shape and define the special government-to-government relationship between federal and tribal governments. Yet the U.S. government forced many Native Americans to give up their culture and, throughout history of this relationship, has not held to its promises of providing adequate assistance to support Native American interconnected infrastructure, self-governance, housing, education, health, and economic development. Another of America’s Broken Promises.
And then that promise and hope of our fore-bearers as stated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We love to recite these inspiring words all the while America refuses to set a federal living wage, there are 37.2 million American’s living in poverty, a woman’s right to control her body hangs in the balance and in the hands of men who are desperately trying to hold on to power and control, human rights and gays rights are in the crosshairs of religious and political game play. Again and again, America breaks her promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to her people.
The litany continues today:
The promise made of Affordable Health Care for All – Data from the US Census Bureau revealed that in 2019, 26.1 million people were living without any health care coverage. Another of America’s Broken Promise.
Immigration and Refugee Reform: The promise made: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Children, mother’s and father’s dying in the Rio Grande trying to reach the safe shores of our country; children huddled in cages on US soil separated from their parents; dreamers who have known no other home but America being deported because they no longer have “legal status.” Another of America’s Broken Promise.
The promise made: All children are entitled to a “sound basic education”: The state of North Carolina gives its children a right to an education through both the state constitution and state laws. A “sound basic education” means there is a qualitative component to the NC system of public schools. In Wake County Public Schools, 16.6 percent of schools were identified as low-performing. In Durham, 22.4 percent of schools were identified as low-performing. That means that the children in those schools are not receiving a “sound basic education.” Another of America’s Broken Promise right here in our own community and state.
Dare I begin the litany of the church’s broken promises to a hurting and suffering world? Or said more accurately, the church’s broken promises to a radical gospel of justice-love and a theology of setting a place at God’s table for all people? Especially white protestant churches. How many promises has the church broken in its persistence to promote racism and homophobia and xenophobia and victim blaming? How many promises has the church broken in proclaiming a theology that sows division and hate and exclusion; and a theology that seeks to control and shame those who need God’s liberation and grace?
I could go on and on about our broken promises, and the broken promises of America and the broken promises of Christianity, but the season, this season, compels me to offer a word of hope before I take my seat. While we humans and America and religion are making and breaking promises at breakneck speed, there are some promises that are kept, that remain faithful and true. What are they you ask? God’s kept promises of a justice-love, of a grace upon grace, of a vision of a beloved community where all have a seat at the table. God’s kept promise of a hope where all are equal, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, where the last shall be first, where those blessed are the poor in spirit and the meek and the hungry and the peacemakers. God’s kept promise that Jeremiah proclaimed of a righteous branch that will bring honesty and fairness to the land.
This time of year, we focus our attention on the incarnation of that righteous branch that came to us in the birth of Jesus. And rightly so. The birth of Jesus is central to our story of faith. But if all we do is re-visit this story once a year with Christmas carols and pretty lights and decorations, we fail to understand the real meaning of incarnation and what happened in that stable; and well, we might as well just stop what we are doing. My theology hears Jeremiah not just prophesying about one righteous branch but about many righteous branches – those daring to have the courage to risk being God’s continued incarnation in the world today. From one righteous branch sprouts another and another and another. You, me, the person sitting in front of you and beside you and behind you. Righteous branches like Sojourner Truth, Rosa, Martin, Malcolm, John T. Pullen, John Lewis and those who linked arms with him and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Righteous branches like Harvey Milk and Edith Windsor. The hope this season announces is the hope that more righteous branches will sprout from that righteous branch born in a stable thousands of centuries ago; and that new promises of justice-love and equality for all will be made and kept by people like you and me.
As I prepare to close, I want to go back to that day in 1992 sitting with Mahan and my broken promise. I don’t know if you caught what I said as I was telling that story. But I said this: “It took me four months and a confession to mend my broken promise.” Fulfilling promises in our personal lives, in our nation and in our religious institutions will require first confessing our broken promises and having the conversations we need to have in order to mend what is broken so that HOPE may be born today.
We Baptists don’t like the idea of confessing, and we Pullenites don’t love the idea of sin at all! But I want you to consider that today on this first Sunday of Advent, we mark the beginning of a liturgical season that aligns with a planetary season, the winter solstice which marks the shortest night of the year. The solstice carries with it a promise – that the light will come again as the days begin to lengthen and our Earth begins her journey into the warmer seasons. But we are to use these days BEFORE the solstice to prepare ourselves, and to take responsibility for the necessary death that feeds the life of new beginning. Yes, we light the Advent candle today in Hope, Hope for the light of the world that will come to us in through that righteous branch born long ago. But we also light the candle as a promise, a promise to go inside ourselves, to be willing to see the consequences of our privilege, to be willing to die to our need for power and comfort, to be the righteous branches of Hope sprouting forth today. And if it makes you uncomfortable to be a “righteous” branch, then just be a branch that does justice, loves kindness and walks humbly with God.
I know that the hardest part of these hard words is our own reckoning of what does this mean for me, what do I do tomorrow, how do I contribute to undoing centuries of broken promises? Well, that is, in itself the work. As these days shorten and our mornings and evening darken, I invite you, this season, to be willing to sit still, to listen, to observe, and to ponder in your heart what might be asked of you to fulfill some new promises of justice and love and equality for all. And to do so knowing that Hope is on the way.
