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[no audio] ...Hope Felder, who has really in an existential, relevant, powerful way presented his lectures to us regarding this important theme of rescuing the black male by the infusion of African and African-American content into the church

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and school curriculum. This morning he will deliver his final lecture entitled "Racial Motives in the Biblical Narratives." Let us now hear Dr. Felder. [drumming] It has long been recorded in holy writ,

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"And the trumpets shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible." I feel very much as the early morning lecturer, as the trumpeter, trying to raise the dead. And I trust in this effort and by our reflections and remarks, we shall be incorruptible.

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It's a pleasure to be here again for the third time to speak on this very important subject of rescuing the African-American or black male through the rediscovery of our role. And I should add responsibilities

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with regard to the ancient biblical narratives. And in our first two lectures, we have been looking at significant aspects of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament that bespeak

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of an integral relationship between the text of the Bible and ancient African history and culture. We have suggested that there has been significant and most serious set of omissions through the systematic

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de-Africanization of the Bible by European and Euro-American scholars over the years and that while many of our own lay and some trained professors have suspected this, that we have had not had the luxury and the support to be able to write in a leisurely manner about the importance of the Bible itself for the

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pride and the sense of dignity that has always been intended by God to be a part of the black religious experience as the biblical narratives themselves show forth too clearly. I've also suggested that it is significant that we today are experiencing what it means to be on the eve of a new black Renaissance. A

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Renaissance that I trust will be more substantive than the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and less rhetorical and short-lived as the Black Power movement of the 60s. We're experiencing this in a number of ways and I'm sure that we will see the full bloom of this new Black Renaissance through the decade of the 90s, this last decade of the

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present millennium. Think about it. It is, in the Greek, kairos. It is the moment of opportunity for African-Americans.

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It is a moment of decision. And we are called on this eve of this Renaissance to decision. The decision to determine how we shall exercise our freedom and what freedom, in fact, does mean to us.

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And I'll be talking about the sense of the importance. Today, I'm going to talk about the implications of our desire to celebrate the African presence in the Bible in the Old and New Testaments.

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I want to talk today not so much about the themes or the personalities or the geography or the ethnography of ancient African relationships to the history of salvation as reflected in the Bible.

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I've done that in the first two lectures. I want today to talk about the implications. What does this mean? As the Germans say, was bedeutet das?

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What does this mean for us? It's one thing to look at the great royal presence of the ancient pharaohs, not least of which the 25th dynasty, the black pharaohs who

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ruled all of ancient Ethiopia and Egypt, there's no question, that's there. It's always been there, despite the subjugation of this knowledge by the Europeans.

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It's one thing to talk about the blackness of the African identity of the Queen of Sheba, called the Queen of the South, and Matthew, and in Matthew 12, 42, in the parallel reference,

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in Matthew 12 42 in the parallel reference and the Jesus saying and Luke 11 31. It's one thing to talk about the Queen of Sheba or the the Queen of the Nubians and in biblical Ethiopia with her capital in ancient Meroi called the Kandake from which we get the name Candace. She's there, those

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black queens are there. Old Testament refers to it, New Testament refers to it, they're there. But we have to be careful in the celebrating of the African personalities and the distinctive biblical themes that would give us a sense of heightened pride, we have to be careful that we trace the hermeneutical

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question, what does this mean for us in the black church, for us in the black community today? This is precisely where many of us as Bible scholars, particularly the 99.9% white people who dominate the biblical field, have refused to tread upon these waters, tread upon this area of investigation. For us, for

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them, really not for us hopefully, but for most of the Bible scholars they have suspended the hermeneutical question. They have limited themselves to looking at the ancient text in its ancient context without ever feeling any obligation to relate it to a broken and and hurting world today that the church

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must in some sense address or run from. The hermeneutical question, what does this mean? What are the implications of the greatness of antiquity that so many blacks have had. So I think it's this hermeneutical question or the question of meaning and interpretation and application that should come into focus

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sharp focus for us today because it's not enough for us to celebrate what was. The fact of the matter is as we look about the black community in this nation today it simply is a fact that we don't have much evidence of our former glory and at now therefore we should reflect on how there are implications for this

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wonderful ancient past for what we must do in these times to verify my contention that we are at the eve or on the eve of a black Renaissance. The poet has put it, the Negro, James Weldon Johnson, many of you know it, I am a Negro. Black as the night is black. Black like the depths of my Africa. I've been a

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slave. Caesar told me to keep his doorsteps clean. I brushed the boots of George Washington. Yes, I did. I've been a worker. Under my hands the pyramids arose. I made mortar for the Woolworth building. I've been a singer. All the way from Africa to Georgia, I carried my sorrow songs. I made ragtime, too. I've been a victim. The Belgians, they cut off my hand in the Congo. They lynch me now in Texas. I am a Negro. Negro black as the night is black black like the depths of my Africa and we have

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seen the depths of this Africa fully reflected in the pages of Holy Writ and because this is not a part of the standard curriculum of the elementary schools or the or the church schools or the or the secondary schools or the colleges indeed not even of the seminaries for the most part in Europe

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or the United States or in Africa we have an obligation to participate in what Michel Foucault the French epistemologist has called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. Dr. Charles Kofor, distinguished professor of the Hebrew Bible Old Testament here in Atlanta for many many years has pointed

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out in a recent article that we as black people looking at our presence in the Bible stand between the Mount of Gerizim the ancient mount of blessing and the Mount of Ebal the ancient mount of cursing from the New Testament point of view we could say it is easy to confirm this because that is precisely where the

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Samaritan woman of John 4 was standing at Jacob's well between the Mount of blessing and the Mount of cursing and she there attempting to draw some water was leaning one side or the other when Jesus of Nazareth came by. And I have said in my own book, Troubling Biblical Waters, that the Samaritan experience in

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a way might help us begin to appropriate the hermeneutical question because in a number of respects we as African-American peoples today stand with that Samaritan woman, we stand with those Samaritans who are mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, despised a different system of law, victims of a different

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interpretation of justice, scandalized as a people, avoided on all counts by the dominant classes, in that case it was ancient Judaism of course, and today of course as many of our white brothers and sisters even some of the foreigners or minorities who come in from other countries the boat people even two

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minutes ago that the boat people struggling to survive to get on these boats and the next minute they own all the stores in my community Oy vey. Stepping over us because they pick up the notion that we yes are the Samaritans of our time and we stand between the Mount of Blessing and the Mount of Cursing even

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here at Morehouse College and at Spelman College and Clark Atlanta and so forth. As I was traveling about I wondered as I saw many of these marvelous young people I wondered where they were leaning on the leaning side. Are they leaning towards the Mount of Blessing to help our people or are they leaning on the

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side of cursing to be new middle-class arrogant condescending and cannot be soiled by our people in our their despair. I wonder as we are here between the Mount of Blessing and the Mount of Cursing where are we as a black church leaning. I told you I was the trumpeter this morning so that the dead might be

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able to be raised incorruptible. And so we want to explore the sense in which the Samaritan experience, though they're not extensive explicit references in the New Testament for blacks as such, we do have significant paradigms there and I am suggesting that the Samaritan experience is not a small

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or insignificant paradigm for such an exploration. In point of fact, we find in the ninth chapter, the 51st verse of the Gospel of Luke a critical literary turning point with regard to the Samaritans. Here we see the ending of Jesus's primary focus on going to the Jews of Galilee, his own people. Here in

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951 Luke tells us "And the time came for him to be received up and he set his face to go to Jerusalem. The Greek term is analambano. [inaudible] Jesus apparently in the Luke and theological design is attempting to

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demonstrate that he has some foreknowledge of God's plan for him, that he will be taken up, he has an appointment in Jerusalem, Zion, and that from when he meets this appointment he then will make his final witness and God will take him up, he will be received up as part of God's plan for him. But at

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Luke 9, we find the important references as we begin now what is formally called the journey narrative or the travel narrative that continues until Luke 18. we find here Jesus now shifting away from the Jews of his own people and he is coming to another people, other people. And who does he begin with? He begins

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with the Samaritans and he sends messengers to the Samaritans. He confounds his disciples, his Jewish disciples are confounded by his vision. They weren't expecting that. They knew he had a sense of destiny, they knew now they heard him express a sense of resolve, but they are confounded when Jesus says, "Now you

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serve as my messengers, go to the Samaritans, those despised people, go to them and tell them I must come their way. You know the story, I don't need to belabor it, but I should say that we are told in the text that when the disciples of Jesus, the messengers come to the Samaritans, they do what many in the

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black community lately have been doing, at least for the last 20 years, but it's beginning to change a little bit. Jesus may be ready to send messengers to them but we are not ready to receive those messengers. We are just not used to it. So here we find in Luke 9 52 and he sent messengers ahead of him who went and

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entered the village of the Samaritans to make ready for him in 53 but because the people would not receive him because his face was set to go to Jerusalem. So we see immediately that the people, the Samaritan people, hearing of this one who while sending his disciples to them is yet not wanting to stop just with them

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but wants to go on to make his witness in Jerusalem. And that is the disqualifier. That for the Samaritans, they shows that they too cannot receive this extraordinary vision of Jesus. Jesus' disciples obviously can't receive the vision but neither can the Samaritans receive the vision. And when his

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disciples James and John saw it, they said Lord do you want us to bid fire to come upon these ungrateful Samaritans. But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went to another city. Now this is very important my friends because it helps us to see, it helps us to see that Jesus is reaching out for people that

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most of us have given up on. Jesus is sending us and trying to send us to these people and then when after all of Jesus' examples and efforts of sending us to these people, the spies, homeless, drug abusers, the incarcerated, the large numbers in our community, we are being sent to them and then when reluctantly

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we go to them we then find they don't want to receive us, they don't want to hear about no Jesus because they're into Muhammad, baby. And we give up. And we believe that somehow Islam is more authentic a religion than Christianity. We believe that our own Christian heritage is a white man's religion. We

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believe that these claims that have been put upon them and the way they have been beaten down and their rejection of us. And we cave in. Oh you and Muhammad? Now you got the little the kufi you wearing? Oh I see you're saying the prayers five times a day and yes I'm doing it all. I see fine. Well okay we just

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take over here. We are not ready to respond because they have rejected us but let me tell you what happens in Luke. In Luke 10, the next reference to the Samaritans is the passage of the so-called Good Samaritan passage. Jesus, we see here, lifts up as an example of a person who has the law of God in its

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true intent and blazing on their heart, he lifts up a Samaritan of all people as an example to his disciples of someone who understands compassion. Jesus didn't have to do that. These people didn't even want to hear about any Jesus. They rejected him, but Jesus has not given up his vision for them and he chooses one

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them. Now this was a Samaritan, the text is clear, it says it. But a man as he journeyed came to where he was and he saw him, saw the beaten man who had been robbed and he had compassion on him, the Greek word "Splagonizomai" that at the deepest seat of his emotion there was an empathy that this individual had. We

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don't have that anymore in America, we just step over and pass by people, we don't even see homeless folks, don't see people beat up, just drive by, roll up by window, oh Lord. But here but a Samaritan as he journeyed and he came and they saw your compassion and he went and he bound up his wounds and he poured oil

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and wine there then he set him on his own beast and he brought him to an inn and he took care of him and the next day he took out two denarii and he gave them to the innkeeper saying take care of this man whatever you whatever more you spend I will repay you when I come back. Now which of these Jesus is

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teaching now? Now which of these do you think proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell among robbers? And in verse 37 and he said one of the disciples said the one who showed mercy. You know these weren't smart students. The disciple that's what the word "hamathano" means "hamathetes" in the Greek it means a

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student, the disciple is a student, then Jesus responds, "Go and do likewise." And I tell you friends we have not even heard Jesus' response in 2,000 years, more often than not. When he says to his disciples, "Go and do likewise." Do likewise as who has that? As that despised Samaritan. Though they rejected me, there's

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good among those people, they have potential. Where's the next reference to the Samaritans? It's in Luke 17. It's very important to see how this develops. Luke 17 verse 11, "On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee and as he entered a village he was met by ten lepers who

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stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said Jesus have mercy upon us and when he saw them he said to them go and show yourselves to the priests and as they went they were cleansed and then one of them when he saw that he was healed turned back praising God with a loud voice and he

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fell on his face at Jesus' feet and he gave thanks and now this one was a a Samaritan. Yes, something is happening here. Jesus takes the initiative, he goes to the Samaritans, the Samaritans reject him but Jesus lifts one of the Samaritans up and says he has this one understands he exceeds the dictates of the Torah he

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goes beyond what anything in the law requires. You can learn from a Samaritan or to all what we would give if more white folks in America could realize that they could learn from some of us black folk. Amen. Amen. But now he instructs his disciples and they're befuddled about it but Jesus is not

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finished yet according to this narrative he turns back around yet again and comes full circle by showing that indeed those Samaritans in 952 and following have rejected his initiative by golly one knows among them all how to stop and say thanks Lord I'm healed and he gave thanks oh it's a it's a powerful thing

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to see what can happen when we don't take the world's no and we maintain the vision of God for the despised, for the lowly. Now of course this may sound interesting as a lecture with homiletical flourishes but as I was saying to a few people here moments ago, we at Howard University are now wondering

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how we can push ourselves. See many of us as professors don't have that much courage sometimes. How can I become concerned not just about my professorial career and tenure and pleasing the white folks in the gill but how in the light of all of that I've been trained to do how is it possible to remember the

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hurts of my people even as I am a professor, a full professor, yes, published author. So many of my students, my book came out, it's now of course done so extraordinarily well, the fifth printing in nine or ten months, it's unbelievable. But the question that comes to me, how can I do more to show that

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we are just beginning and we're just on the road here because our people are still hurting so much. So I don't know I got this suggestion one thing with New Testament at Howard what you said we're gonna have to do told my students we are going to study these passages, 15 sets, memorize never before have I done this

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in last 12 years of teaching. Memorize at least six verses from these passages, choose which one you want. In preparation for a hermeneutical field trip into the black community, to the house of Ruth for abused and battered women, shunted to the side. Let's go there with our Bibles, not to preach to them platitudes and

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Biblicisms, but to go and listen to them what they can tell us about their world that we in our own middle-class understandings have forgotten. And I'm going with you because I need this too. Now the bus came, students are on the bus, recite the passages. You know I was a professor in the mid down in Atlanta I

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didn't know all of the verses but I tried to seem as though I knew verse by verse and word for word you know yes yes that was good C, B, alright right very good. But the point was they were learning these verses in light of the context of the contemporary reality. When we got there we tore the facility, we get

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the stench that came and the beaten and broken bruised women, some women half out of their minds, poorly clad. You could see on the students' faces, some of the students recognized some of the women from childhood friends. Other students who had been working at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the mentally broken said

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that I thought you had been transferred to another hospital and one of my students almost passed out because under the Reagan years these people in the mental hospitals have been just thrown on the streets and many of us have been silent about it and they find their ways into these shelters and so we we did our

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tour and some of the students said we ready to leave? I said by no means. Now 45 minutes must be spent in direct dialogue between you and I paired them off one by one to these women. Sit there on the bed, sit here on a chair, talk, listen to their reality. Oh what an experience that was as I had two women that I myself was

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having to talk to. Could feel the pain inside being communicated to and the belief and the faith of some of these elderly women too. Though they were living in a shelter, desperate. One woman told one of my students and that that she had put her son through college but but for some reason he just didn't want

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anything more to do with her and that she was there for him and he had a big job downtown making big money but he just didn't want and she was there in the shelter but she believed in God. Yes. And I could see the students visibly moved because this was being done in the context of Bible study and we left there

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back on the bus we then went to the prostitution areas in Washington with the young white girls and the black girls out there selling their bodies and the bus driver thought this he thought we will come. He said "Doc, I've never seen anything like that. know I live pretty close by let me show you where the drug deals go down I bet

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you'd haven't seen that. I says by all means we have the bus for a couple more hours take the bus over there. And so the bus went there we saw one policeman with his foot on the neck of a 14 or 15 year old boy typical in Washington DC all the time. A bus drug bust had just taken place and to see this black boy with his

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face down against the concrete with that policeman's foot on the neck. I said see see see see see see see see see there it is. All of these realities are part of the understanding of the meaningfulness of the way we read the text in light of Yes, it's ancient context, but draw instructive analogies in terms of how we apply this to our people today.

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Came back now three-page papers. I spent most of the day in the hotel the day before yesterday and yesterday afternoons reading these papers of students and We went to Martha's table another time. We're doing this Martha's table for abuse for for latchkey children and neglected children Have the students making sandwiches?

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playing with the children who are begging out for role models. These are the despised ones and we cannot give up on them. It's wonderful to celebrate the ancient royal past, but I want to know what does this mean when the party is over? What does it mean when we have to look at the terrible tears of our

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people in the cities and in the rural today? And what are we doing in the seminaries to make a difference. What are we doing in the colleges to make a difference? Barrios and ghettos, Asian-American enclaves even, children abused, Native Americans suffering genocide, drunk on the reservations, white

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students dump a bag of flour over a Native American student in college and and says glibly, "Now you know what it's like to be white." Six black youth, standing there spread eagle, males each one, their big Ranger or whatever the Suzuki

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vehicle they were driving all souped up there, turned over and now spread eagle was the police frisking. You see it so often. And this, coupled with Hispanics doing drugs left and right, Hispanic gangs against the

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black gangs, and all of this in our land of freedom, a land that calls itself the capital of the free world, America with its Bible Belt. A belt my friends which is and has been much too tight. It has made me uncomfortable this Bible Belt. It has choked me really and it causes us to look back at the Samaritan experience

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and see that we stand there with these Samaritans between the Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and that we must raise the question of how are we leaning toward the blessing or toward the cursing. How are we using our freedom as we find that question of freedom so poignantly raised in the epistle to the Galatians,

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Galatians 5 1, for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast in that freedom. Here in a simple verse with a refrain at Galatians 5 25 at the end of the chapter we have what is called the indicative and the imperative of salvation the indicative statement for freedom Christ has set us free the Greek

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word Eleutheria and it is reminiscent of the Hebraic notion of let my people go That's the indicative, but then the imperative. Stand fast in that freedom. Here Paul has attempted to recapture the ancient words of Moses as recorded in chapter 14 of the book of Exodus, as Moses himself had been the vehicle and

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the instrument of trying to help the Hebrew people coming out, probably Afro-Asiatic but nonetheless coming out to a new sense of what it means to move to and for and under a sense of God's promise. And yet they'd seen miracles of all kinds. They left the Pharaoh behind with a high hand and as soon as they saw

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the enemy approaching on the horizon they attacked Moses. Have you brought us out in the wilderness to die? We have no graves in Egypt. I mean how much do you have to be convinced of the miracles of God for you that have happened so dramatic why do you think you're even here? But they had little faith. They

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could not hold on to that vision and Moses there in Exodus 14 says stand fast and see the salvation of your God and the waters were divided they were troubled and they opened, we're told. And I tell you today that Paul in Galatians 5 and 1 is turning back to the words of Moses and is now saying to the Galatian

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community these words, "Yes it is for freedom, you have been set free, stand fast in that freedom there's something you have to do. Most of us in America delude ourselves and thinking that we're free, abuse the freedom by choosing to lean toward the mount of cursing instead of the mount of blessing. All of us are

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are guilty of this to some extent. And I believe that in our time, we have to reassess how this is happening to us now, or we shall miss the kairos of the new black renaissance

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of the '90s. Freedom, of course, is one of those abstract words which everyone seems to use so quickly. Very few people try to define it.

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In the United States, people often assume this is the land of the free. We hold these truths self-evident. Freedom, liberty, that's an inalienable right.

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But you know, friends, you and I know it was not an inalienable right when those words were written. It was not an inalienable right for the women who had no vote and no status politically.

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It was not an inalienable right for the Native Americans whose lands were usurped and were systematically destroyed people? It was not an inalienable right for the blacks who were considered only three-fourths, three-fifths of a person property? We hold these truths self

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evident. Whose truths? And why was it necessary in 1863, January the first, to have an Emancipation Proclamation if we were free? I thought we were free. And we We are not free yet. Throughout the history of Western Hemisphere,

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there have been so many tensions that have existed regarding the meaning of freedom. Such tensions have reached crisis proportions. Political freedom from Europe came to mean freedom

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over Native Americans. All this talk about the Berlin Wall coming down makes me nervous. The reunification of Germany.

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I wonder what now-- now, oh, Lord, have mercy. Don't tell me the Russians-- Russia's now becoming more capitalist, Gorbachev wants to be the United States

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President, oh God what does this mean? East and West coming together? Why are they doing all of this all of a sudden? What are the implications of this for Africa in the future? What are the implications for the North-South relations? Yes, a lot of airtime for that in this so-called new freedom, but I

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I wonder what it means for us and in the future. Similar pattern is evident when we then see the political freedom from Europe has come to mean the freedom over Native Americans who

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are partially exterminated, deprived of their ancient lands, reduced to the Indian reservations, or offering halting opportunities to assimilate in the American mainstream.

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A similar pattern is evident in this history of South and Central America when the Spanish, when the descendants of the Spanish and the Portuguese, like those of the British and the French, to the north have presented equivalent options

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to the indigenous aboriginal, our aborigines, the Amerindians, the aboriginal peoples of this continent and of South America. Freedom in America has also meant the enslavement, socioeconomic deprivation, incarceration, or so-called equal opportunities for blacks. Charles Long has said in his book Signification,

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"My land has been a strange place, a constant enigma to me." We need a freedom that frees, that helps us to choose how to lean to Mount Gerizim, the of blessing so that each of us can be seen as a blessing to our own people all over again. And each of us is really free to choose it. Each of us is free to see

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or not see the tears here in Atlanta. Each of us is free or to choose to see or not see the teenage parenting. We are free to choose whether we want to see or not see the incarceration statistics wherein in the state of Wisconsin for example 75% of your prison population is black male in a state that has so few

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black people in it to begin with. We're there, but in the prisons. It's free, we're free to choose to see or not see that we only have one governor since Reconstruction in the governor's mansion and office. Nobody's in the Senate that's black, African-American, male or female. That all of the lands and all of the

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economic policies and the laws of this country are still set by white people. We are free to see or not see what that means for us. We are there with the Samaritan women with the opportunity to choose as Luther Smith, Professor Luther Smith in the book God and Human Freedom has pointed out how we can be

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response-able. How we can see ourselves with as having an ability to respond like even Jesus even when there is a no to our first response then we make a second response. There may be a no or cynical attitude to the second response we make a third response.

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[ Silence ]