By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for Land Sunday, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Detroit, MI)

The word for today is “woe.”  Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe!  The potency of a cry!  It is the season of the sob—the wail of grief, the howl of anger, the warning of danger!  But we live in a society that is illiterate in the language of lamentation.  Neither the tears of mourning nor the rage of wounding is acceptable in the halls of power or the decorum of wealth.  Lose a spouse or child to disease?  We give three days off from work.   Then you better be fully functional and productive again, not talk of the agony, not exhibit the melancholy.  Go private with the pain; pretend in public.  Lose a spouse or child to violence—it is the same.  Lose entire families and communities to violence—like generation after generation of black folk up against the nooses and walls, choke-holds and policies, traffic stops and bullet barrages of white folk?  Swallow hard and invisibly, smile politely and submissively, and re-assume “the position.”  Dare arch an eyebrow?  Your funeral is next.  March in the streets?  Now we really uncover the history and reality of the country.  Out come the labels, the AKs, the white-sheet posses (now dressed Hawaiian or khaki), the full metal jacket riot squads hot-to-trot, itching-to-swat, backed by bellicosities Fox and Hannity, Carlson profanity, Barr absurdity and the sheer inanity of an Orange-headed contempt for fact and truth and reasonable conversation.