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Fire Shut Up in My Bones: Stories to Tell
“The work of freedom is perpetually unfinished,” wrote Bishop Matt Heyd in an email to the Diocese of New York which went out early Thursday morning. It was Juneteenth, calling to remembrance that day in 1865 when Union troops finally brought the liberating message of emancipation to the last enslaved people of the Reuniting States. Sometimes called “Independence Day,” its arrival was some two and a half years after Emancipation was proclaimed the official law of the land in 1863. It came finally to Texas two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
We remember this day not only as a point of history, but one which reminds us as a nation and people that such a proclamation was needed at all, and one which calls us as Christians and citizens to examine not only the why of the past, but how we are to live into the future.
Matt’s letter goes on: “This work of freedom is the unfinished dream of every generation. Our faith compels us to participate in God’s liberating work in the world.” Calls us to remember, I would say, and to re-member.
To know, uncover, examine the truth about the past, and to remake ourselves into a people who—every day, every year, every generation—do the work of freedom, something that our Jewish friends and colleagues call Tikkun Olam—repairing or healing the world. Our bishop has called for a Season of Freedom. I look forward to seeing what that will be.
Our National Episcopal Church and the Presiding Bishop also sent out a news release on Thursday, offering ways to participate in this generation’s work of freedom:
“Juneteenth is a summons to truth telling, repair, and faithful public witness. Even as we honor the joy of freedom, we acknowledge that emancipation was delayed, contested, and always incomplete. The legacies of slavery continue to shape racial disparities in wealth, health, housing, incarceration, migration, and political power. As followers of Jesus, we reject every theology and political movement that baptizes racial hierarchy, white supremacy, domination, or Christian nationalism. Our faith calls us instead toward Beloved Community: a society where every person bears the full dignity of being made in the image of God and where public policy protects the freedom and flourishing of all.”
Included were action alerts whereby, with the push of a computer button, I sent letters to Congress on current bills related to reparations, maternal health, the right to vote, the end of solitary confinement, and private prisons—all Episcopal Church-supported policies.
Will it make a difference? Perhaps, if enough of us do the same. At least I know my name is on the list in some Washington congressional offices—a small step, perhaps, in this generation’s work of freedom.
Today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah is another reminder, and a stark one, that this work did not begin with 1863, or even the resistance of 1619 America, but is the ancient call of God to repentance and renewal, too often unheard.
Jeremiah did not choose to be a prophet. “Why me?” he lamented. Yet God was not deterred in sending him to give a message of warning, reform, and hope, calling the people of Judah to give up their evil ways. He foresaw the coming siege of Jerusalem, its destruction, and the exile in Babylon to follow.
Yet Jeremiah’s warning fell on deaf ears. The people silenced him, called for his death. When he spoke, he was booed and battered. Yet God’s message within him remained.
He tells it like a street preacher: “All around I hear the people making me a laughingstock. I will not mention the name of the Lord,” he says. “But I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot be silent. Within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones.”
The truth will out. He could not keep God’s message to himself. His story was an urgent truth that had to be told.
Some 2,500 years later, some of you may remember another Fire Shut Up in My Bones story that had to be told. It was the opera created from the memoir of New York Times columnist Charles Blow.
In 2021 it was the first opera to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera after the eighteen-month pandemic closure, the first by a Black composer, woman director, and librettist. It set the stage—literally—for something new.
Called Fire Shut Up in My Bones, it tells the urgent truth of abuse, trauma, and racism in growing up in Louisiana. It became a tool—a way of healing and liberation—not just for one person, but for a myriad of communities, literally singing the truth.
What about closer to home? What about us, who may not be memoirists, prophets, politicians, or bishops? How do we do the work of repair beyond proclamations and news releases? How do we do it personally, and also as the community of St. Michael’s?
What of our own memories, closed off, but which in the telling might lead to change and repair? What fire in our own bones can inspire us and give us energy for repentance, repair, and re-membering?
What are our urgent stories that should be remembered, if not told? How do we come to consciousness that things in a world gone awry—name them and work for repair? How do we hear the prophecy of our own modern-day Jeremiahs?
Many of you know that I grew up in the South—in segregated Georgia, to be exact. Over the years I have come to examine those times, and I hope to learn from them and to answer some prophetic call for repair.
Reflecting now from the perspective of decades, there are images that emerge which make me aware of how much there is still to do. One of them is to recognize in myself those places where I am resistant to change. Another is to remember where and when the knowledge that something was not right first came to me.
When I see the photos now in museums of the so-called “separate but equal” world of the 1950s and 1960s, they are real experiences I remember.
From my local Empire Five and Dime: the water fountains—one large porcelain, another smaller and stainless steel—had carefully posted signs to say who belonged where. There were two elementary schools, not far from each other, whose books and facilities were definitely separate but far from equal.
I learned about the Green Book.
My white father, whose job as a civil engineer was to assure the delivery of electrical wire to various cities in the Southeast as part of a Rural Electrification Project, worked with tractor-trailer drivers delivering the wire who were African American.
If there was a flat tire, a traffic jam, or an accident, what was meant to be a one-day trip became two or three. I remember late-night emergency phone calls and the anger of my father. He spoke of the injustice that the local motel, closest to where the driver happened to be stranded, would not welcome him.
These stories, and so many more, I hope sparked a fire in my own bones to tell and to join with others who sought, however failingly, to be part of the work of freedom.
What are your stories—of pain or injustice, and also of triumph? The work of freedom includes all of them.
There is the story of St. Michael’s—which you are already telling—the history of reclaiming the work of St. Jude’s Parish and the altar, now at the entrance of the church. It doesn’t bring back the neighborhood destroyed by “urban removal,” but it reminds us that there is a better way forward.
There is the work of the Reparations Committee, ever broader and now with matching funds. And not so long ago, your work and welcome and care of people with AIDS. We will have a forum on that history next week on Pride Sunday.
Yes, all of this is still the unfinished business of the generations. It will continue in the years to come with your new rector, and the one after that.
Be not afraid, as our Gospel reminded us. Be not afraid to tell the stories that must be told and heard.
The fire in the bones of St. Michael’s is a prophetic one, and one that will ever compel you to continue the work of freedom from generation to generation.
May it be so.
Amen.
