Now, O Lord,
Take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds and think through them;
Take our hearts and set them on fire with Your love.


On December 7, 1993 Colin Ferguson, a Jamaican-born New Yorker, murdered six people and injured 19 others when he opened fire on a group of unarmed passengers on a Long Island Railroad train, in Garden City, New York.

Ferguson ended up representing himself at his trial. This resulted in a bizarre and somewhat disturbing situation, where he was given the opportunity to cross-examine some of his own victims on the stand.

Ferguson represented himself because he had fired the legal team of William Kunstler and Ronald Kuby — who, as it turns out, had taken on his case pro bono.

Ferguson did not agree with his lawyers’ defence strategy. What he chose in lieu of their approach was to put forward a number of very implausible conspiracy scenarios, all of which were somehow meant to absolve him from responsibility for this horrible act. And none of which helped his case.

Needless to say, Ferguson lost the case and is currently serving a 315-year prison sentence in Franklin County, New York, on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder.

The legal strategy that Ferguson rejected was a new and rather bold one. Kunstler and Kuby attempted to argue for a variation of the insanity defence. They wanted to say that years of living as a black man in an oppressive, racially-biased society had so affected Ferguson's mind that he was not acting wilfully when he opened fire on the unarmed commuters. The strategy came to be called the “black rage” defence.

Ferguson, these lawyers would have argued, was overcome or consumed by a a fire, by a rage that was ignited by a prolonged exposure to a racist society.

Ferguson, they wanted to argue, was consumed by black rage.

Now, I don’t know if the “black rage” defence would have been legally successful or not. And even if it had — even if the courts would have somehow found Ferguson not criminally-responsible for his actions — it would not have undone the horror of the violence, the suffering of the victims and their families, or the fact that Ferguson did actually commit this act.

Was Ferguson consumed by black rage?
That was the question the lawyers wanted to put to the court, and to American society in general.

Was Ferguson consumed by black rage?
I don’t know.
And we may never know.
Whatever it was that drove him— anger, rage, insanity — it was like a fire that burned so intensely within him that it ultimately consumed him.

***
But by a strange historical coincidence, or perhaps, by a movement of the Spirit, this question — this very same question — has thrust itself upon us again today.

Has Ferguson been consumed by Black Rage?

Does this question have a different meaning today?
Even while Colin Ferguson has faded from historical memory to some degree —
There is another Ferguson (Ferguson, Missouri) that is on everyone’s mind.

Has Ferguson been consumed by a black rage?

That is, in the wake of the death of an unarmed Michael Brown by police gunfire
would the unrest that continues there,
the animosity that festers between the largely white police force and the largely black population of the city,
Would this be an example of black rage?
Has this anger, this rage, been sparked by the same systemic racism that was said to have ignited Colin Ferguson’s murderous act?

***

Now I must admit to you that the discovery of this coincidence, this historical resonance, this strange confluence of racial tensions around the name Ferguson — was not my own, but that of Lauryn Hill, the famed singer-songwriter, and hip-hop artist.

Several years ago, well before the tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, Lauryn Hill wrote a song called “Black Rage.” She’s been performing the song live since 2012.

But after the death of Micael Brown she released a lo-fi version of the song, recorded in her own living room with acoustic guitar, shaking percussion and the sounds of children talking in the background. The melody line is taken from The Sound of Music’s, "My Favorite Things". The words are powerful, the song quite beautiful. She released the recording last month, dedicating it to those fighting for racial equality in Ferguson.





Listen to the first verse (keeping in mind that my recitation does not do justice to the song itself):

BLACK RAGE is founded on two-thirds a person
Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens,
Black human packages tied up in strings.
BLACK RAGE can come from all these kinds of things
Black Rage is founded on blatant denial
Squeezing economics, subsistence survival,
Deafening silence and social control.
Black Rage is founded on wounds in the soul!

When the dogs bite
When the beatings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember all these kinds of things
and then I don't fear so bad!

This is the question Lauryn Hill has posed to our day: Has Ferguson been consumed by black rage?

I don’t think it’s my place to answer this question. 
And you didn’t come here to hear a sermon on black rage.
But this does have something to do with today’s Scriptures.


***


I think that today’s Exodus reading can speak into this complicated situation in a poignant way.

This text tells the story of Moses’ prophetic call. Moses was the first prophet in the Bible. Prophets are, after all, those whom God calls to be messengers of God’s word on earth.

While prophets are messengers of God’s word, they are not mere vehicles. They do not disappear as unique persons when they become bearers of divine speech. God uses the unique, often strange, often idiosyncratic ways of particular individuals to convey this divine word — whether a word of warning, of judgment, or of hope.

God’s choice of Moses for such an important role was not an obvious one.

The lectionary doesn’t have us read the whole story. But Moses doesn’t exactly rise to the occasion. It would be more appropriate to say that he stumbles into his encounter with the living God before the burning bush.

One of the key moments in Moses’ stumbling movement toward God is his killing of an Egyptian taskmaster. Listen to these words from Exodus 2:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

This is a complicated but key moment in Moses’ call — it is one that, I want to suggest, God seizes on when speaking to Moses from the burning bush.

Moses’ response to the forced labour of his people is partly what makes him a good candidate for his prophetic vocation. Moses sees the forced labour his people are subject to. Having witnessed this injustice, he cannot but respond. Even if he does so poorly, even if he does so with a rather cowardly act of violence.

However, given where Moses has come from, this response seems just about right. Moses, recall, was raised in the Egyptian household of Pharaoh, even while he was nursed by his own Hebrew mother. He would have, therefore, learned the ways of both peoples:
- from his Egyptian family and teachers he would have learned that power is taken and maintained by force and by violence;
- from his mother he would have learned that the God of Abraham is a God who despises injustice.

Moses acted as a Hebrew in responding to the injustice, and as an Egyptian by resorting to a calculated violence, and a cowardly attempt to hide the act and return to his position of power.

Moses’ unwillingness to simply observe the injustice of the Egyptian system is perfectly in line with his Hebrew identity. It is, I suspect, one of the characteristics that qualifies him to be a prophet and a leader of Israel. God would have looked with favour upon Moses’ compassionate anger — upon what we might call his “Hebrew Rage.”

Indeed, does Moses’ response to the suffering of his own people — his Hebrew rage — not foreshadow God’s own response to this same suffering?

“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians,”

Like Moses God sees the suffering of his people,
like Moses God is intent on responding to this injustice.
Like Moses, God is caught up in what could be called a rage — a holy rage.

But this is where the similarities cease. God’s response is not one of a cowardly act of calculated violence. It is a deliberate movement “downward” into the midst of the people. I have “come down to deliver them,” says God from the burning bush.
(Contrast this with Moses’ return to Pharaohs household after murdering the Egyptian.)

Moses knows something about being a prophet — he responds passionately to the suffering of his people — but he has much to learn.

He is right to be angered, to be enraged by the injustice that his people have suffered under the Egyptian system.

And yet, there is an important difference between God’s Holy Rage and Moses’ Hebrew Rage. The clue to this difference is present in the symbol of the burning bush.

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

It was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

- God’s holy rage burns like a fire against injustice, slavery, and violence.
See, the name of the Lord comes from far away,[says the prophet Isaiah] burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke; his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue is like a devouring fire;
- God’s holy rage burns against Egypt and all it stands for
“You send forth Your burning anger, [says the song of Moses in Exodus 15] and it consumes them as chaff.”
- God’s Holy Rage, finally, is God’s to consummate and fulfil, not ours. As St Paul reminds us in today’s epistle:
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

- God’s Holy rage burns like fire, consuming injustice, consuming slavery, consuming violence, consuming racism.
- But God’s Holy Rage does not God.
- God’s Holy Rage does not consume the divine desire and intent for liberation and justice.
For if it did this rage would burn itself out,
This rage would itself become a spectacle of violence
and not the light by which to lead the people of Israel through the desert.
Indeed, God’s burning rage against Egypt will become the pillar of fire by which the now-liberated children of Israel can find their way toward a new land of justice and plenty.

Moses, on the other hand, was consumed by his Hebrew Rage —
His rage led him to violence,
to yet another death,
to more collateral damage,
and ultimately it failed to challenge the Egyptian structure of injustice.
Indeed, he simply fed the system that itself survives on violence.

Moses needed to learn how to transform his Hebrew Rage
into a rage that burned without being consumed.
A rage which did not burn itself out
A rage that did not loose sight of the divine desire for justice and liberation.

Was Colin Ferguson consumed by black rage?
I don’t know.
But the rage that did consume him offered no real challenge to the racism that was said to have ignited his rampage.

The burning of his rage was merely destructive
The fire of his rage burned itself out and never became a light that might lead to the land of justice and plenty.

Has Ferguson, Missouri become consumed by black rage?
I don’t think it has.
Even if the risk remains.

The risk remains…
But, more importantly, so does the hope.
So long as the rage — black rage, like Hebrew rage — is fed by the divine fire
That fire that does not consume itself
that fire that does not burn itself out.
that fire that does not feed the system that ignited it,
by offering up more death, more bodies, more violence.

And so, may the rage of those who fight against racism and violence
be like the fire of the burning bush — a fire that blazes without being consumed.

And may our rage be fed by a divine fire that burns against injustice
and illuminates our dark journey toward a new day of justice in God’s promised land.

Take our hearts, O God, and set them on fire with your Love.

Amen.