Listen Lord: We Hate it Here - Day Sixteen
Praying with Ella Baker
“I always like to think that the very God who gave us life, gave us liberty. And if we don’t have liberty it is because somebody else has stood between us and that which God has granted us. And so we have come to renew our struggle, our struggle for that which we are entitled by virtue of being children of the Almighty. The right to grow and to develop to the fullest capacity with which God has endowed us.”
Ella Josephine Baker was born in Norfolk Virginia, December 13th 1903, she passed on December 13th, 1986. At the age of 7, Ella moved to the hometown of her grandmother in North Carolina. Inspired by the stories of her grandmother, an ex-slave, Ella devoted her life to fighting for justice for African Americans. In 1927, Baker graduated from Shaw University as valedictorian and began work as an activist and organizer. In 1930, she joined the Young Negro Cooperative League and began collective organizing for Black economic power. In the 1940's Baker worked as a field secretary and director of branches for the NAACP growing its membership among young people across the nation.
In 1957, Ella Baker moved to Atlanta, Georgia to help launch the Southern Christian Leadership Conference where she served as executive director and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1960, Baker went to Greensboro,NC to show support and offer counsel to protesting students. The meeting led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee better known as SNCC. As a part of SNCC, Baker helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to increase African American voting registration. Baker's life and contributions are chronicled in the documentary Fundi: the story of Ella Baker. Fundi is a Swahili word for someone who passes down a craft to the next generation. Ella’s legacy continues to live up to this name.
Let’s pray together. Lord we come to you this morning, children in need of your mercy. WIll you shadow us in the hollow of your hand? Will you bring us this day our daily bread of life, so that we might grow strong in your Spirit? For now, O Lord, today, we are temples of weakness.
Listen Lord, “we hate it here” used to mean the human condition of suffering unearned, oppression unbroken, but now it is becoming a geographical location. It is the Amazon warehouse and other places of work where we are exploited and dehumanized.
It is our houses, an apartment or a home where we are unable to escape the risk of abuse. It is our own minds, where we are taunted to self-despising and despair. It is the long hours that run rapid as cases of COVID-19 fill our news feeds, fill the hospitals, fill the makeshift morgues and fill the hearts of those who mourn with inescapable grief.
So we pray now, Spirit of Liberty, in the words of our mother Ella, whose life was an example to us that when given light, people will find a way. Will you hear us, will you speak, and give us light today?
“This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.” Lord we would know the reality of your vision for us. We pray for the vision of life you gave in Isaiah 65, where the laborers are not striving in vain. We pray this over your children involved in mass strikes today. We pray this for your children who have been laid off, robbed of sick leave and wages. We pray this for your children who languish ill and infected, who are brought to their knees because they cannot bury their dead. We pray life’s sacred dream into present reality. We pray the light of abundant life and living wage be shown to your children who long to find a new way.
“Awake youth of the land and accept this noble challenge of salvaging the strong ship of civilization by the anchors of right, justice, and love…. let us resolve that for the welfare of the whole, for the good of all, for the uplift of the fallen humanity, for the extension of Christ’s kingdom on earth…there shall be no turning back…we will strike against evil, strife and war until the choir shall resound in the recesses of the earth and…the waters of the deep”
Lord of Solace and Sustenance, your children are slumbering this morning under your watchful un-sleeping eye. Will you wake all the peoples of the land into a reign of peace and love? O God, teach watchfulness to your children who despise necessary distance. Teach caution to your children who lazily spend their privilege on inexpensive travel and spread risk of infection everywhere they go. Edify the weary wages of essential employees in the working class. Refresh the fatigued and desperate nurses and doctors. Protect the people who must put themselves in harm's way. Give researchers and scientists dominion over this sickness. Give us a cure, give us a strong medicine. We pray this morning, Lord, that you would bring a light to our bodies, to our hearts and minds. Be a light to your children who are eager to make a way.
“People cannot be free until they realize that peace—we can talk about peace—that peace is not the absence of war or struggle, it is the presence of justice.”
Lord we come to you this morning, minds unsettled, hearts heated and ears ablaze - as we discover daily, new but unsurprising acts of terror and stupidity. We are calling on that Amos justice this morning, that rolls down like an ever-flowing stream.
We are stricken with unsarcastic dread at the faithless leaders of Christian communities who make money off of putting you to the test. Christian colleges and houses of worship are opening and inviting people in to come and be made ill. O God would you change their minds or mute their feed? Would you rescue blind followers from sightless guides. These are your children, Lord, and they have tried to find a way without your light.
Redeemer of the ransomed, we invoke the power of your Spirit to all the places where your children suffer terror and threats thereof. Guard them against hurt, harm and danger. Be a shield around their little ones. Be a stumbling block to the harmful and obsessed who spend the midnight hours plotting evil on their beds. We bind the sinister spirit of greed that has possessed the highest office of government in this land. We cast down the stronghold in the US Department of the Interior, which threatens your children who have rightful claim to these lands.
Be a light to the despised and the displaced, O God. Show your children where to look so they might find a way.
Listen, Lord. We would hear your message of love meant to meet us in this time of peril and pain. We would know your power to blot out the temptations to give up, to stop hoping and stop singing. We would have a word from you. We would have you listen and then have your Spirit instruct us to hear. Teach us to hear from you. For as the numbers climb, as curves remain un-flattened, as anxieties overtake us and sickness grips us and the people we love, we are washed under the waters where you stride out on the open sea.
Our troubles have overtaken us and all of it is truly above us now.
Teach us to pray with the fervor that you gave to Saint Ella, Our Lady of Freedom’s Light who spoke a word of testimony and admonition: Give light, and people will find the way. So we pray now, Spirit of Liberty, in the words of our mother Ella, whose last amen in this life was merely an invitation to continue her legacy or solidarity.
[Read this final section aloud]
“We are here not because we want to see something take place just for the fun of it, we are here because we do know that the freedom which we seek is a larger freedom that encompasses all humanity. And until that day, we will never turn back.”
We will not turn back, we will not let go of your promise and our surety, we will be like you, O God of Help for the helpless, we will not rest until freedom comes. Amen.
Songs: Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, John P. Kee // If You’re Out There, John Legend
Scripture: Psalm 118
Images: Peace by the Pond, Stacey Brown // Africa Liberates Peace & Freedom, Anthony Armstrong // Ella Baker, Makeba Rainey
Learn more about Ella Baker
https://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker
https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/44635461502
https://southinblackandwhite.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/givelight-peoplefindway-tyson.pdf
Children’s worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com/people/ella-baker/