Eternal God, who is called by so many names, Known in every tongue, worshiped in every land— we stand today between almost and not yet. The Senate has spoken, the votes are counted, but the hungry still wait on confirmation— mothers still count cans and calories, fathers still stretch prescriptions, elders still pray that tomorrow the lights stay on.
Creator, we thank You for the flicker of relief, for the doors that may soon reopen, for the workers who will be called back, and for the food that will again find its way to tables. But we do not confuse delay with deliverance, nor cloture with closure. This was a procedural mercy, not yet a moral reckoning.
You, O Holy One, are not impressed by votes without vision, nor cloture without compassion. We name the violence still lingering— the SNAP cuts that slice through family budgets, the healthcare premiums rising like tombstones over a system that buries the poor while billing the sick. We refuse to call this “normal.” We will not celebrate crumbs while the loaf is withheld.
So breathe on us, O Spirit of the Living One that connects us in humanity breathe courage into every organizer, breathe endurance into every faith leader, breathe wisdom into every policymaker who still dares to listen. Make us restless in comfort, and relentless in hope. Until justice rolls down like water, until every child eats without shame, until healthcare is treated as holy, and until this nation learns that budgets are moral documents, not weapons of war against its own people.
We seal this prayer with the faith of those who refused to be silent, and the ancestors who built freedom out of scarcity.
I have some thoughts about July 4th but will save mine for a couple of days. I can’t possibly do better than Dr. William Barber and Fannie Lou Hamer.
TC and her twin sister Lisa were born in Sunflower County, Mississippi 500 feet from where Hamer is buried, delivered by the same doctor who identified Emmet Till after his heinous murder.
White liberals (like me) should hold silence on this day and listen—then follow—the courageous prophets such as Dr. Barber who know what to do. The following was his post today:
“When Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer decided to join the freedom movement in Sunflower County, Mississippi, she knew two things: the majority of people in Sunflower County despised the policies of Senator James O. Eastland and Eastland’s party had the votes to get whatever they wanted written into law. The day she dared attempt to register to vote, Ms. Hamer lost her home. When she attended a training to learn how to build a movement that could vote, she was thrown into the Winona Jail and nearly beaten to death. Still, Ms. Hamer did not bow.
“Instead, she leaned into the gospel blues tradition that had grown out of the Delta, spreading the good news that God is on the side of those who do not look away from this world’s troubles but trust that a force more powerful than tyrants is on the side of the oppressed and can make a way out of no way to redeem the soul of America. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” she sang, and a generation of college student volunteers came to sing with her during Freedom Summer. Their mission was to register voters and teach the promises of democracy to Mississippi’s Black children in Freedom Schools.
“On July 4, 1964, Ms. Hamer hosted a picnic for Black and white volunteers who’d dedicated their summer to nonviolently facing down fascism on American soil. They celebrated the promise that all are created equal even as they faced death for living as if it were true. Those same young people who were at Hamer’s July 4th picnic went on to launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and take their challenge all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that August. “I question America,” Ms. Hamer said in her testimony that aired on the national news during coverage of the convention. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
“Hamer and the MFDP didn’t win the seats they demanded at the 1964 convention, but Atlantic City would be the last convention to seat an all-white delegation from Mississippi. Just a year later, as part of the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid Act, expanding access to healthcare to elderly and low-income Americans – an expansion that Trump is rolling back half a century later in an immoral betrayal of the very people he promised to champion in his fake populist appeal to poor and working people.
“There’s nothing un-American about questioning a fascism that defies the will of the people to terrorize American communities and assert total control. It has been the moral responsibility of moral leaders from Frederick Douglass, who asked, “what to the slave is the 4th of July?” to those who are asking today how Americans are supposed to celebrate when their elected leaders sell them out to billionaires and send masked men to assault their communities. Ms. Hamer is a vivid reminder of the moral wisdom that grows out of the Mississippi Delta. It teaches us that those who question America when we allow fascists to rule are not un-American. They are, in fact, the people who have helped America become more of what she claims to be.
“So this 4th of July, may we all gather with Fannie Lou Hamer and the moral fusion family closest to us – both the living and the dead – to recommit ourselves to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yes, America’s fascists have the power today. They will throw a party at our House and desecrate the memory of so many who’ve worked to push us toward a more perfect union. But they will not own our Independence Day. As long as we remember the moral tradition that allowed Fannie Lou Hamer to host a July 4th picnic while she battled the fascism of Jim Crow, we have access to the moral resources we need to reconstruct American democracy today.
“This is why today, as all American’s celebrate our nation’s declaration of liberty and equality, we are announcing that the Moral Monday campaign we’ve been organizing in Washington, DC, to challenge the policy violence of this Big Ugly Bill is going to the Delta July 14th for Moral Monday in Memphis. As we rally moral witnesses in the city of Graceland and the Delta blues – the place where Dr. King insisted in 1968 that the movement “begins and ends” – delegations of moral leaders and directly impacted people will visit Congressional offices across the South to tell the stories of the people who will be harmed by the Big, Ugly, and Deadly bill that Donald Trump is signing today.
“Yes, this bill will kill. But we are determined to organize a resurrection of people from every race, religion, and region of this country who know that, when we come together in the power of our best moral traditions, we can reconstruct American democracy and become the nation we’ve never yet been.
“Today’s neo-fascists have passed their Big Ugly Bill, but they have also sparked a new Freedom Summer. We will organize those this bill harms. We will mobilize a new coalition of Americans who see beyond the narrow divisions of left and right. We will lean into the wisdom of Ms. Hamer and Delta’s freedom struggle, and we will build a moral fusion movement to save America from this madness.
