A sermon for Dayspring Baptist Church By Chris Fillingham “The Lynching Tree Story” 6th in the series, The Wondrous Cross A sermon on Acts 10:38-39, Hebrews 6:4-6 and 1 Peter 4:12-13 April 5, 2020

In a smoky nightclub in New York, 1939, one of the greatest jazz singers of all time took the stage. Billie Holiday’s voice filled the air, crooning beautiful tunes, as the newly integrated crowd talked and drank late into the night. But then, she did something unexpected. The crowd grew uneasy and quiet… as Billie Holiday sang a haunting tune that would become her signature song, “Strange Fruit.” It’s a song about the strange fruit that hung from southern trees, the fruit of black bodies, lynched, rotting, and hanging in the breeze.

Holiday used the poetry, and the music, and her haunting voice to force white people in that audience… and in future audiences... to look at the brutality of something they preferred to ignore. In fact, she began ending every one of her performances with this same slow, haunting song… refusing to go back out for any encore… so that everyone in the room would leave that night with these words stirring in their minds:

Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and better crop.

Billie Holiday called this her song of “personal protest.” Since then, others have called it “one of the songs that changed the world.” Time magazine has called it “the best song of the century.”

But it wasn’t so well received to those out on the town for a bit of entertainment… at least not by the white crowd. Nightclub owners started to prevent her from singing it because white patrons would walk out. It was banned from several radio stations. And Holiday’s recording company, Columbia, refused to record it out of fear that the South would boycott them.1

1 James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 136.

1 But for the black community, it gave voice to their deep-down anger and pain over the lynching that continued to take place for decades… lynching that was happening with complete immunity … and sometimes even with the celebration and blessing of entire communities.

A two-time governor and US senator from South Carolina said that lynching is a “divine right of the Caucasian race.” Another senator boasted, “I led the mob which lynched Nelse Patton, and I’m proud of it. I directed every movement of the mob and I did everything I could to see that he was lynched.” Even presidents refused to oppose lynching publicly, and some even supported it.2

You see, once slavery ended in the US, lynching became seen not as an evil thing, but a necessary tool. White communities saw it as the only way a community could protect itself from the dangers of black people who did not remember their place.

In fact, the lynching tree in America was simply a tool for maintaining the status quo that white people clung to with all they had… … just like the Cross was simply a tool for maintaining the status quo… in the Roman Empire… as I explained a few weeks ago. ***** That, of course, is why I’m talking about it today especially, this last Sunday of Lent… Palm Sunday. This is the day that a peasant from a marginal, unimportant group in the Roman Empire known as the Jews… tried to ride into their ancient capital like a would-be-king… as if this peasant-rabbi could threaten the stability and the peace of Rome.

Jesus of Nazareth -- needed to be reminded of his place.

Scholars for some time now have been saying that Jesus’s triumphal entry – his entry into Jerusalem like the kings of old—was likely the event that nailed Jesus to the cross. It’s how he knew he would be crucified, because he knew what riding into Jerusalem on a donkey would mean. [You’ll get a sense of that if you’re reading the novel Killing a Messiah with us this year.]

What took place on that first Palm Sunday… led to Jesus being hung on a tree.

And remember, as Christians, our challenge is to always bring the ancient story of the Bible into our present world. To recognize how those same stories are playing out now, among us. That’s what I want to challenge you to do today… as I try to tell what is likely the most uncomfortable story of the cross that you will hear: The Lynching Tree Story.

It’s a story that has been told for more than a decade now by the most important black theologian of our time, James Cone.

2 Cone, 8.

2 He died just two years ago this month, but part of the great work of his life… was spent sounding the alarm that white American Christians must come to grips with the Lynching Tree Story of the Cross if we really want to have any hope of being saved from our sins.

Of course, all Lent I’ve been sharing different stories about the cross… and how it is connected to our sin and salvation. And as I mentioned last week, we have to learn to listen to the stories of the cross that are being told by people who do not look like me. And if we’re a white Christian in America, that especially means we need to listen to James Cone’s Lynching Tree Story. ***** That’s what we’re going to try to do today, but first I have a challenge for you:

I’m willing to bet that as I tell this Lynching Tree Story, almost every white person listening will find their mind and heart getting defensive. Your soul will automatically start trying to undermine and critique this story before you even have had a chance to really absorb it. It’s just what we do. It’s a natural impulse reaction.

So today, I want to ask you to notice that skepticism in you, and recognize it for what it is: It’s a defense mechanism we all have… including me. And then… try to set it aside. And you’ll need to do it again and again. Just set aside your impulse to react or to dismiss this story… and try to listen to a voice that may have a very different perspective than your own.

Remember, our mission statement as a church says that we are “followers of Jesus Christ, open in heart and mind.” That’s what this means. And so, I need you to practice that today especially. Because James Cone can be kind of hard for white people to hear and to process, but he has something really important to say. He’s offering us another window into the mystery of the cross…. one that we will not discover on our own. ***** He does that by beginning with a very simple epigraph at the top of Chapter 1 of his book. It’s the passage from Acts 10 that we heard just a moment ago. And to set the stage for that passage, I want to point out that these verses come in the middle of a story where Peter is being led by the Holy Spirit to a very uncomfortable place. To the house of a Gentile Roman Soldier named Cornelius.

And he doesn’t understand why he’s there. All he knows is that he’s very uncomfortable. It goes against what he has believed is true. But he thinks the Holy Spirit has pushed him there. And Peter’s trying to follow the lead of the Spirit. He’s trying to be open. And so, he goes to Cornelius’s house. And while he’s there, he starts to tell all those Gentiles the story of what happened to Jesus.

And the way he tells this story… is especially poignant for James Cone… and poignant for black communities in America. Peter says, quite plainly, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.”

Now, for a black person in America, those words evoke a profound parallel with the story of their community. It’s a description not just of what happened to Jesus, but it tells the story of what happened to their parents and their grandparents. To their brothers and cousins. 3

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.”

Cone starts there… because it’s just so clear: there is a deep connection between the cross and the Lynching Tree. ****** But he knows it’s not so clear for the rest of us. So, no, his book doesn’t end on page one. Cone goes on to unpack these striking parallels between the cross and the Lynching Tree.

And to help us get a sense of this very important connection, I’m going to do something I don’t often do. I just want to read to you one page from his book on this. [pick up book, pg 30-31]

[T]he crucifixion is clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions. As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists—the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place…. The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian [heart and mind] from seeing the connection.3

It’s an unsettling question that Cone asks us there. “What blocks the American Christian mind and heart from seeing the connection?” Why isn’t it as obvious to us as it is to him and other black Christians?

I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do… with the possibility that we were taught a distorted story about the cross… one that pulled the cross out of any historical context, as I talked about last week, and one that became only about me and my private sin, my personal ticket to heaven… a story about the cross… that completely ignores Jesus’s life and his radical message -- calling us to participate in the Kingdom of God right here and now.

3 Cone, 30-31.

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I think that’s at least part of it. We were taught a distorted, myopic story about the cross.

And so, Cone forces us to ask whether or not we’ve been actually worshiping and following the real Jesus at all, instead of some Jesus of our own making: a white Jesus, who cares about white sensibilities, and white hearts, and white bodies… even to the detriment of the rest of the world.

It sure is an uncomfortable suggestion, isn’t it? -----

But you know, I think that what’s most disturbing about this Lynching Tree story of the cross… is the unavoidable fact that we are part of a religious tradition and part of a church tradition that gathered on Sunday morning for Sunday School and worship, just like our practice has been, and sang together some of the same hymns that we do today, and then went out and lynched black bodies and somehow felt no disconnect.

That is incredibly disturbing. It says something about our religious tradition.

It was our Christian Sunday School teachers, and deacons, and leaders, it was our church forbearers… who gathered for worship on Sunday morning, that would also gather for a public lynching on Sunday afternoon.

Or even if some of them didn’t… they were silent about it happening.

And so, we have to wonder, don’t we, what is it about our understanding of the gospel… that could allow people in our pews… to talk about and sing about Jesus… and then… go out and re-crucify Jesus.

That is exactly what Hebrews 6 suggests they were doing. I want you to hear these verses with that image in your mind because they are chilling in a way I had never imagined before I read James Cone. This is Hebrews 6:4-6:

“For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, but still have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.” That’s the NRSV version.

“On their own,” Hebrews says, those Christians “are crucifying again the Son of God.”

This is what white American Christianity has done. And so… for all of us who are part of mostly white churches in America, or who have grown up in mostly white churches… the painful truth is that this is the poison in the blood of our spirituality…

5 and just like our parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents before us, it’s still hard for us to face how this is playing out in parallel realities today.

And so Cone says that “Until we can see the cross and the Lynching Tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”4 ***** Now, I know that is a hard pill to swallow if you’re a white Christian. And I know that might feel like it is stretching things a bit too far for you. But what we have to realize is that this is not at all a stretch of the imagination for the Black Church. It’s just obvious.

In fact, Cone says that:

“Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that White Christianity was fraudulent. As a teenager in the South where whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it meant to follow Jesus,”

He goes on to say, “Nothing their theologians and preachers could say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live with their hypocrisy—such blatant contradiction of the man from Nazareth…. White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both of them outside of Christian identity…. “There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome.”5 ****** You see, in the Lynching Tree Story, we are forced to see what we have been blind to for so long. In this story, the horror of the cross pushes us to face the horror of our history.

And in the process, I think it demands that we have to start reckoning with the generational power that we white Christians benefit from still today.

You see, the Lynching Tree is one of the critical reasons that there are generational opportunity gaps between white and black people and the generational wealth that is growing even larger today, and it’s there at the root of countless other subtle and hidden advantages we have as white Christians in our society today…

This story of the cross makes us come to grips with the reality that these gaps and advantages… were earned by the tools of Rome, not by the way of Jesus.

The gaps between whites and blacks, are not the fruit of our own virtue,

4 Cone, xv.

5 Cone, 132.

6 but the fruit of our sin of betraying Jesus and his way… They are the crop that was sown long ago by the blood dripping from the Strange Fruit of Lynching Trees.

I guess, in a way, the Lynching Tree Story of the cross is a particular expression in our particular time and place of the Exposure Story I told a few weeks ago and the Scapegoat story I told last week.

***** But there’s another facet to this story… that I need to tell you about before we’re done today… and that is the salvation that this story brings, the salvation that comes for all people everywhere, in all times and places, who discover God’s presence with them… whenever they suffer under the principalities and powers of Rome.

That’s the other part of this story that Cone tells us.

You see, when the Black Americans saw their loved ones hanging on a tree, and then when to church and worshiped the one hanging on a tree, what they discovered was that God was with them… and with their loved ones… in their deepest suffering.

When they discovered God hanging on a cross, they discovered that God was one of them.

They weren’t the first to discover this in the cross. It’s also one of the essential meanings of the cross that I Peter tells us about…. this letter that was written in the name of Peter who had gone to Cornelius’s house… and discovered God in those who were so different from him.

Well, this letter of 1 Peter was later written to a Christian community enduring great suffering in their time… in the same way black communities have endured great suffering in our time.

The church that 1 Peter is addressed to is much like the Black Church in America. It was a church that was facing ongoing violence, and uncertainty, and fear – often sanctioned by the legal authorities of its time.

And so, in 4:12-13, the scripture says that the suffering they endure… is a sharing in the suffering of Jesus. Their suffering is Jesus’s suffering. His suffering is their suffering.

In that way, the cross brings a kind of hope and salvation for every community that suffers under the same kind of principalities and powers.

This is the redeeming hope that Cone discovered in the cross…

7 and it’s how he made any sense out of God in the midst of such suffering in his community.

He said that since God was present with Jesus on the cross, “God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the re-crucified body of Christ.”6 ******* This is part of the unique power of the Christian story. We worship a God that entered all the suffering that the world creates… and in the process, God becomes present with us in our deep suffering. It’s one of the deep truths of our faith, at work in every generation.

In fact, even this connection between the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of black people actually has a long history… in our land, one that predates the lynching era.

It goes all the way back to that old spiritual sung by slaves on the plantation… “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?….” It was sung as their bodies were beaten, and bloodied, and threatened… all to create wealth for white communities. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble.”

That haunting spiritual, sung on slave plantations… helped those black men and women have a sense of God’s presence with them in their own suffering…

And it did that by putting them and their slave owners at the foot of the cross… just like “Strange Fruit” pushed white and black crowds… to the foot of the Lynching Tree.

In fact, those two songs together, “Were you There?” and “Strange Fruit” help tell the whole of this Lynching Tree Story of the cross.

Together, they tell us a story about the cross that deals with our sin by making us recognize the re-crucifixion of Jesus on our own soil.

And a story that offers us salvation through the repenting of our sins, our sin of indifference, our sin of silence, our sin of turning away and dismissing the voices of those who are different than us,

And it offers salvation… to all those who endure meaningless suffering under the principalities and powers of their time… …it offers them the salvation of knowing the presence and the vindication of God… is with them. ******

6 Cone, 158.

8 Yes, I know the Lynching Tree Story of the cross may just be the hardest one some of us ever hear. But I think we have to let it begin to shape our souls.

If white Christians want to help work for racial reconciliation --which I know is something we desire— then we need to talk less and listen more.

If we want real reconciliation, if we want real salvation from the sins that continue to plague us and our communities, and… if we want to know more of this great and mysterious God, then we’re going to have to allow the perspective of black and brown Christians to shape our theology.

Only then will we get a deeper look into the heart of the One who died, not just for the salvation of white people, but for the salvation of the whole world.

Let’s Pray:

O God, help us learn how to come to grips with this story of the Cross… and just as our parents and grandparents in the faith couldn’t recognize the cross happening in their time, we confess that we may not be recognizing it in our time.

Help us to have eyes to see and ears to hear… where and how we may just be crucifying you today. Help us to see it, so that we might repent and be saved.

We ask this in the name of the Crucified One, who taught us to pray, saying… Our Father….

Silent Reflection:

Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The Lynching Tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.”7 pg 158

“The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the Lynching Tree, and the LynchingTtree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”8

7 Cone, 158.

8 Cone, xviii

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