The doors of the church are open. Good morning, Saints.
Beloved children of the sun, it’s good to be in the number this morning. Today, I’m preaching to you from Montgomery, Alabama. I’m downtown, deep in the heart of the Black freedom struggle. Right outside my hotel window I can see Legacy Plaza. I can see a full-size statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., looking like he’s walking these sacred grounds and delivering a fire sermon to the people!
Church, this is the same city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. I’m standing here trying to picture all those ordinary Black folk walking these streets for a 381-day boycott rather than surrender their dignity to racist bus drivers who took their money and treating them like shit. In January 1956 one of Dr. King’s home was bombed while he was preaching at a local church. A racist mob brutally attacked Black and white Freedom Riders as they arrived here in May 1961. The 54-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march went down here in the spring of 1965.
And saints, let me tell you, there’s something about standing in this Montgomery heat that reminds you that history ain’t dead. Every which way you look, this city reminds you that it remembers. Everything remembers. The people, the streets, the soil, the churches, every monument and marker, and every brick whispers out to you and reminds you that freedom must be demanded and you must refuse to let the truth be crushed to earth. Hallelujah.
Jesus said in Luke 19:40, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out." Well, saints, I can hear the stones in Montgomery crying out this morning, and I can feel the energy of my ancestors. So this is the perfect setting to preach today’s message.
As I stand here in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, I’m thinking about how our terrible president keeps trying to tell Americans how they should remember this country’s history. His regime continues to wage war on memory and truth. They keep trying to rewrite the past. So it made me think about his biblical equivalent, King Jehoiakim.
Do Y’all know about King Jehoiakim? No? That’s all right. Most church folk don’t know about him and a lot of preachers only give him a passing mention, if any, because he ain’t biblical celebrity like Moses, Peter, Esther, Paul, Job and n’em.
So our scripture today comes from **Jeremiah 36:27–28. **It’s a story that’s more that 2,000 years old but I feel like it was written for this week. Because like Donald Trump, King Jehoiakim was a ruler who believed that if he could destroy the written record, then he could escape the truth it contained.
Brotha Willie, read that scripture for us out loud please: “When the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.”
Now Saints, lemme give Y’all some context for this scripture so that you can see how what was happening in Judah relates to our current political moment in hot-mess America.
So here we had Jeremiah who had been preaching for a couple of decades about how the nation’s political elite had abandoned justice. They had been exploiting the poor. They worshipped power and only cared about their own selfish interests. When Jeremiah brought the word and warned them that if they kept on the corruption then the Christian god was gonna make them FAFO. But the kings, priests, and political elites laughed in his face and refused to repent. The Christian god decided it was time to make a written record of all the corruption so nobody couldn’t say they weren’t warned.
The Christian god said, “come now Jeremiah.” God dictates a scroll and Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch, writes down decades all the years of corruption, injustice, and the lord’s judgment against these rulers who had abandoned righteousness. The scroll gets delivered to King Jehoiakim. He reads it.
What happens when he reads it, Saints? Saints, did he act like a wise man? Did he listen? Did he receive the word humbly? Did he repent? Did he drop to his knees and said, “Lord, what I gotta do to make this right?”
NO! Because King Jehoiakim love power and control more than he loved god and the people. So what did he do as the scroll was read out loud? He took a knife and cut off each section as it was read. And then, Saints, he threw each section into the FIRE!
Now saints, he didn’t say a mumblin’ word. Didn’t challenge the evidence. Didn’t bother to investigate the accusations. He didn’t give a damn about justice. He just burned the record.
Church, turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun.”
Now, I want Y’all to flash forward to America, to 2026, to this week. I want you to let your mind take you to Washington, D.C. and see yourself standing outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The news told us the other day that Donald Trump ordered to have WARNING SIGNS placed outside the museum to let people know that the museum’s presentation of American history are inaccurate. His administration can’t run up in there and take down or rewrite all the uncomfortable exhibits because it is privately funded. So that’s why we’re about to get warning labels right beside history.
Now look at these men side by side, Donald Trump and King Jehoiakim. They are both rules who believe that if they can destroy the written record, if they can erase the past, then they can escape the truth these documents contain. They believe that they can keep the people from understanding what the government has done to them so there will be no resistance.
This is what Empire’s corrupt leaders do. Burn the scroll. Burn the evidence. Silence the prophets. Silence the warnings. This is narrative warfare, Saints. If you can control the story, then you can control the people.
Saints, the history of the world teaches us that every empire eventually discovers that its greatest weapon isn’t swords, guns, bombs, and tanks. The greatest weapon against the people is . . . STORY. Think about. Long before a rule or government wages military warfare, it wage narrative warfare through propaganda, erasure, and revision. If you can control the public memory, you can control the public imagination about what is possible. You can convince folk to call oppression justice. Censorship because patriotism. Injustice looks righteous.
This is why you see authoritarian regimes waging war on books, archives, teachers, journalists, museums, libraries, and prophets. They want to colonize the moral imagination of the present so the people will willingly surrender the future.
**Isaiah 59:14 **tells us, "*Truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.” *So when we see truth threatening corrupt leaders and their power, Empire always tries to push it out of the public square. Whenever truth threatens unjust power, empire tries to reach for the fire and tries push it out of the public square. B
But Jeremiah reminds us that truth always finds its way back and cannot be defeated by narrative warfare. You can burn the scroll, Deacon Johnson, but you cannot burn the Word. You can intimidate the messenger, Sister Williams, but you cannot silence the truth. Every time Empire reaches for the knife or the fire, god raises up another witness and says, "Come now, take another scroll."
Give the lord a praise.
Now Saints, I really want y’all to think about the absurdity of Donald Judas Trump, a man who has built a whole political career on lies and distortion, appointing himself as the guardian of historical accuracy. I hear Y’all laughin’. And it is laughable. But we gotta remember that this is precisely how authoritarianism operates! Now Trump is not using a knife or fire. He’s got other tools like executive orders, warning labels, censorship campaigns, and propaganda.
If you can’t erase the evidence, attack the credibility of the prophets, scribes, and truth tellers. If you can’t destroy the archive, tell the people that the archivists can’t be trusted. If you can’t make the history disappear, then smear the historians.
And remember, this is exactly what King Jehoiakim did. Did he say that Jeremiah’s words were false? No. He simply destroyed the scroll and thought he could destroy the truth. But saints, the truth doesn’t become false because a corrupt ruler finds it inconvenient.
That is the first lesson Jeremiah gives us. And the second lesson is even more beautiful.
So King Jehoiakim burns the scroll, but the Christian god does not surrender. God didn’t say, “Welp, I guess the king has won.” God was like, “Jeremiah, get another scroll.” And the scribe rewrites everything that got burned. But wait a minute, Saints! **Jeremiah 36:32 **says, *“all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire; and many similar words were added to them.” *
Brotha Willie, they don’t hear me!
Scripture say that the king’s attempt to silence god’s truth didn’t reduce the message, Y’all. Nahhhh. It . . . listen to me now . . . it EXPANDED IT. Ohhh, y’all don’t want this word. Church, I said the king’s censorship campaign came became the occasion for an even fuller testimony. His act of destruction, his burning of the historical record, his attempt to silence the truth produced an even greater record. The fire did not weaken god’s Word. Noooo, it multiplied it. That’s how justice and righteousness works, Saints.
Brotha Willie play that organ for me.
Every time Empire tries to erase the truth, another witness raises up. Every time they burn a book, somebody writes another one. Every time they silence one prophet, another voice speaks up and testifies and preaches and teaches. Every time they tear down an archive, another generation starts collectin’ the evidence all over again. The truth becomes larger because now it contains not only the original testimony that got whitewashed, erased, cut out, burned, but also the story of the Empire’s failed attempt to destroy it.
Ohhhh hallelujah up in here!
Saints, that’s why Jehoiakim FAFO and ultimately loses. We know his name today not because of anything righteous he accomplished as a king, but because he tried it, and he failed to burn the lord’s truth. Ain’t now power in his legacy is not his power. His story is only about his censorship campaign.
But look at Jeremiah, Y’all. His legacy isn’t that his words were burned. His legacy is that his words endured. Saints, his truth was fireproof. It survived the flames. And when it came back, it was stronger than before!
When a corrupt rule tries to make the record smaller, the lord will make it larger. When a king tries to silence our truth, god will multiply our witnesses. When he burns one of our scrolls, god will commission another.
And saints, as I stand here in Montgomery this morning, I am reminded that this is the story of Black America. They made laws to keep us from reading, but we wrote our own narratives anyway. We didn’t forget. They bombed and burned our communities, but what did we do? We rebuilt them! They tried to erase our names and accomplishments from the textbooks, but generations of scholars recovered them and showed them to the world. Every single time this nation has attempted to burn the scroll, Black folk wrote another one.
And Black liberation theology teaches us that oppressive leaders and governments fear historians, teachers, librarians, journalists, archivists, museums, and prophets. They understand that if you can control what people believe about yesterday, you can shape what they are willing to accept tomorrow.
What we are witnessing in this political moment isn’t just an ideological argument over museum exhibits and history books. The powers in this country want a flattering and celebratory version of American history that requires no confession, no repentance, no healing, or repair. They want folks to see slavery as an unfortunate footnote instead of this country’s foundation. They don’t want you to see where racial terror as the engine of this capitalist system. They want the people to hear every demand for justice as “dividing the country” because the underlying injustice has been rewritten out of the national story.
Black Liberation Theology refuses that national project because our faith is not built upon protecting the reputation of empires or becoming custodians of the empire’s image. Our faith is rooted in justice and the ancestors call out from the markers, statues and bricks to be custodians of truth and to become living witnesses ourselves.
Every time we teach our children the history they’re trying to erase, we write another scroll. Every time we preserve the names of those omitted from the record, we write another scroll. Every time we defend libraries, archives, museums, classrooms, scholarship, journalism, and the freedom to tell the truth about this nation’s past, we write another scroll.
Saints, the third lesson Jeremiah gives us is, do not despair! All kings come and go, all governments rise and governments fall, propaganda expires, truth crushed to earth rises. Truth survived Babylon. It survived Rome. It survived the Middle Passage. It survived centuries of slavery. It survive the terror of Jim Crow. It survived the lynching tree, the bombs, the fire, the hoses, the dogs, Bull Conner, the KKK, and will survive a Trump regime that imagines a warning sign can erase what god has already written into history.
Church, we are not just readers of the second scroll. We are its authors. And when we survive the fall of this current Empire, we will emerge more dangerous to power because we will have NOTHING to fear!
Let us pray.
God of Moses, Esther, Jeremiah, Nat Turner, Ida B. Wells, MLK, Rosa Parks, and the ordinary people of Montgomery, we thank you for being a god who remembers.
We thank you for hearing the cries of the oppressed. We thank you for giving the truth tellers and the witnesses scrolls and the ability to preserve the testimony of the forgotten. We thank you for expanding the record and for refusing to allow lies to have the final word.
O lord, strengthen us to become faithful keepers of memory in an age of authoritarianism and white supremacist propaganda. Lord, we need courage to tell the truth even when it becomes dangerous and costs us something. We need wisdom to teach the next generation all the stories and truths they’re trying to erase. Lord, we need the perseverance to keep writing another scroll when Empire reaches for that knife, the fire, and warning signs.
Lord, we ask you to bless the historians, We need them to uncover the forgotten stories and voices. We need you to bless all the teachers who refuse to whitewash honest education. We need you to bless the librarians who are the keepers of knowledge. We need you to bless the museum workers who preserve all the receipts. We need you to bless the journalists who write the first draft of history. We need you to bless the preachers who teach us about justice and pathways to liberation. And lord, Bless every ordinary person who refuses to forget and let them know that they have voice and agency. And give us the strength to let our lives serve as witnesses and living corrections to the lies of Empire.
And let the church say, **Amen, Amen, and Amen. **
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**ONE MORE NOTE TO READERS: Going forward,…
