James Cone - The Cross And The Lynching Tree

It wasn't until I started paying a lot of attention to Protestant traditions of preaching and theology that I developed any appreciation for the important art of preaching sermons, of how, like a jazz musician playing a composition, the playing of it, the performance of it, would develop as the same composition, a sermon, would be given many times and develop new and different nuances of meaning that change and build over time. 

You can hear that over the many times the great Black liberation theologian James Cone has given his powerful sermon, so obviously relevant for Holy Week leading up to Good Friday and Easter,  The Cross and the Lynching Tree.   There are a number of the delivery of the sermon given by Rev. Cone over the years, shaping the focus and developing different themes based on current events and who he's giving the sermon to, some of them focusing on different questions people have asked him about it.   Some of them are extremely uncomfortable, some of those when he has made the focus more personal, some of them when he has gone into more detail about the culturally warping terrorism that lynching was and how those subjected to that decades and centuries long terror campaign survived both physically and in their humanity.   

You seldom hear a preacher putting his own biography into the topic of his sermon when the reasons for that were as clear as in James Cone's inclusion of that in this sermon.   His witness and experience of the terror of lynching gives him the same kind of credibility to talk on this as the students who experienced the terror of gun violence have an enhanced credibility to talk on that that the Santorums and Swaggarts and other merely preachy paid pundits for the industry of death never will have.