The doors of the church are open. Good morning Saints.
Did y’all have a good Juneteenth?
Did you rest? Did you reflect? Did you barbecue? Did you laugh hard? Did you dance? Did you pour one out for the ancestors?
I hope you had a good one.
Because Psalm 126:1–3 says, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”
And Saints, that is what survival sounds like. Laughter after bondage. Dancing after delayed freedom. Joy after somebody tried to convince you that your bondage was eternal.
And Saints, if that does not symbolize Black people in America, then I don’t know what the hell does. Because WE are the people who learned to laugh with chains still rattling in the background. WE are the people who made music in the belly of captivity. WE built families under auction blocks. WE cooked joy out of scraps. WE turned mourning into movement. And WE kept dreaming in a country that kept trying to make nightmares permanent.
Juneteenth is the sound of Black people saying, “You delayed the news, but you did not defeat the promise.”
It is the holy audacity of a people who know that freedom may be obstructed, postponed, legislated against, lied about, and hidden in somebody’s drawer in Texas, but it cannot be buried forever. Our mouths are filled with laughter and our hearts are filled with joy because our ancestors survived long enough for us to become their answered prayer.
Ohhhh, Y’all ain’t ready to hear Rev. Dr. Staceypants preach today! Give the lord a praise if you got laughter in your mouth and joy in your heart.
Beloved children of the sun, today’s scripture comes from Proverbs 26:4: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.”
Now Saints, what does this mean?
It means you don’t let a fool drag you into his foolishness and then pretend y’all are equals. It means you don’t let somebody with no wisdom, no shame, no functioning frontal lobe and no evidence of home training set the terms of your response. Saints, every barking dog ain’t a burning bush.
Now, I’m gonna keep it real with Y’all. As I minister to you, I minister to myself. Because I struggle with this. I’m thinking of Romans 7:15 where Paul says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
In other words, Saints, even the apostle was challenged. Even Paul had moments when his spirit knew better, but his mouth had other plans. His theology was saved, but his temper still needed deliverance. His mind knew the high road, but his fingers were hovering over the keyboard saying, “Say less, fools.”
So I am not preaching this as somebody who has mastered the art of ignoring fools. I am preaching this as somebody still under construction, still being refined, still asking the ancestors to sit on my hands when foolishness starts calling my name.
When the fools come for me, I wanna answer. I wanna say, “Lord, hold my mule and my earrings.” I wanna clap back. When they lie on me, when they insult me, I wanna snatch them and remind them that I am saved by nobody, sanctified by nothing, and petty by ancestral inheritance.
And I know Proverbs says, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly.” But sometimes my flesh says, “But Lord, what if I answer with style, with humor, with alliteration, with historical context, with facts and data, and a little bit of violence in the adjectives? What if I don’t cuss them out, Lord, but simply escort them to the edge of their own embarrassment?”
See, this is why the word is for me too, even though I’m an atheist. Because wisdom is not saying the fool is harmless. Wisdom is saying the fool is hungry. Hungry for your time. Hungry for your attention. Hungry for your energy. Your blood pressure. Your nervous system. Hungry for your oil. Hungry for the proof that they can interrupt your assignment.
And church, sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is deny the fool a meal. Do not feed foolishness with your oil. Do not feed foolishness with your breath. Do not feed foolishness with the sacred energy you need for your own survival.
Brotha Willie, play your organ!
Because the goal is not just to insult you. The goal is to distract you. The goal is to make you stop building. To make you climb down from your platform, your purpose, your calling, your work, your joy, your peace, and your power, just to wrestle somebody who came covered in mud.
But Saints, hear me this morning . . . You cannot build and brawl with fools at the same time. You cannot heal and entertain foolishness at the same time. You cannot walk in your assignment and keep stopping to prove your humanity to people committed to denying it.
So the proverb is not telling us to be weak. It is telling us to be FREE. Free enough not to answer. Free enough not to perform. Free enough not to defend, justify, or explain. Free enough not to let a fool become the liturgist of your life. Proverbs is saying to us that every fool is not your ministry and sometimes the holiest thing you can do is keep on walking. Keep standing in the wind. Keep building. Keep shining. And let the fool hear the sound of your purpose moving past him.
Somebody say Amen.
Which brings me to former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Did y’all watch the opening of the Obama Presidential Center this week? Did y’all watch Lady Obama’s speech?
Did you see that woman walk onto that stage in all that elegance, all that unbothered poise, all that “I know exactly who the fuck I am and nobody in a musty red hat can help me forget it?”
Did you see her stand there, not begging for dignity, not pleading for their respect or validation, not explaining herself to the unwashed MAGATs of Empire. Did Y’all see her? Just standing there in her glory and in the fullness of her assignment. Hallelujah, praise Black Jesus.
She stood up there just days after she was called a man at that UFC fight on the White House lawn. By the ghouls who claim to love civilization but turned the people’s house into a cage-match for white authoritarian masculinity. And in the middle of that spectacle, a fighter whose name will be a mere footnote in history, called Michelle Obama a man.
He tried to masculinize her. Humiliate her. Remove her from womanhood. Drag her through the mud. But Michelle Obama did not turn around and answer the fool according to his folly.
Saints, that is not weakness. Obama knew the difference between silence and surrender. She knew that every accusation does not deserve a defense. She was silent not because that degenerate was right. Not because she was afraid. But because she was operating from assignment and not agitation.
She did not stop her assignment to wrestle with somebody else’s degradation. She did not climb down from dignity to debate with disrespect. She did not let a fool become the master of ceremonies over her spirit. Hallelujah. Saints, silence is not always the absence of an answer. Silence is the answer of somebody who knows exactly who they are.
Michelle Obama did not get online and explain her womanhood to men who cannot even manage their own humanity. She did not stop history to address hecklers. She did not climb down from the stage just because the gutter cleared its throat. She walked into the opening of a center for the man who adores her, the center bearing her family’s name, and she stood before former presidents, community elders, artists, organizers, children, neighbors, and witnesses, and gave a speech about memory, dignity, service, love, and hope.
She did not clap back. She rose up. She did not argue with the insult. She answered from her assignment.
The Spirit of Michelle Obama says this morning: stay on the stage. Stay in your calling. Stay in your dignity. Stay in your assignment. Because church, some folk only insult you because your response is the closest they will ever get to your power. Some people throw dirt because they can’t build nothin’. Some people call your name from the gutter because they want proof that you heard them.
Church, as I come to an end of this sermon, I want to tell Y’all that Michelle Obama reminds me of a woman from the Bible. Her name was Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1–8.
Now, Hannah was a woman carrying a lot of grief that other people couldn’t understand. She was barren in a world that measured women by their ability to birth children. She was mocked by Peninnah, misunderstood by Eli, and accused of being drunk while she was praying out of the depths of her soul. Hannah was already wounded, and then people piled on and added insult to injury. They misread her pain, misnamed her prayer, and attacked her womahood. They looked at this woman in anguish and decided she must be out of order.
But Hannah did not waste her oil trying to explain herself to people who had already misread her. She didn’t let Peninnah’s mockery become the center of her life. No! She did not let Eli’s accusation become her identity. No!
Hannah took her pain to the altar. She poured out her soul. And when the lord answered her, Hannah came back with a revolutionary song.
She sang about arrogant mouths being shut! She said the bows of the mighty are broken. The poor were lifted from the dust. The humiliated were restored. She said the hungry are fed. She said the barren woman has borne children. In other words, Hannah said, “You thought my humiliation was the end of my story, but it was the beginning of my prophecy.”
That is what Michelle Obama did this week. They called her out of her name. They tried to make her body the battlefield. They tried to reduce her to an insult. But she did not answer Peninnah. She did not answer Eli. She did not answer Donald Trump and his MAGA degenerates, she answered from the altar of her assignment.
Beloved children of the sun, Black Liberation Theology teaches us that god does not sit politely above the suffering of the mocked, misnamed, misgendered, the excluded, and the oppressed. God hears Hannah when everybody else misreads her. God meets her at the site of her pain and turns her wound into witness. God shows up where the world has said, “Nothing good can come from here.”
And Saints, that is Black people’s story. They renamed us, bought us, bred us, mocked us, misgendered us, and tried to make our bodies testify against our humanity. But god kept meeting us in the ash heap and teaching us how to sing.
So when Michelle Obama stood there after being called out of her name, she stood in Hannah’s line. She did not answer the racist fools. She let the assignment answer. She let dignity answer. She let history answer. She let the song answer.
Let us pray.
God of the mocked, the misnamed, and the misunderstood, steady our spirits today. Give us wisdom to know when to speak and when to keep walking. Give us discipline not to feed every fool, not to wrestle in every mud pit, and not to surrender our peace to people who came looking for our pain.
Teach us to answer from our assignment, not our agitation. Help us protect our oil, guard our laughter and joy, and remember who we are when the world calls us out of our name. May our silence be powerful, our speech be righteous, and our lives be the testimony.
Let the church say Amen, Amen, and Amen.
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