Rev. Barber at Duke Chapel

Readers’ Note:

News reporting is above the star-line; commentary’s below it.

John
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Rev. Dr. William J Barber II, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC, preached the sermon today at the 11 A.M. service at Duke Chapel.

Barber’s a graduate of NC Central University (BA in Public Administration, cum laude) and Duke’s Divinity School, where he was a Benjamin Mays Fellow and earned a Masters of Divinity degree. Barber earned his doctoral degree at Drew University, Madison, NJ. (More bio information can be found here.)

Barber, who also serves as NC’s NAACP state president, spoke out often last spring concerning the Duke lacrosse case. At a series of news conferences he urged a prompt, full and fair investigation of charges made by a woman many at the time were calling “the victim.” Barber also met with Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, who later described him as a friend from whom he had learned a great deal.

In recent months Barber’s said little about the case. But during today’s sermon he directly addressed it along with some issues many see as related to it. (I viewed the entire Chapel service via webcast.)

Barber told the congregation he would not speak about the treatment the players have received or “the indictments.” He was “putting them aside,” he said, because he wanted to talk about “silences” and “injustices.”

The “silences” existed, Barber said, because of our “denials” as individuals and a society of problems such as those evident in the racial slurs directed at the women the night of Mar. 13/14 and less than adequate educational opportunities for many children.

Barber invoked the memory and words of Dr. King in urging the congregation to make its own King’s work of bettering the opportunities available to the less fortunate and assuring that America continues to strive to be more just.

Just prior to his sermon Barber expressed appreciation to people who’d instructed and befriended him during his student days at Duke. He thanked Greenleaf Christian congregants who accompanied him to the Chapel. And he said he was glad to be with his “good friend,” Chapel Dean Sam Wells.

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First, many of you will want to access Rev. Barber’s sermon. You can do that by going to the Chapel’s home page where you’ll see on your right a menu with a yellow background. The first listing is View Webcasts. Click. Now you’re at Webcast Archive. Archived sermons are in reverse chronological order.

Barber’s sermon is the first listed but it’s not active as of 6 P.M 1/28. Tech support will likely have the sermon active within a few days of its delivery.

When you click to activate the sermon it will take a minute or two before the sermon “loads up.” If you use Real Player there’s a clip bar, so you can move back and forth through the service. My recollection is Barber began preaching with the timer at about forty minutes.

Thanks are due the Friends of the Chapel who make the webcasts possible.

Now, my commentary -------

We benefit when we’re reminded of those in need and our responsibility to help them. The same is true when injustices are called to our attention and we’re offered the example of someone like Dr. King who sought to undo injustices.

Barber spoke about those things, but with less effect than he could have had.

That’s because, for reasons he never really explained, he put aside considerations of the monumental injustices done the lacrosse players while bringing “front and center” considerations of racial slurs made the night of March 13/14, and his judgment that the women dancers were at the party as a consequence of economic and social forces rather than as a result of individual choices they made.

Many in the congregation know the second dancer, Kim Roberts, acknowledges she began the racial slurring a neighbor overheard when Roberts taunted some of the players with “little ---- white boys.” But Barber only focused on the black women as victims of the slurs; and he directed his censure only at the white players.

Such discriminations are expected nowadays from NAACP leaders and others like them, but such discriminations have no basis in Christian theology.

Do you doubt there were at least some informed congregants, free of PC bias, who listened to Barber and asked themselves:

“Has he ever mounted a pulpit and condemned the racists who made threats of physical violence and death against Reade Seligman last May 18?

Has Barber ever encouraged President Brodhead or Dean Wells or anyone else at Duke to condemn those racists?

During all of Barber’s talking about the case at news conferences, at forums and in pulpit sermons has he ever expressed even a few words of solidarity and comfort to Reade Seligmann and his family?”

I’m sure everyone in the congregation who worships the holy trinity of race, class and gender agreed with Barber that social and economic forces brought the women to the house that night. But I wonder exactly how Barber and such congregants explain to themselves the fact that millions of women subject to the same economic and social forces as the two exotic dancers don’t do exotic dancing; and would feel ashamed and disgraced it they did.

There is more I could say but this post is getting long.

I’d like to hear Barber preach again sometime. His high intellect and theological training suggest he’s capable of a profound sermon that illuminates the heart of God. Today, for all his invocation of religious texts and beliefs, Barber merely delivered “the latest” from NC’s NAACP.

If Barber preaches again in Duke Chapel,I have a sermon topic and title suggestion: "False witness: Why God said it was sinful."