Truth Must Make Noise

This sermon provides a narrative of our recent civil rights pilgrimage.  To see the pictures referenced, go to davidbahr.weebly.com for the sermon of the same name

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

October 5, 2025

“Truth Must Make Noise”

Isaiah 5: 1-4, 7b – Common English Bible

Let me sing for my loved one
     a love song for his vineyard.
 My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.
 2 He dug it,
     cleared away its stones,
     planted it with excellent vines,
     built a tower inside it,
     and dug out a wine vat in it.
 He expected it to grow good grapes—
     but it grew rotten grapes.
 3 So now, you who live in Jerusalem, you people of Judah,
     judge between me and my vineyard:
 4 What more was there to do for my vineyard
     that I haven’t done for it?
 When I expected it to grow good grapes,
     why did it grow rotten grapes?

 God expected justice, but there was bloodshed;
     righteousness, but there was a cry of distress.

Isaiah 5 begins as a love song.  Not one of rapturous affection, but a ballad of heartbreak.  Isaiah imagines God as a devoted gardener, bending low to plant a vineyard on fertile ground.  God clears away the stones, chooses the best vines, builds a watchtower for protection, and carves a winepress into the rock.  It is a picture of extravagant hope:  everything prepared for abundance, for sweetness, for life.

But when the season came, the grapes were wild and sour.  God expected justice, but found bloodshed.  God expected righteousness, but heard only the cries of the oppressed.  A nation given every gift instead chose greed, exploitation, and violence.  That’s what we saw on our civil rights pilgrimage last week — a vineyard that bore the fruit of cruelty.

Nearly 20 members of Mission Hills traveled with nearly 20 members of Pilgrim UCC in Carlsbad and arrived in Atlanta on Monday, September 22.  

The next morning, we made our first stop in Anniston, Alabama, infamous for its brutality against the Freedom Riders.  In the spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, put out a call for people willing to challenge the South’s defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation on interstate buses and terminals.  They were organizing a bus ride from Washington DC to New Orleans.  But they didn’t just ask who wants to go.  They asked, who is willing to die.  Riding through the Deep South, Black and white, sitting side by side, was like striking a match in a room filled with gasoline.

First came the application:  Why do you want to go?  Have you told your family what may happen to you?  Then the extensive interview. Could you take a blow without giving one in return?   And then the training.  In church basements they practiced again and again being dragged from chairs, hair pulled, shoved to the ground until their bodies had the muscle memory to go limp, your lips whispering prayers instead of curses.  Because one clenched fist, one angry shove, could undo everything.  Not everyone made it through. 

At last, thirteen were chosen – seven Black, six white.  A retired professor, a minister, a veteran, and a 19-year-old nursing student named Mae Frances Moultrie.  She boarded the bus that left Washington, D.C., and when it rolled into Anniston, Alabama, on Mother’s Day, she sat in the middle as the windows shattered under the mob’s attack at the small Greyhound station.  That station was our first stop of the week.

Here’s what happened.  A hundred men organized by the Klan were tipped off by police who promised to give them fifteen minutes before authorities showed up.  They smashed windows, slashed tires, cursed and threatened.  Inside the bus, Mae Frances and the others sat frozen, praying.  Somehow the driver managed to inch the crippled bus out of the station, limping down the highway on flat tires.

Six miles outside town, we saw the second site:  the place where the bus stopped and the mob surrounded the bus, shouting and pounding on the sides.  Then came the bottle of gasoline, lit and hurled through a broken window that exploded inside.  Flames tore down the aisle.  As the riders gasped for breath, they clawed at the doors and tried to escape but the mob outside held the doors shut.  Their plan was not just to frighten but to kill, burning the riders alive in the heart of Alabama.  And then, by what some called a miracle, the heat reached the fuel tank and with a thunderous crack it blew, forcing the mob to scatter just long enough for the riders to crawl free.

They staggered into the daylight, coughing, choking, their bodies blistered and blackened by smoke, only to be beaten again with fists, bats, chains, and iron pipes.  Mae Frances was beaten by grown men who hated the sight of her courage. 

We stood on that roadside where the charred skeleton of the bus once lay and remembered by a photograph that went around the world:  the Greyhound engulfed in smoke and flame, black sky above it, riders barely escaping with their lives.  That image in 1961 burned itself into America’s conscience. 

The ride began with thirteen, and that might have been the end.  But students from Nashville like Diane Nash and John Lewis refused to let it die in Alabama.  Thirteen became thirty, then one hundred, then two hundred.  By the end of that summer, more than four hundred and thirty Freedom Riders had answered the call from the South and the North, from colleges and churches and union halls.  The original plan was one bus to New Orleans.  But the Spirit had a bigger plan:  hundreds of buses, hundreds of Riders – some of whom were barely eighteen, others in their sixties.  They filled Mississippi’s jails until there was no room left because they refused bail.  They sang freedom songs through prison bars and bore witness rather than bow to fear.  Four hundred and thirty, wave after wave, risking their bodies so that God’s vineyard might bear good fruit.  And all of that was only the first morning of our pilgrimage.

That afternoon we visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four little girls were killed.  

Denise McNair was the youngest of them, only eleven.  She loved to gather the neighborhood children to play school, always casting herself as the teacher.  On that September Sunday morning in 1963, the month following the March on Washington, she was in the ladies’ lounge in the church basement with her friends, preparing to usher for Youth Day.  A few minutes later, at least 15 sticks of dynamite under the outside steps stole their future.

We then walked through the park across the street from the church, where children once faced fire hoses turned up so high they could tear the skin from their bodies.  Our guide, Elizabeth, led us through the streets and pointed out how one side was white and the other Black.  In her stories we heard the resilience of the people.  And you realize:  if Christian nationalists succeed, schoolchildren will never learn that their peers once stood against hoses and dogs for the sake of justice.  Because it might make them uncomfortable.  Because without that truth, their conscience will not be stirred if it happens again.

The next morning, we drove to Selma and were guided by Barbara Barge, an outspoken retired school teacher, who had been one of the very young foot soldiers, who remembered being kissed on the cheek by Dr. King and vowing to never wash her face.  We saw beautiful murals and historic sites.  

But then she took us to a confederate cemetery,

a place that made me feel nauseous with its monuments surrounded by confederate flags.  She took us there because, she said, you must see this too.  “We have to live with it every day.” 

And then came the sacred journey many of us had been waiting for. 

We walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, imagining the first glimpse of the mob that once waited on the other side.  It was both sobering and inspiring.  Afterward we drove the 50 miles to Montgomery along the same road the marchers once traveled, who slept on rain-soaked ground for five days.  To erase this story from the history books is itself another act of violence.

That morning in Montgomery we boarded a boat bound for the Equal Justice Initiative’s new sculpture garden.  We floated up the calm and picturesque Alabama River, which made it all the more haunting to remember that this river once carried thousands of enslaved people to the auction block in Court Square – in staggering numbers.  In 1820 there were 45,000 enslaved people in Alabama; by 1860 the number had grown to 435,000.

When our boat docked, we entered a garden of sculptures envisioned by Bryan Stevenson that was so powerful, it took more than 90 minutes to walk its paths.  And near the end is the National Monument to Freedom:  a wall 43 feet tall, inscribed with 122,000 surnames drawn from the 1870 census. These were names taken by those who had survived enslavement – every name representing a family, a story, a seed of hope that refused to be erased.  

A quote in the sculpture garden reads: “The most radical form of resistance to enslavement was survival and never giving away the capacity to love.”

And then Legacy Museum.  It tells the story in a straight, unflinching line.  It begins with the sound and images of ocean waves crashing over your head, pulling you into the terror of the Middle Passage.  Then it leads you past slave pens and auction blocks where men, women, and children cry out to be seen.

The exhibits unfold, showing how emancipation was followed not by freedom but by convict leasing, chain gangs, and a new form bondage called sharecropping – the same logic with different chains.  They show how lynching became the weapon of terror to keep Black people “in their place.”  They show how segregation walled off schools, buses, and neighborhoods.  And they show how today’s prisons carry the same logic forward – and not confined to Alabama.  In California, African Americans are 5.4% of the population and 28 percent of the prison population.

The message is unflinching:  slavery did not end, it evolved.  And it keeps evolving, repeating itself in new forms.  At the Confederate cemetery we read a plaque proudly quoting Robert E. Lee:  “The principles for which we contend will reassert themselves in another form and another time.”  That is Isaiah’s vineyard gone to waste, a vineyard that bore only the grapes of cruelty.

And then we visited the beautifully haunting memorial to the thousands of victims of racial terror.  

We walked beneath more than 800 steel columns, each one suspended like a body, each one inscribed with the name of a county and the names of those lynched there. 

One of those remembered was Arthur St. Clair, once enslaved in Florida, but after freedom he became a Baptist minister and a county commissioner.  And in a sign of how far Reconstruction dared to go in lifting up Black leadership, he even rose to become a captain in what we would now call the National Guard.  But in 1877 he was lynched for performing the wedding of David James, a Black man, and Lizzie Day, a White woman, knowing the danger but refusing to deny their love.  Later, as he traveled home, a mob of armed white men surrounded him on a country road.  They left his body as a warning, but his courage still speaks:  a minister who risked everything to show that God’s love is greater than man’s hate – a vineyard meant to bear the fruit of justice.

Bryan Stevenson and EJI have created one of the finest museums ever conceived, complete with the memorial and the sculpture garden.  Like the Holocaust museum, it is also one of the hardest you will ever encounter.  It confronts both heart and mind, demanding attention.  You could spend days within its walls and still carry the work of processing it for a lifetime.

On Friday morning we visited the parsonage where 24-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta first began their ministry.  

The modest home, with furnishings many of us recognized from our own childhoods.  It made him feel less like a monument and more like a young pastor and husband.  Yet this ordinary home became a hub of the civil rights movement, scarred by the blast of a bomb on the porch that blew out its living room windows but could not extinguish its light.

Our last stop in Montgomery was at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King served as the pastor from 1954 to 1960.  Sitting in the light filled sanctuary, we could imagine the many sermons he gave from the pulpit.  For example, his sermon Loving Your Enemies given in 1957: “Loving your enemies.  Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization.  Yes, it is love that will save our world, love even for our enemies.”  “We begin to love them by looking at ourselves.”  “When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.”

On our way to Atlanta, we stopped in Tuskegee and learned the story of how for forty years, hundreds of Black men in Macon County were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” but they were really being studied as their syphilis went untreated.  One of them, Herman Shaw, lived long enough to stand at the White House in 1997 when President Clinton offered an apology.  Shaw said, “We were all hard-working men … and citizens of the United States.”  A word – citizens – that should ring like an alarm bell.  I am sure that at this point in our pilgrimage, you can imagine the heaviness on our soul.

But Saturday morning we walked through sunlit Sweet Auburn, the neighborhood where Dr. King was raised as a boy.  Our guide Roger spoke with pride, pointing out the churches, shops, and businesses that once made it the most prosperous Black neighborhood in the country.  Pride and grief when Roger showed us the scar that tore through the heart of the community: the freeway that cut right through the middle.  Surely not by accident.

That afternoon, our group came together and began to speak aloud what we might do with our experiences.  And that night, after so much sorrow, we went to a club and danced.  

Resistance requires such joy – not to erase what we had witnessed, but to breathe for a moment, to hold one another in laughter and song.  A release for weary spirits.

And on Sunday morning we worshiped at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King’s home congregation

– now in a new sanctuary.  We watched four people step into the waters of baptism, we sang until even my own body swayed, and we listened as Rev. Dr. Olivia Maxwell declared:  “Truth must make noise.”  It was the clearest call we could have carried home from this pilgrimage: history must not be silenced.

I cautioned our travelers at the beginning:  this journey will break your heart, but it will open your heart.  It will stir grief and it will stir courage.  It will call us to see not only what was but also what still is, and what can be, because the same Spirit that moved in those days is moving still.  Let’s get on board.

Isaiah describes a picture of extravagant hope:  a God who has prepared everything for abundance, for sweetness, for life.  So, let us tend the vineyard of justice.  Let us nurture the vines of righteousness.  Let us become the fruit of God’s extravagant hope.  And know this:  embodying God’s hope in these days of rising hate, shrinking courage, and muffled conscience requires this daring conviction:  Truth must make noise.  We must make noise.