Rev. Joseph Boyd
The painting on the cover of your order of service has a lineage that has been inherited. G.F. Watts did this painting in 1889. He called it hope. Immediately critics disliked it – they thought it was too bleak. They were confused why he called it hope – that’s the last thing they felt by looking at it. Watts insisted this was perhaps his finest painting in his whole collection, and it endured. Theodore Roosevelt hung this painting at his Sagamore Hill home in New York – he never said anything about it. We have no idea what it meant to him. Then in 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon called “Shattered Dreams.” He talked at length about this painting, the embodiment he felt of the civil rights movement – reminding him of being beat up by police and other white citizens, spending countless nights in jail, having his family threatened, dogs tearing his clothes to shreds, bomb threats coming in daily. Yes, this was the kind of hope he felt. Then in 1990, a young African American preacher named Jeremiah Wright stood up in front of his congregation, and focused his sermon around one theme based on this painting – audacity.
The audacity of this woman, the bold perverseness of this woman, the spirit of this woman who still dared to hope. To make music with one string. A young Barack Obama was in the pews as he spoke that Sunday morning. Obama was studying law, and he was being celebrated as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. This was 1990. He had yet to begin his political career. He and others thought this would be the greatest accomplishment of his life – president of the Harvard Law review. Obama thought this was it – he had reached a milestone few had reached, and yet there was something he never told anyone, at least not publicly yet. He didn’t tell anyone that when he sat in the pews and heard the sermon about this woman clothed in rags, blindfolded, and left with one string to play – he immediately saw himself – the boy who felt abandoned, the young man who tried to navigate being black while not losing his ambition, the man who was confused about how to maintain his integrity – staying true to his own music, the music he inherited from his African father, his white mother, and the failed union that led to his life
That’s another piece of this painting that I’ve never heard anyone talk about. When I look at this painting now in 2017, I hear music. I hear the blues. I hear Jazz. I hear a uniquely American wail that expresses endless searching for a melody that can help us continue on even when we feel like we can’t. When I look at this painting, I see America – I see longing and disappointment and a stubborn, daring kind of grasping in the dark for a future that remains just out of reach. I think you could call this painting ‘America” and it would be understood. But I liked that It’s called hope. This is the kind of hope that moves my heart – hope that has run out of options, hope that is beat up, bedraggled, robbed. Perhaps like Obama, I look at this painting, and I see my own struggle – the struggle to reclaim my inheritance.
I think we all stand in the place where our parent’s dreams have been. Whether those dreams were spoken aloud or not – I think those dreams get passed on to us, and our life becomes a way to simultaneously wake up and make them real in some way. And like any dream, I think our inheritance can be contradictory, confusing, hard to make clear sense of.
I see very much I am standing in my parent’s dream. My father was a man who was considered an everyman, someone who was approachable, humble, someone you could talk and feel comfortable with. He had a way about him that people of all different backgrounds felt like they could share their life completely with him, and he wouldn’t judge you. I saw this as I would go door to door with him as we did every week as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He would knock on stranger’s doors, and he had this uncanny way of making the other person feel like they weren’t a stranger. He wasn’t overly familiar or conning or manipulative. He was simply there – transparent with no pretense. There was nothing about him that screamed that he was anybody special. There was no threat, and he didn’t feel any need to posture. My father grew up on a farm, he dropped out of high school to support his family after his dad left. He eventually got a GED, met my mother going to door to door, and through a friend got a job at the post office as a letter carrier. He loved Elvis, and baseball, and peanut butter, and American-made muscle cars and rock n roll. He was a guy – and he was American through and through.
It drove my mother crazy. She would yell at him – “You have no ambition. Why are you going to a baseball game – why don’t you see how you can make us more money?” My mother’s dream was very different. She was an immigrant – she was the descendant of indentured servants who worked tirelessly to survive the brutality of the British empire, and now she made it to America, and she had ambition. She had high hopes for her family. My mother taught me the reality of America for immigrants, for those who didn’t look completely white or male. She told me – America only rewards the exceptional. The common people are never valued. Be exceptional, and you’ll have a future here. The irony is she married a common person – my father. But she would remind me to never settle – to keep growing, learning, daring.
Both of those dreams have converged and become my life. I still value the humility and everydayness of my father, though I don’t think I have the same talent of putting people at ease like he did. And I value from my mother to keep daring, and never settle for what life insists on handing you. To never think that anybody is better than me.
My mother taught me confidence, and my father taught me approach-ability. That’s my inheritance.
But that’s not the complete story. It never is. It’s still being told through my life. And I’ve inherited struggles to – struggles with identity, struggles with what it means to be a person of faith, it was a crisis moment to even consider being a minister. The struggles are there, and they’re part of me, still not completely resolved, still being incorporated into the music of my life moment by moment.
Yes, I do see myself in this painting. I’ve been there when I felt like I’ve either been robbed or I’ve squandered my inheritance, or I’ve been waiting for relief, and it didn’t come. I’ve felt like I’ve had my clothes ripped, and my instrument destroyed, and I’m blindfolded. I’m not sure if I’ve been blindfolded, or If I put the blindfold on myself. Either way, all I see is nothing, complete darkness. There’s no vision I can grasp onto or make sense of. And i recognize that seed of despair and grief that has no place to go and so it festers into something perverse, a perverse kind of hope that insists only on itself.
It has no reason, no promise, no future, but there it is in the present, sounding out and breaking my heart with it’s bluesy, jazzy tone as it reaches for just one more note. That’s all it needs – one note, played on one string. It’s perverse, it’s audacious, it’s sad, it’s beautiful. It’s the sound of hope.
Just so you know, I’m expecting one of you to become president now. So you can say you heard this sermon, and it inspired you to write a book and build a presidential campaign. And make sure you credit me, and you credit Youngstown, and you credit this congregation. And you can say that I said something completely perverse, which I’ll say now. I think that we’re entering a time of real hope. I believe real hope begins where optimism ends. Real hope boldly insists on itself when there are no more stories, no more schemes, no more rational predictions. Hope exists because it exists, and it grasps to express itself in some way that can resonate throughout the universe, even just to break its heart. I do see our nation in this painting – beaten up, exhausted, robbed blind, and yearning for a vision.
The strings we’ve counted on are breaking, and we see there isn’t a politician or a manifesto that will help us completely recover. And yet the music goes on. We don’t even know how but it does. It’s almost ridiculous. It’s audacious. It’s bold. It won’t go away and give up. Not yet.