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United States Senator and Ebenezer Baptist Senior Pastor Dr. Raphael G. Warnock’s Sen. Rev. Raphael G. Warnock’s signature sermon centers the book of Isaiah. In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah addressed a people in exile in a time of tectonic change. The Israelites have made all the wrong decisions and are in the wilderness--seeking hope. They are a nation beset by fear when Isaiah prompts them to re-imagine what is possible, in the words we know so well from Handel’s As Sen. Rev. Warnock says: But Isaiah also offers the way out. Isaiah offers a moral topography, a brand-new vision of how to live and relate to one another in the land. A geo-politics that centers love and justice. Isaiah imagines a future with hope. Through this clarifying lens, Sen. Rev. Warnock examines six crises that represent a moral flashpoint at the center of American life: Voting rights and voter suppression, gun violence, mass incarceration, the persistence of poverty, dark money in politics, and the climate emergency. For Sen. Rev. Warnock, democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea.
About the author
Raphael G. Warnock
Summary
From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most
Sen. Rev. Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in the congress and pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Sen. Rev. Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources, but a poverty of moral imagination.
His sermon on the book of Isaiah draws from ideals resonant in his own faith and all of the great faiths and other moral traditions, offering a bold vision of how to live and relate to one another in the land. A moral topography, he calls it, a geo-politics that centers love and justice, or as Dr. King would so often say, the beloved community. The Crooked Places Made Straight examines six crises at the center of American life: voting rights and voter suppression, gun violence, mass incarceration, the persistence of poverty, dark money in politics, and the climate emergency.
This is not a naïve faith, either. As Sen. Rev. Warnock writes: the prophet Isaiah knows well the perils of public corruption, sophisticated legalized bribery, and a political class more interested in preserving their own power than in serving the people. He’s fed up with political leaders who were focused on their own gain at the expense of the people. “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves,” he says.
For Sen. Rev. Warnock, democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. A vote is a kind of prayer. The Crooked Places Made Straight is his inspiring vision for a more just and equitable America where communities thrive with hope and possibility and every child has a chance.
