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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
July 25, 2025
Reading: Deuteronomy 8:2-3
Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Excerpt from Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
Last week, my son Charlie and I enjoyed vacation in Manhattan, and we spent a day at Ellis Island. Whenever I visit Ellis Island I find myself in respectful and quiet awe of the million of people from scores of nations who balanced their hopes and fears to come to a land where they dreamt of better lives. The last two stanzas of Langston Hughes’ seminal Let America Be America Again, written at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1936, rekindle the faith needed to move us toward God’s peace.
My maternal grandfather was born the 6th of 10 sons to a prosperous farmer in Thomasville Geogia. But the family went bankrupt in the 1923 Farm Depression when 8000 US farmers lost their farms. My grandfather left school illiterate and joined his father and brothers earning $2 a day picking oranges, lemons, and grapefruits. At 15 he bought a train ticket to New York City. His mother embroidered his destination on his shirt so the conductor could tell him when to detrain. Charlie and Conor are now 15. Savvy and literate though they are, I can’t imagine them boarding a train and making their own way in the world alone.
After arriving in New York, my grandfather found work with the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. He worked nights and attended school during the day, graduating from high school in 1932. His experiences from Georgia shaped him, and he came to believe that every worker had to receive adequate wages and work in reasonably safe conditions.
In 1936, my grandfather joined the utility workers organizing committee. He would be forever proud that a 25-year-old Jimmy Hoffa came to Brooklyn to plan and commence the 1938 labor lock-in at the plant. Because it was a utility company, the workers could not legally stop production, so they locked management out and ran the gas works from inside until management recognized the workers’ collective bargaining rights. My grandmother would recall taking hot dogs to the gate and passing them, one at a time, through a chain link fence for the workers to eat.
The passage from Deuteronomy instructs the people of Israel to recall how God led them to their promised land and fed them manna to sustain them in the desert those forty years. Langston Hughes’ poetry, and my grandfather’s experience leaving abject poverty in Florida’s citrus groves suggest that faith can be strengthened along the journey, AND that faith requires engaging God’s peace and beneficence after we have arrived. We should be grateful for how far God’s grace has brought us, but we also must grow in faith and learn from our experiences to what and whom God is calling us to engage after our initial journey appears complete.
Our journeys toward equitable justice, dignified liberty, and meaningful freedom are unfinished. We can and should be grateful for progress we’ve made along the way. But we should be cognizant of the path forward not only to perfect these principles for ourselves but also for our families and neighbors.
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