Lent celebrates Jesus being led by the Spirit into the wilderness to strengthen his life witness. At the end of his sojourn he is tempted by the devil. Fannie Lou Hamer is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to strengthen her life witness. She is tempted as a human rights activist by the devil that is the racist U.S. Empire. Her life’s work is to create communion, but she is made to be like the Samaritan woman at the well, an outcast, judged a sinner. Her sin was to be a Black woman seeking human rights in a white male supremacist empire. Rulers of the Empire refused her human rights. She was given a “Mississippi appendectomy” when she had surgery for a uterine cyst and the white doctor forced upon her an involuntary hysterectomy. She faced repeated intimidation and abuse for being a voting rights activist. In 1962 she was fired from her job and had her home taken away for attempting to vote. Her life, like the life of every person the empire makes into an outcast, was made miserable. Misery came with every struggling or denied health clinic, every impoverished school, every discriminating financial policy like taxes and wages and rents that plundered her community. Misery came with every band of night raiders who fired bullets into the homes where she stayed. She was a witness to lynchings and all manner of violence, “instead of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” it’s called in Mississippi “the land of the tree and the home of the grave.” Fannie’s life was threatened every day with every violence forced upon her by city police and county sheriffs trained to enforce the racist laws of the racist Empire that made her life miserable. Law enforcement officers were among the gangs of white men who harassed her and beat her and other activists, including in their jails. She was beaten in her cell and shared in the screams of other activists suffering the same misery, one time being nearly beaten to death by the police. She suffered blood clots in her eyes, injuries to her legs that exacerbated a bout with childhood polio, and permanent kidney damage from the beatings. She persevered and in 1964 she achieved success in her voting rights activism when, in defiance of the Party, she attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She and other Black delegates, who were denied representation in favor of an all-white delegation, were formally recognized. Fannie continued to work for communion in all her civil rights activities. She said, “I don’t want to hear you say, ‘Honey, I’m behind you.’ Well, move, I don’t want you back there. Because you could be two hundred miles behind. I want you to say, ‘I’m with you.’ And we’ll go up this freedom road together.” Fannie Lou’s courageous journey on the freedom road ended with her death at 59 from complications due to hypertension and breast cancer in 1977.
Prayer: “I never know today what’s going to happen… but I do know… I walk with my hand in God’s hand.”
Question: What is my mission from which I will not be diverted?
March 8, 2026 Gospel John 4:5-42 Third Sunday in Lent