First Watch | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 12.31.23
On the last day of the year we consider what we’ve seen together this year and prepare our hearts and minds for what’s to come.
Sermon Transcript
It was already late enough and a wild night, they sat expectantly for the stroke of the clock at 12:00. They didn’t know exactly what would happen or how it would even arrive this day, this day when everything would change together in secret, so often in the past together now more openly, but together, that is what mattered. That is what mattered on the first watch. For a century, Methodists had gathered for New Year’s Eve for Watch Night services, but this was something different, something new. Songs played and then silence held them. Poetry filled the hall and the hearts of all who lingered there watching the clock. The message of the gospel, the good news of love, breaking free over and over and over and over, rang crisp and clear and pure in the air like a bell peeling liberty and siblingly love, like the first saints felt a prayer spill over them from a mountaintop.
Freedom Eve
On the evening of December, 31st, 1862, Tremont Hall in Boston was filled with people waiting for midnight for the dawn of January 1st, 1863. Frederick Douglass was among them and said at the event, “We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves.” It was the First Watch night and the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect at midnight, and set in motion the abolition of forced servitude of slavery at long last. Across a tattered country, souls gathered to be together to watch the first stitches of a new freedom knit together in the lives of some 4 million.
Douglass said, “It is a day for poetry and song, a new song, these cloudless skies, these balmy airs, this brilliant sunshine are in harmony with the glorious morning of liberty about to dawn upon us.” They called it Freedom Eve. And friends, I wish you a glorious and a magical Freedom Eve. Douglass, who broke the yoke of slavery himself, dedicated his intellect, his passion and his life to those yearning for freedom and never took for granted for a moment all that freedom meant and all that it costs. Of all the freedoms he held dear, it was the freedom of speech and expression that he spoke of the most. In 1860 following the election of Lincoln, the first anti-slavery president, Douglass attended a public discourse about bringing about the end of slavery. The meeting was in Faneuil Hall in Boston and it was violently disrupted and city officials stood by and did nothing. So a week later, undeterred, Douglas convened another meeting to continue the discourse. In that speech, he addressed the Boston government’s complicity in allowing the violent end to the previous meeting.
His words, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter ones thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That of all rights is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.” It was in large part Douglass’s fearlessness in addressing the wrongs he saw in the world that helped him to turn hearts toward understanding, toward siblinghood with those in and away from the horrors he’d endured that built this nation with its stolen labor. Speech after speech after speech, changing a few hearts at a time he brought people together, drawing them in because he knew that building community that way, drawing us together to think and feel is important because if we do not draw together, we will be drawn apart. That is how freedom always is won, by coming together across division and in celebration of difference, not the mere toleration of it.
Celebrating Freedom in Modern Times
So now you know how Frederick Douglass spent one of his New Year’s Eve, so what are you doing tonight? What do you got planned? I’m just asking. I’m not comparing. I mean, you guys you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. You don’t have to gather a few hundred of your friends for prayer and song and poetry. There are plenty of other ways to celebrate that are just as meaningful, just as worthy. Personally, I am a fan of the bromance of Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper that will be on full display tonight. I’m sure Ryan Seacrest, this generation’s Dick Clark will be on the television somewhere too introducing some of the world’s biggest musical acts. And when you think about it, right there, you’ve got poetry. You’ve got a prayer of sorts, at least for me and for some, the Cohen-Cooper bromance, whether funny or unfunny to your taste represents something powerful to a kid and to all kids who, say, grew up in the ’80s in Texas, believe that it is an answer to a prayer. I didn’t even dream I’d need to pray one day.
Watching two middle-aged openly gay friends talk about their families and a nation hearing them, seeing them and loving them, well, part of a nation at least, but I’ll take it as a good start. I’m sure whatever you have planned is fine. Maybe you’re getting together with friends or maybe you’re celebrating not doing anything, which I support too. One of the tremendous blessings of our modern life as many, but not all of us live it is that abject, large-scale suffering doesn’t dictate all we do in this nation in our personal lives, for many the dream of freedom born in hearts that Freedom Eve has come to pass, but the hopes of freedom that Douglass had that evening, that First Watch night didn’t come to pass as quickly as he would’ve hoped or at all for many. The basic human rights so often held up, so often defended as so uniquely and so proudly American were still denied persons in this nation and around the world, in many ways they still are.
The Right to Free Speech
Among those basic rights, still abridged is the right to free speech that Douglass prized so dearly, and there’s a component of that right lost today in so much discussion of it. Perhaps, it was his own fame for oratory, one person speaking and speaking or the legend of his ability of his gifts at capturing his audience with his story and all that he was calling for all of that call for freedom that leads us to forget sometimes what he put in his words, equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as the rights of the speaker. That’s what the tyrants fear us just talking with each other about what matters to us. That’s what tyrants really fear is us talking about how to keep them from abridging our rights to freely express our thoughts and to listen to others express themselves to celebrate their self-expression.
Reflecting On What Matters
Robert Hayden’s poem titled and dedicated to Frederick Douglass and penned more than a century after Freedom Eve reminds us that not all are free, that this remains an ideal to be sought, but it is also a call to reflect upon and then speak about what matters most to those in your life and what matters to you. For me, it would go like this, it’s Freedom Eve and I pray on my knees for an immediate end to the more than two dozen active armed conflicts in the world right now and an end to any tactics by any nation friend or foe that whether indiscriminately or with intentional purpose uses the lives of innocents as a tool of warfare. It’s Freedom Eve and I pray for the release of those in bondage and captivity, including those in bondage around the world and this nation, and even in this city.
It’s Freedom Eve and I pray in Douglass’s name that we continue in the year to come to celebrate the freedom to speak and the freedom to listen that in the poet’s words, we continue visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man’s superb and love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues, rhetoric. Not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of the beautiful needful thing. The hopes of freedom that Douglass had that first Freedom Eve, that first watch didn’t fully come to pass we know. The stroke of the pen on the proclamation, the stroke of the clock at midnight did not strike from the world in that moment, the ravages of exploitation, but the hope he kindled still lives. In the freedoms we hold, we guard in the freedoms we wield with wisdom and with deafness we pray with the earnestness, urgency and care we have together.
There are times when I want to believe that this faith and its principles can save every life, and maybe it can. I want to believe that, but what I don’t have to believe, what I know to be true is that it saved this life, my life by holding as wholly every part of that life and by blessing me without exception, without judgment. Mary Oliver again, “And there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save.” This poem gives me tremendous peace because it also holds up a freedom I hold so dear to recognize my own still voice and then to use it to talk to myself, just to talk to myself at the grocery store or the hardware store, just prattling onto myself because this faith and Mary Oliver said I could. My faith and the principles and practices of freedom have my back and yours.
Who is going to take the First Watch?
Now, you don’t all have to celebrate your freedoms like I do by freaking out people in the frozen food aisle. It’s fine. Thankfully, there are other Unitarian ministers to listen to as well. One account from the first watch night in Beaufort, North Carolina went like this. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister and colonel of the first Black Regiment in South Carolina in the Civil War was asked to read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation text at the Watch Night service there. He remembered this moment from the evening. His own words, “Two women’s voices immediately blended. My country, tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty. The quavering voices sang on verse after verse. Others around them joined. I never saw anything so electric. It made all other words cheap. The life of the whole day was in those unknown people’s song.”
It’s First Watch, practice freedom, however you want. It’s First Watch, go out or stay home. It’s First Watch, read things that challenge you and ask yourself why they do. It is First Watch, draw closer to those you love and talk about things you are afraid to talk about because it’s the First Watch. It’s Freedom Eve of a dawning year when we are going to need one another, friends, to stand, watch and guard against the ignominy of oppression, to stand, watch and guard one another’s quavering voices of fear and hope, to stand, watch and guard a chorus that calls all who will listen to the better angels of their nature. It is already late enough and a wild night. Be bold, be brave, and get free. The day is drawing nigh friends. It’s Freedom Eve. Who is going to take the first watch? May it ever be so. Blessed be, and Amen.
