The Crooked Places Made Straight

United States Senator and Ebenezer Baptist Senior Pastor Dr. Raphael G. Warnock’s The Crooked Places Made Straight, a secular sermon in the tradition of Dr. King, on the issues that most plague us, framed by the words of the prophet Isaiah.

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 Messiah: every valley shall be exalted.

As Sen. Rev. Warnock says: 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. We feel the turmoil in Isaiah’s words as he criticized his people, who should have known better, and done better. 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.

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. The Crooked Places Made Straight is his inspiring vision for a more just and equitable America.