Sermons

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God. Amen

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In the year 1900, twenty-nine-year-old James Weldon Johnson sat down to write a poem in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Johnson was the Principal of the Edwin M. Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida and he was tasked with writing something that the children could recite. But what came out was so much more than that. What came out was … lift every voice and sing,’til earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of Liberty. Johnson had written Lift Every Voice and Sing, which we now call the Black national anthem, the hymn that is often heard at this time of year and which we sang at our service which would be set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson.

Lift Every Voice and Sing isn’t really about Abraham Lincoln at all. But it is about gathering strength from past trials, and keeping hope alive in spite of dire circumstances, and the assuredness of victory in God’s liberation. Because 1900 was a turning point for Black Americans. Reconstruction, following the American Civil War, when so much had been gained for Black people, was over. What came next was a period of backsliding of racial progress and the rise of Jim Crow, and what Pauli Murray, the first Black woman ordained in the Episcopal Church, would call Jane Crow. “Between 1870 and 1901, there were 20 Black representatives in Congress and two Black United States senators. Between 1901 and 1929, there were none.”^[1]

And when it came time to title this period of backsliding, those in power stole a word from religious imagery. They called it redemption. And they called it that because they believed that the influence of free Black people had somehow tainted the purity of the nation, which they believed was in need of saving. Now we look back on that time and wonder what could have been if the progress of Reconstruction had been allowed to continue without the backsliding, without this faux redemption.

The period of the Civil Rights Movement from which we heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s words today was another time of progress, of the expansion of voting rights and ending state-sanctioned segregation. King is famous for saying that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Today I would add that the arc is not a smooth curve, but rather one of two steps forward and one (or sometimes one and a half) steps back.

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And n0w we fast forward to our present day. Two days after Trump was elected president in 2016, my colleague at The Atlantic (where I was working at the time), Adam Serwer, wrote an article called Welcome to the Second Redemption. In it he said that “the idea that America needs to be redeemed, like the notion that it needs to be made great again, rests on the notion that something has gone horribly wrong.” And this time, as we are seeing, the backsliding is not just against progress made by the Black community, but against rights of immigrants, the rights of LGBT people, of women, of non-Christians, of leftists.

I wonder if you heard what I heard today in the reading of the excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? This passage struck me as especially prescient. King writes, “[White Americans] believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken.”

This country has never been the Utopia that it aspired to or even, brazenly claimed that it was. But that also doesn’t mean that real progress hasn’t been made or can’t be made again. It just means that we have to recognize when we are moving forward and when we are moving back. There is no America that I want to live in that elevates the rights of some over the rights of others. We are in this together or not at all.

The gospel text today from the beginning of John tells the story of John the Baptist proclaiming over and over that Jesus is the one they have been waiting for. It almost gets repetitive because he keeps saying “this is the guy!” the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the one on whom the Spirit rests. Then Andrew and Simon name Jesus as rabbi and messiah and follow him. These are three examples of people who are testifying to who Jesus is and to what he calls forth in each of us.

Each of us has a testimony to give. John the Baptist testified to the coming of the Son of God. Jesus testified to the light he was bringing forth. James Weldon Johnson and Rosamond Johnson testified to the struggle of their people. Pauli Murray testified to the lived experience of Black women. Martin Luther King testified to the possibility of a radical change in how the people of this country ordered our lives.

And so I ask you, what is your testimony? What are you showing forth with your life? Is it that radical change is possible, or that every human life is sacred and beloved by God? Is it, like we say in our baptismal covenant, that we must respect the dignity of every human being? And you likely won’t have an answer immediately. But many of us will have time tomorrow, on a national holiday and using Dr. King as an exemplar, to sit with a friend or a journal and discern what God is bringing forth in you.

One of the great things about Lift Every Voice and Sing is that it is challenging to do the actual thing that the song commands, to sing it. It takes gusto, breath, stamina. The notes span more than an octave, and for many of us we have to use our head voice as well as our chest voice to reach all the notes. This is a full body exercise. And in our conversations with our interim director of music Mike and with others, we learned that it’s not a song you want to process in or out on, and I like to think it’s because of the physicality of just singing the notes, you don’t want to be doing anything else.

But this word painting that you get in the music brings what it illustrates to life like when the notes go up on “let our rejoicing rise”,  in this way it is a beautiful synthesis of the work of the two brothers. And so I return to James Weldone Johnson’s words:

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray.” Amen.

^[1] Serwer, Welcome to the Second Redemption