God Of Our Weary Years, God of Our Silent Tears....

Gospel.singing

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A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

Wendell Berry
"The Loss of the Future"

Church this a.m. at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The gospel for the day is Matthew 6: 25-34

Do Not Worry

25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[a]?

28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

(a) Matthew 6:27 Or single cubit to his height

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Psalm 78

A maskil of Asaph. [a]
1 O my people, hear my teaching;
listen to the words of my mouth.

2 I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter hidden things, things from of old-

3 what we have heard and known,
what our fathers have told us.

Psalm 78:1(a) Title: Probably a literary or musical term

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Patty, Shalin and I went to Ebenezer Baptist -- I loved the singing, the energy, the seamless way that the choir and the preacher and the ushers move the service. How the congregation know their parts, how they understand and participate in the theology. God is moving through history, God is present in our histories both personal and societal. God is moving us right now, at this moment. The theology never loses sight of the fact that each individual has his contribution within the community, but it is the story of the community that we are celebrating as our life within God's hand.

The opening chant /song (after the Battle Hymn of the Republic) was

"The Lord is still Good --
After all I've been through --
The Lord is still Good."

The metaphors within these traditional hymns seem different within each setting. What is the battle ? Who is fighting a battle and what is it for? Is it really a battle , or does it just feel like one? Is the battle internal or external ? The feeling of the hymn is colored by the community that sings it.

Then there was a chant which expressed the sentiment :

"Forget about yourself -- come and worship God, Forget about yourself, come and be with the people of your community and think about the needs of the people."

This seemed to be a gentle reminder. Remember . Remember who you are, why you're here, remember who God is, who you are. Whose son or daughter are you ? Where have you been? It isn't just you, or , you are more than you think you are. There is an aspect of you that can only come into being as part of a or this community.

Then the minister basically preached about Obama and about "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

[From Wikipedia:]

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" — often called "The Negro National Hymn" or "The Negro National Anthem" — was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and then set to music by his  brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1944) in 1900.

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (now also known as "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing") was publicly performed first as a poem as part of a celebration of Lincoln's Birthday on February 12, 1900 by 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School. Its principal, James Weldon Johnson, wrote the words to introduce its honored guest Booker T. Washington.

The poem was later set to music by Mr. Johnson's brother, John, in 1905. Singing this song quickly became a way for African Americans to demonstrate their patriotism and hope for the future. In calling for earth and heaven to "ring with the harmonies of Liberty," they could speak out subtly against racism and Jim Crow laws—and especially the huge number of lynchings accompanying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan at the turn of the century. In 1919, the NAACP adopted the song as "The black National Anthem." By the 1920s, copies of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be found in black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals.

In 1939, Augusta Savage received a commission from the World's Fair[1] and created a 16 foot tall plaster sculpture called Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing. Savage did not have any funds for a bronze cast, or even to move and store it, and it was destroyed by bulldozers at the close of the fair.

During and after the American Civil Rights Movement, the song experienced a rebirth, and by the 1970s was often sung immediately after "The Star Spangled Banner" at public events and performances across the United States where the event had a significant African-American population.

In Maya Angelou's 1969  autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the song is sung by the audience and students at Maya's eighth grade graduation, after a white school official dashes the educational aspirations of her class.[2]**

Bear den, Rom are and Henderson, Harry. A History of African-American Artists (From 1792 to the Present), pp. 168-180, Pantheon Books (Random House), 1993, ISBN 0-394-57016-2
^ Angelou, Maya (1969). I know why the caged bird sings. New  York, New York: Random House, 169-184 ISBN 0-375-50789-2.**

The first verse is the one most commonly heard.

Lift every voice and sing,'
Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,'
Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

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.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.**

Our sermon was the "God of Our Weary Years" -- Despite our fears, or loss of hope , we remember that Faith and Memory are inextricably connected. When we recite and recount what God has already done, we recall also the sacrifices made and the pain suffered. We recognize ourselves in the stories about people brought through history to a particular time and place. In we see the themes in Psalms 105, 106 135 and 136, we have songs like "Lift Every Voice" that recall for a later generation what has been done. We remember because it helps us to ''envision God's bright future.''

We rejoice because we remember. We aren't remembering so as to settle scores or be bitter. Every person here, even Barack Obama didn't get here all alone. Where Obama stands today -- you stand. He didn't get there by himself, and no one else did either. We recite and recount what God has done, what our ancestors went through. We tell the stories so that we stand in a common knowledge of where we come from, and where we seem to be headed. We remind each other of our stories so that we don't lose heart or lose faith.

When we shout in the present, we look in the rear view mirror at the past -- [the objects are always closer than they appear.] When we see a turtle on a fence post, we know that someone put him there. No turtle gets up on a fence post all by itself. We are all these turtles on fence posts. We are all walking the fine line between crazy and prophetic. We are acting walking singing and saying because of those who came before us , and fought the battles that they fought. We stand on their shoulders, and need to remember that.

We believe that God is moving across History -- moving everywhere, in and amidst and in spite of "the wine of the world." The world is a place of forgetting, a place of getting lost. We need one another to recall.

We rejoice because we remember.

Then we sang , held hands, lifted up hands, greeted, thanked and prayed with each other. It was a huge energetic transaction -- the voices, singing, gesturing, spontaneous response, the songs with big hand and body gestures.

In my church, we never reference politics except in the most general sense. In the past, there has been a lot of conflict and contention about political and cultural matters. Which I don't think is a bad thing. What is unfortunate is that the past conflict has seemed to lead to our present conflict adverse situation. It creates a stuck energy that is keeping us from really "listening to what the spirit is telling the churches." I just know that , if God is truly the God who moves and speaks through history, there is something in the wind. That I wanted to be with people who were going to celebrate Obama's victory. It seemed too big to let it pass unremarked in my community. It transcends a 'personal' celebration -- the fact that it happened at all seems to validate the theology that goes "no man is an island, complete unto himself alone." That says that our religion speaks of a people , not just of personal acts of observance and piety.

So Patty and Shalin and I headed downtown to the King center, and gave thanks to God and to the larger community , a community which gives assent to the covenant and remembers and is faithful to:

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.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.*

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