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    Feb 23, 2020

    The Power of Spirituals: Worship and Spiritual Life

    The Power of Spirituals: Worship and Spiritual Life

    Passage: Genesis 28:10-16

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. ~W.E.B DuBois

    E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868, just at the time of Emancipation and lived until 1963 at the time of the swelling Civil Rights Movement in which he served as a leader and activist. Listen to his words:

    Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things.  The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.  Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond.  But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear; that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.

    Spirituals are snapshots.  They paint many-faceted pictures of an enslaved population in the words of slaves as they describe their housing, food, clothing, resistance, and evangelization.  The songs allow entry into the lives of those enslaved from the “inside out,” rather than from the “outside in.”  Scholar Benjamin Mays, writing in 1933, said of Spirituals:

    These songs are the expressions of the restriction and dominations which their creators experienced in the world about them.  They represent the soul-life of the people.  They embody the joy and sorrow, the hope and despair, the pathos and aspiration of the newly transplanted people; and through them the race was able to endure suffering and survive.  Clearly the Negro Spirituals are not songs of hate; they are not songs of revenge.  They are songs neither of war nor of conquest.  They are songs of the soil and of the soul.

     

    Scripture Reading  Genesis 28:10-16 (CEB)

    10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”

    I Want Jesus to Walk with Me and Jacob’s Ladder both express the deep desire to walk in harmony with Jesus.  Of the first, Dr. Eileen Guenther writes:

    The slaves’ association with Jesus was of such a personal nature that they believed Jesus accompanied them daily on their earthly journey and helped them endure its pains and sorrows.  They firmly believed this companionship would take them to freedom and, ultimately, to heaven.

    Then Dr. Guenther offers this excerpt from Peter Randolph, a slave writing in his diary:

    When I was a child, my mother used to tell me to look to Jesus, and that He who protected the widow and fatherless would take care of me also.

     I Want Jesus to Walk with Me draws from a long line of scripture texts that refer to biblical characters who “walked with God.”  Genesis speaks of Enoch, the father of Methusaleh and Noah who walked with God.  The Prophet Malachi says that Levi walked with God in peace and did the right thing.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus reminds the disciples that he is the Light and says, “walk while the light is still with you. This spiritual expresses the singer’s desire to do the same.

    Jacob’s Ladder is based on the story of Jacob’s dream as he set out to find a wife.  The ladder is a metaphor for the believer’s journey toward God.  Listen to the Jacob story, and then we will sing both spirituals.

    Spirituals  I Want Jesus to Walk with Me & We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder     

     Slave life was horrible. Forced labor. Beatings. Families torn apart. Human beings treated as property and used in the most inhumane ways. Christianity was slow to be adopted by the slaves, but once it was, slaves began to sing their faith – giving voice to their enthusiastic praise of God as well as to the faith that sustained them in “the time of storm.” Add to the mix the fear that the master would overhear either the enthusiastic praises or the deep mournful singing – and punish the slaves for making too much noise.

    Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child is a deep cry of mourning, laying the singer’s soul bare before God. Imagine what it felt like for a mother to learn that she is being sold to a plantation far from her children or her husband.

    William H. Robinson recorded this memory of losing his father:

    We hastily scanned the line over for father, but he was not in that gang. But there was a vehicle built something like our omnibuses, which convey passengers from the depot, only it was built of heavy oak boards, with staples driven in them. They would handcuff men that were valuable and men that would not be whipped. I climbed upon the wheel of this vehicle and saw father sitting with his face buried in his hands. 

    As I spoke he came to the iron grating or window, and asked where mother was. I told him she was there, then he said to me, ‘William, never pull off your shirt to be whipped. I want you to die in defense of your mother. I once lay in the woods eleven months for trying to prevent your mother from being whipped.’

    He shook my hand and kissed me good bye through the iron bars. Then three sisters and two brothers climbed upon the wheel and bade him good by.

    Now the most trying scene of all is at hand. Mother climbed upon the wheel and father said,‘Rosy, I’m bound for Richmond, Virginia, and from there to some Southern market, I don’t know where. We may never meet again this side of the shores of time, but Rosy, keep the faith in God, and meet me in heaven.’

    Listen to this recording of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child sung by Odetta Holmes, a woman who was often referred to as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.”

    Despite the hellish conditions, faith took root in the souls of many slaves, and they sang their praise and their lamentations. We began today with singing a spiritual and a Black Gospel song that express the highs of praise. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot sings of hope and freedom and salvation, possibly referencing the longing of the enslaved to return to Africa. “A chariot was a French sledlike vehicle used to transport tobacco in the Carolinas. After [Ned} Turner’s revolt slaves wanted a chariot to swing out of the skies from Africa low enough for their souls to mount and be carried many miles from North America.” The “band of angels” is thought to be a reference to Harriet Tubman and those who accompanied her on her trips on the Underground Railroad. After Turner, and after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, slaves felt that the only place of safety was heaven…or the North…or Africa.

     Spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

    Praise and prayer were intricately woven together in the lives and worship services for the slaves on plantations. Patsy Larkin wrote this recollection:

    On Sunday they [the slaves] would have services after the white people had had theirs. Most times, however, the slaves held their meetings in the woods under (brush) arbors made by them. The preacher came from some other plantation; he preached about heaven and hell. There they were not allowed to pray for freedom, but sometimes the slaves would steal away at night and go into cane thickets and pray for deliverance; they always prayed in a prostrate position with the face close to the ground so that no sound could escape to warn the master or the overseer.

    Steal Away is a clear example of a Code Song – and a prayer. It voices hope for freedom – the constant beacon in the life of most slaves, as expressed in this testimony by Solomon Northup:

    Freedom – for herself and for her offspring, for many years had been her cloud by day, her pillar of fire by night. In her pilgrimage through the wilderness of bondage, with eyes fixed upon that hope – inspiring beacon, she had at length ascended to ‘the top of Pisgah,’ and beheld ‘the land of promise.’

    As we move toward a time of prayer, let’s sing together Steal Away.