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[Dr.
Harnish began the sermon with the reading of the poem
entitled
"The Creation".]
James Weldon Johnson was born in
Jacksonville, Florida in 1871 and was really a man before
his time. He would become one of the great African American
poets of the early 1900s. He was the first African American
to be admitted to the bar in Florida, a leader in the Harlem
Renaissance, a diplomat serving in Venezuela and Argentina
and, in 1920, the General Secretary of the NAACP.
His last book of poems was
entitled God’s Trombones and was based on his memory
of the old-time African American preacher. He says the
old-time preacher was “...the first shepherd of the
bewildered flock, the mainstay of hope and inspiration.”
(page 2) The preacher was the one who gave voice to the
hopes and fears, the agony and the faith, the confidence and
the strength of the people. Not afraid to deal with
difficult texts from the Bible, Johnson says he remembers a
preacher reading from a particularly challenging text,
then:
...he took off
his spectacles, closed the Bible with a bang and announced,
“Brothers and sisters, this morning — I intend to explain
the unexplainable — find out the undefinable — ponder over
the imponderable — and unscrew the inscrutable.” (page 4)
But before the sermon, and
behind the preacher, there was always the “prayer leader,”
often a woman, who would offer the prayer for the preacher.
Johnson raises the voice of the prayer leader in this poem:
"Listen, Lord: A Prayer"
The black preacher, bringing a
word from God, hope in the face of suffering, faith in times
of despair, wisdom for the day and courage for the struggle.
Contemporary African American theologian Samuel DeWitt
Proctor (who, by the way, graduated from United
Methodist-related Boston University and is a professor at
two United Methodist seminaries, United in Ohio and Duke
Divinity School) describes these old-time itinerant
preachers:
In their passion they chose
to redeem their race from centuries of dehumanization and
make holy the ground on which their parents and grandparents
suffered and died. With nothing but faith, they imagined the
future. They fixed their trust in God and began the journey
up the road to equality.
Itinerant black preachers
tramped the dusty back roads of the South, telling Bible
stories, and stomping hope into the hearts of the people.
(Samuel DeWitt Proctor,
Substance of Things
Hoped For, page 6)
In early Methodism, one of the
famous African American preachers was simply known as “Black
Harry.” He was a preaching colleague of Bishop Frances
Asbury, first bishop of the fledgling movement. He traveled
with Asbury across the frontier in Revolutionary America,
and some historians say he was actually a more popular
preacher than Asbury himself.
Though Wesley and Asbury were
staunch abolitionists, unfortunately, it didn’t take long
for the sin of white supremacy and racial bigotry to enter
our tradition. Within the first decade of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, the first division in the Methodist
movement followed the refusal to allow African American
Methodists to sit on the main floor of Old St. George’s
Church in Philadelphia, and the result was the creation of
the AME—the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Today we
repent of our sin, and give thanks for the African Americans
who did choose to stay within the Methodist Church, in spite
of injustice and prejudice.
In Johnson’s poetry, death and
life are often seen in very graphic, picturesque terms. Here
is one of Johnson’s poems, again in the voice of the
preacher, which shares the pain of death and the hope of
eternal life.
"Go Down Death — A Funeral Sermon"
The preacher brought comfort in
the face of sorrow and courage in the face of pain, but he
also gave voice to the struggle of the people for justice,
and the cry for liberty and freedom. He claimed the hope of
God’s deliverance and the promise of God’s final triumph
over evil.
The New Testament book of
Philemon is the shortest of Paul’s letters, only 25 verses,
yet it is one of the most radical in the whole New
Testament. The setting is that Onesimus, a runaway slave,
has come to Paul for safety, and Paul is sending him back to
Philemon. Unfortunately, there were times when this letter
was used to justify slavery and the return of runaway
slaves, but clearly they hadn’t read the whole thing. St.
Paul sends him back to Philemon with this amazing request:
I am sending him back to you, I
am sending my very heart; I am sending him back to you,
no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved
brother. Receive him as you would receive me. (Philemon
1:16)
What a shocking, radical
command. It is a word that has the potential to challenge
the whole structure of society and turn the world upside
down. Because if Philemon really does receive Onesimus even
as he would receive the Apostle Paul, and if we really do
accept one another as beloved brothers and sisters, there is
no room for prejudice, no room for barriers of color and
race, class and culture. All of our divisions come crashing
down in the light of God’s amazing love for each of God’s
children. St. Paul’s hope for Philemon and Onesiumus, his
vision for the church, is summed up in his hope for the day
when there would no longer be “…Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male or female, but we would all be one in Christ.”
(Galatians 3:28)
James Weldon Johnson died in
1938. He didn’t live to see the Civil Rights movement of the
1960’s. He never marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He
would never hear the great “I Have A Dream” speech. For
Johnson, it was always “a dream deferred.” And that’s
the title of a poem by another poet of the Harlem
Renaissance, Langston Hughes: “The Dream Deferred.” (See
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems, page 221)
And let’s be honest. In
many ways, it still is a dream deferred.
We’ve come a long way, but we
aren’t there yet. We are still, like the old-time preacher,
holding up the vision, the dream, awaiting its fulfillment.
We’re on the way, but we aren’t there yet, and until we get
there, we are going to need imperfect, interim tools like
affirmative action to get us where we need to go. That’s why
the fight in Michigan against the so-called “Civil Rights
Initiative” ballot proposal is so crucial. It’s a moral
issue and not just a political one.
We aren’t there yet, we’re still
on the way, and along the way and for the journey Johnson
wrote this incredible hymn. He first penned the text in 1900
and his brother, John, wrote the music. In 1920 the NAACP
published it along with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
and it quickly became known as the Negro National Anthem.
Johnson lifts the vision, and sings of the hope:
Lift every
voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with
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 till victory is won.
Then — remember he is writing
less than 50 years after the end of slavery and the Civil
War — he acknowledges the pain, the struggle in brutal
honesty:
Stony the
road we trod, bitter the chastening 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 thru the blood of the slaughtered;
Out of the
gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the
white gleam of our bright star is cast.
In the last verse, he turns to
God in prayer. It is a prayer acknowledging faithfulness on
the journey thus far, a prayer of dependence on God for the
future, a prayer for constancy and faithfulness on the part
of God’s people, a prayer of confession coupled with courage
and hope.
God of our
weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who
hast brought us thus far on our way;
Thou who
hast 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.
(U.M.
Hymnal, page 519)
Hear this
benediction from James Weldon Johnson:
And now, O
Lord —
When I’ve
done drunk my last cup of sorrow —
When I’ve
been called everything but a child of God —
When I’m
done traveling up the rough side of the mountain —
O — Mary’s
Baby —
When I start
down the steep and slippery steps of death —
When this
old world begins to rock beneath my feet —
Lower me to
my dusty grave in peace
To wait for
that great gittin’ up morning — Amen.
(God’s Trombones, page
14)
Notes:
For more
information on the life and poetry of James Weldon Johnson,
go to:
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/johnson/johnson.htm
www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/amlit/johnson/johnson.html
An insightful book on the life
of African Americans within the United Methodist Church is
the story of Bishop Leontyne Kelly and her family, written
by her daughter, Angella Current. It is entitled Breaking
Barriers: An African American Family in the Methodist Story,
Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN.
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