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There is an old saying that, I believe, originated in Germany: The folks I talk to are my fellow human beings; the ones I sing with are family. Our music does say a lot about who we are, or who we aren’t. The church is one of the few places left where all present are to join together in song. In fact, it would not surprise me -- if it were possible to get right down to the core of what many Christians believe -- that the kernel of faith is as much in the hymns we sing as it is in the scriptures we read. Of course, many hymns are based on scripture, but there is something ineffable and enduring about the mood and memories created in us by the songs we sing.

The best extra-biblical devotional resource we have is this Presbyterian Hymnal, which captures something of the diversity and breadth of who we are in the PCUSA. I like it because it does such a wonderful job of retaining something of the old while also introducing us to something of the new. I like it because it attempts to use inclusive language, both for God and for humanity, while trying to retain the original sense of the hymn writer. There are hymns written for the master instrument (the organ), but also hymns with guitar chords; monastic chants and contemporary rounds; hymns of Zion and hymns that call for better stewardship of the earth. And, although it is dominated numerically by the words and music of folk of European descent, there is an attempt to give a bit of representation to native American, Korean, Japanese, Hispanic, and other voices in this great choir of the Church Universal’s musical repertoire.

When you compare this hymnal to its Presbyterian predecessors – the old red hymnal and The Worshipbook, another striking difference is the number of African-American spirituals included in our most recent hymnal, by my count 20 or so, plus a couple I am aware of written by African-American composers, Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take my hand” for one, and another by James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” # 563 if you wish to take a look at it. I have heard “Lift Every Voice and Sing” referred to as the national anthem of black America, although I am not sure James Weldon Johnson intended that. But the words of this hymn do take on new meaning in light of the suffering black Americans have known/ #563

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 parents 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, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

[play #563 “Lift Every Voice and Sing”]

I have never had an opportunity to sing that hymn in church, but there is a small corpus of African-American – what used to be called colored or Negro – spirituals that I did grow up singing – and probably you did, too. Anyone who ever went to church camp learned to sing “Kum Ba Yah,” “Peace Like a River,” maybe even “There is a Balm in Gilead.”

Caleb and I were recently doing some traveling together and, of course, that means, whether you like it or not, if you’re traveling with him, listening to Jazz. The preeminent jazz sax player today, Chris Potter, has a CD in which he has taken a couple of old hymns and improvised over the melody. When I heard Potter’s quite wonderful and reverential improvisation over Just as I Am and some others, I told Caleb that there are a ton of hymns that, even for people no longer in Church, hymns that they sang as children, hymns that never really leave the soul, that are just sort of waiting to be called out again in a new way. Even if you hadn’t been inside a church for ages, who could not remember, for instance, pre-air conditioning and quarterly communion on a hot summer’s day and this African-American spiritual, #513.

[play #513 “Let Us Break Bread Together”]

As “Let us Break Bread Together” testifies, the old spirituals are very much a part of the evangelical tradition in church hymnody. This hymnody claims that you cannot be reconciled to God, you cannot understand the ultimate purposes of the world, you cannot live a truly virtuous life unless you confess your sin before the living God and receive new life in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Like this next hymn, # 382, “Somebody’s Knocking at Your Door.” And if you listen carefully, you might even hear the old pattern of call and response that was such a tried and true technique for passing the long arduous times of enslaved labor on the cotton fields and other fields of the South.

O Sinner, why don’t you answer? Somebody’s knocking at your door.
Knocks like Jesus, Somebody’s knocking at your door.
Can’t you hear him, Somebody’s knocking at your door
Answer Jesus. Somebody’s knocking at your door
O sinner, why don’t you answer? Somebody’s knocking at your door.

[play #382 “Somebody’s Knocking at your Door”]

For black Christians in America, spirituals represented a way to imagine life in a different place – a land of equality, of equal opportunity, of shared possessions, no segregation, no slave labor, but complete freedom of movement. It has been the great irony and the great injustice of American Church history that heaven was, they believed, as close as they could ever come to such a vision.

I got a robe,
You got a robe,
All God’s children got robes.
When we get to heaven
We’re going to put on our robes,
We’re going to shout all over God’s heaven.

Thus, one of the great purposes of the spiritual was to transport the singer beyond the tragedy and suffering of slave life towards the promise of a better tomorrow in another world. The great black educator W.E.B. DuBois in 1900 wrote this about African-American music in his famous book, The Souls of Black Folks:

The music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with
its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement,
still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life
and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from African forests,
where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and
intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of
law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow,
despair, and hope. (from The Souls of Black Folks in African-American
Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 326.)

Probably you caught the cry to escape bondage in the opening hymn we sang this morning, #334. The problem is, unless you’ve been enslaved or have been the victim of prejudice, you don’t really know how to sing that song desperately. Typically, such as in this hymn, #334, African-American spirituals don’t draw upon St. Paul with his language about subservience to the powers that be or his message about slaves being obedient to masters in Philemon. Instead, the great biblical narrative of captivity and freedom is the major theme. And Pharoh is the cruel slave master, then and now.

When Israel was in Egypt’s land, Let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go!
Go down Moses, Way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharoh, let my people go!

[play #334 “When Israel was in Egypt’s Land”]

Even though that hymn has never been a part of white America’s spiritual repertoire, try to imagine a slave singing that hymn in a brush arbor or hidden away in the woods late at night because he’s not allowed to worship anytime or anywhere else, imagine the stress those slaves would have given to the phrases followed by an exclamation mark. Let my people go!
The mood and message of many of the spirituals expresses this hope of a great reversal when the righteous in their chariots will ascend to the mountaintop, that great day of Jubilee that the Old Testament announces when property will be restored and justice will roll down. You can hear these themes in this next hymn, #445, “Great Day!” “Great day! The righteous marching, Great day, God’s going to build up Zion’s Walls . . . this is the day of Jubilee, God shall set the people free.”

[play 445 “Great Day!”]

It would be wrong, of course, to relegate exclusively the longing for freedom to life beyond death in heaven, just as it would be wrong to assume that all African-American spirituals encourage slaves or other oppressed peoples merely to accommodate themselves to the status quo, a “grin and bear it” kind of attitude. The spirituals could also contain a politically subversive message. When slaves on plantations sang, “Steal away to Jesus, I ain’t got long to stay here,” they weren’t talking just about heaven; they were expressing their secret hope that they, too, would have their chance to escape up North to freedom.

And if you know anything about the Civil Rights movement, you know how essential the politically-motivated freedom songs were to its success. Mahalia Jackson, the irrepressible African-American gospel singer, once wrote this about the freedom songs:

The freedom songs began back during the Montgomery boycott
when the Negroes began singing in the churches to keep up their
courage. When the students began to go to jail during the sit-ins
they began to make up new words to the spirituals and hymns and
old gospel melodies that the Negroes had been singing in their
churches for generations. Some got printed, some got put on records
and so just got passed around. (“Singing of Good Tidings and Freedom,”
African American Religious History, 543.)

It was given to Mahalia Jackson to be the one who would sing and lead that great throng in song who had gathered in the March on Washington at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 just before the greatest sermon in American history was uttered by Martin Luther King, Jr. She remembers that day in this fashion when King turned to her just before she was to sing and he to speak, and he asked her to sing “I been ‘buked and I been Scorned.” She writes:

There’s probably only a few white people who ever heard of [this] song,
but its an old spiritual that is known to colored people up and down the
land. . . . At first I sang the words softly . . .
I been ‘buked and I been scorned.
I’m gonna tell my Lord
When I get home.
Just how long you’ve been treating me wrong.
I found myself clapping my hands and swaying and the great crowd joined I in with me with a great wave of singing and clapping . . . Flags were
waving and people shouting. It looked as if we had the whole city
rocking. I hadn’t planned to start a revival meeting but for the moment
the joy overflowed throughout the great rally. They said later my singing
seemed to bounce off the golden dome of the Capitol far down the Mall
and I’ve always hoped it reached inside to where some of those
Congressmen were sitting! (p.547)

A similar cry for freedom goes out today. All we have to do is look to Newport and the events of yesterday and the specter of the KKK to know that the dream has been deferred in some quarters. What discussion of freedom songs could ever be complete without the words for a hand-holding demonstration of unity in the face of racism, injustice, and violence, that which is always the greatest threat, not just to democracy, but even to Christianity itself.

[play “We Shall Overcome”]

One day, maybe we will be able to overcome identifying the origins of our hymns as European, African, Oriental, or Hispanic. But until we can, God’s dream for this nation and for the Church will remain unrealized. About the best we can do the meantime is to pray with the father of modern Gospel music Thomas A. Dorsey, in the hymn #404:

Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand;
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light; take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

[play #404 “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”]