Singing for Our Lives

Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 99; Matthew 17:1-8

February 26, 2017

There are, according to some sources, more than 6,000 Negro spirituals. Almost all of the music we’re singing this morning has roots in that remarkably rich cultural soil. Think about that factoid for a moment: more than 6,000 songs of human faith and hope arising out of the most inhumane and hopeless conditions imaginable.

You can hear that hope and faith in the song theologian James Cone recalls his mother singing around their house in the small southern Arkansas town of Bearden:

O Mary don’t you weep don’t you mourn

O Mary don’t you weep don’t you mourn

Pharoah’s army got drownded

O Mary don’t you weep.

If God delivered the captive Israelites from the bondage of Pharoah’s Egypt, then God would do the same for captive slaves in America. That’s why the song was sung. As Cone puts it: “The power of song in the struggle for black survival – that is what the spirituals and blues are about.”[1]

They are about singing for one’s life. Why does any of this matter for us today? For a pretty much Anglo community whose lived experience is just about the furthest thing imaginable from that of slaves?

To begin with, this matters because the power of song is essential in all human struggle. Songs matter if for no other reason than creating beauty in a time of overwhelming ugliness matters. When we sing, we breathe together. Spirit is wind, it is breath, and when we join our voices we conspire – we breathe together – we engage a conspiracy of beauty.

More specifically, the spirituals proclaim in song the theological truth that black lives matter, and that they matter, first, to God. That truth has to have a claim on our lives, and that claim ought to make us uncomfortable if not with our own individual thoughts and actions, then, certainly, with the ways that white-dominated economic and political systems continue to marginalize and oppress people of color in our own town, across our own country, and around the world. People of color are still singing for their lives.

Our readings this morning are about going up to the mountaintop, and I cannot read them without hearing the echo of Martin Luther King’s final speech that concluded with his assurance that God had allowed him “to go up to the mountain,” to look over and see the promised land.

For King, that promised land was always the Beloved Community, where all God’s children are free at last. Children of color and children of pallor – all of us free: free from racism, free from sexism, free from heterosexism, free from militarism, free from corporatism. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last. That’s what we sing for when we’re singing for our lives. Amen.

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[1] Ibid. 1.