Lift Every Voice and Sing

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING

Mount Hope UMC

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Church, it’s Black History month.  This is the month where everyone celebrates the lives and contributions of African Americans.  However, those who are African American celebrate our heritage each every day of our lives.  But this morning, in that spirit and with your approval, I want to use our Black national anthem and supporting scripture as our sermon message.  Is that all right with you?  Thank you.

James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson must have been inspired by God when they penned the song because each stanza has a connection to scripture.  Let’s take a close look at the words of the song and visit it from a different perspective.  Many of you learned this song in college if you attended an HBCU.

“Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty.”  We know that when praises go up, blessings come down.  David sang in Psalm 68:6a, “God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing.”  Like the Israelites, we were once prisoners in a foreign land.  During slavery, it was the songs that eased the burden of the slave masters’ whip.  It was in the shame of our nakedness on the auction block that we sang songs of redemption with our tears.  It was when our children were sold from our arms that we sang songs of grief pleading with our God to put an end to our anguish.  It was in this darkness of our souls that we prayed Jeremiah 8:21-22, “Since my people are crushed, I am crushed, I mourn, and horror grips me.  Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?  Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?

“Let our rejoicing rise High as the list'ning skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea.”  When we were freed from slavery, we sang songs of thanks and praise to God, our strength and our redeemer!  Psalm 89:1 – “I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations.”  During the Civil Rights movement we sang the Old Negro spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.  We stood on the promises of God and told the story of how we would overcome adversity someday.

“Sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us.  Sing a song full of

the hope that the present has brought us.”  We proclaimed the words of Psalm 105:2, “Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all is wonderful acts.”  Our freed slave forefathers and mothers praised God for their freedom.  During the Civil Rights movement, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, we believed that all former things had passed away and that God would be doing a new thing for us by opening up opportunities that had never been available to us.  Little did we know we still had to fight uphill battles to be considered for better paying jobs, to be able to buy homes in nicer neighborhoods, be able to vote in elections so as to determine our own future, to go to whatever school we wanted in our neighborhoods, to get loans at the same rate as our white brothers and sisters.  In reality, we were partially free, but it was better than the chains that had formerly bound us.

            “Facing the rising sun of our new day begun Let us march on till victory is won.”  Lamentations 3:22-24 (NKJV) says,” Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, Because His compassions fail not.  They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.   “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!”  God’s mercies are new with the dawn of each new da.  We sing songs of hope and encouragement and when we don’t’’ have words to sing, we hum and moan because the enemy can’t understand our moaning’s and groanings. 

The Israelites wandered the desert looking for the Promised Land for 40 years and it was right in their eyesight.  We were slaves in a land that was not our native land for over 200 years.  Four generations passed before the Israelites entered the Promised Land.  After over 200 years we, as a people, are still wandering in the desert awaiting our Promised Land.  Oh, some of us think we have attained it because we have important jobs and nice cars and big houses, but let me assure you, we have not, as a people, come into our Promised Land.  We still have a way to go.  We still have some marching to do.  As the words of the hymn “Beams of Heaven” says, “Beams of heaven as I go, through this wilderness below, guide my feet in peaceful ways, turn my midnights into days.  When in the darkness I would grope, faith always sees a star of hope, and soon from all life’s grief and danger I shall be free someday.  I do not know how long ‘twill be, nor what the future holds for me, but this I know: if Jesus leads me, I shall get home someday.  We always knew that we had hope in Jesus.  Our freedom, our very lives were built upon the hope of Jesus blood and righteousness, so we face every adversity put before us with our faith that if God be for us who can be against us (Romans 8:31). 

“Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast'ning rod Felt in the day that hope unborn had died.”  1 Peter 5:10 comforts us – “In his kindness God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So, after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation.”

Like the Israelites who were slaves in Egypt they just accepted their condition as natural and could see no way out.  Their days we extremely harsh filled with extreme heat and impossible goals making brick from straw.  Our forefathers felt a sense of hopelessness in their enslavement.  Taken from their countries and families to a new and foreign land, they had no concept of how they would return to the land they knew and loved; to their tribe; to their former lives.  Brought to a harsh new land against their will, beaten, forced into hard labor, sold at the whim of the master, made to breed like animals; this was all against anything they knew or experienced in their homeland.  Yet they survived and we are the result.  Our parents and grandparents had it rough.  Many were sharecroppers and in low paying jobs trying to make ends meet.  In jobs where they had to work under harsh conditions, not able to shop in the best stores and getting seconds when they did shop, fear of retribution by their new masters, afraid of having a cross burned in their yard, or a noose around their neck and swinging from a tree on the whim of any false report.  In more recent years, facing the dogs and the water hoses.  Being turned away when someone else of another persuasion was allowed in; having to sit in the back of the bus or movie theater.  Or, when I was growing up, Blacks sat upstairs in the balcony at the local movie theater and whites sat downstairs.  The theater owner didn’t realize that upstairs was the better seats because there was a section in the back in the corner in the dark for the lovers and then there was the front seats of the balcony where the kids would throw popcorn over the balcony on the folks downstairs.  I never did that though.  Even the concession stand was segregated.

“Yet with a steady beat Have not our weary feet Come to the place on which our fathers sighed.”  Psalm 57:7 (NKJV) – “My heart is confident in you, O God; my heart is confident.  No wonder I can sing your praises!”  Many times, our forefathers and mothers planned their escape from the harsh whip of the slave master.  They devised secret messages to send to one another about their escape plans and many were in songs like “Steal Away” - Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus!  Steal away, steal away home, I hain't got long to stay here”, and other songs of the Underground Railroad, like  "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd".  The song's title is said to refer to the star formation (an asterism) known in America as the Big Dipper and in Europe as The Plough. The pointer stars of the Big Dipper align with the North Star. In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus often interpreted as instructions to escaping slaves to travel north by following the North Star, leading them to the northern states, Canada, and freedom: The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a map from Mobile, Alabama up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to the Tennessee River, then downriver to where the Tennessee and Ohio rivers meet in Paducah, Kentucky.  Another song with a reportedly secret meaning is "Now Let Me Fly" which references the biblical story of Ezekiel's Wheels. The song talks mostly of a promised land. This song might have boosted the morale and spirit of the slaves, giving them hope that there was a place waiting that was better than where they were.

            "Go Down Moses", was another spiritual that depicts the biblical story of Moses in Exodus leading his people to freedom, is believed by some to be a coded reference to the conductors on the Underground Railroad. The oppressor in the song is the pharaoh, but in real life would have been the slave owner.

Or, “Encourage my soul and let us travel on.  For the night is dark and I am far from home.  Praise be to God, the morning light appears.  The storm is passing over, the storm is passing over, the storm is passing over, Hallelu!”

“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered; We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”  Jeremiah 17:8 – “They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water.  Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought.  Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.”

The Israelites faced being conquered by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Philistines.  Our forefathers and mothers faced being sold into slavery by conquering tribes and then to be caught in the Civil War.

Our ancestors were violently raped, stood under overseers’ whip and hung in the cover of dark by the Klan, faced Bull Connor’s attack dogs and water hoses, George Wallace’s police batons, shot down by the authorities whose salaries we pay to protect us.  But brothers and sisters, to paraphrase Maya Angelou’s famous poem, still we rise!  Billie Holiday sang the song, “Strange Fruit”, about “Southern trees bearing strange fruit; Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots.  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

“Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our star is cast.”  Galatians 5:1(NKJV) - “So Christ has truly set us free.  Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.”  This verse tells how we came out of the darkness into His marvelous light.  Brought out of captivity and the bondage of slavery and the civil rights movement.  We can sing “Can’t nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around.”  And we can declare with a shout of victory of how we got over.  See, Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV) reminds us “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far on the way.”  Psalm 107:6 (NKJV) - “Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, And He delivered them out of their distresses.”  Just as he delivered David from his enemies, God delivered us from the snare of the fowler.  He did not leave us nor forsake us.  We are the righteousness of God.  His children and he will protect and sustain us against all those who try to destroy us, just as he kept the Israelites safe from the Egyptians.  We have come this far by faith, leaning on the everlasting arms of Jesus Christ.

“Thou who has by thy might Led us into the light Keep us forever in the path, we pray.”  Psalm 119:75 (NKJV) – “And I will walk at liberty, For I seek Your precepts.”  Walk in the light, the beautiful light!  Walk where the dew drops of mercy shine bright.  We are children of the light redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus.  There is no longer the dark stain of sin on us.  We are indeed free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last!   

“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.”  Proverbs 3:26 (NKJV) – “For the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being caught.”  Psalm 121 (NKJV) tells us to “I will lift up my eyes to the hills—From whence comes my help?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber.  Behold, He who keeps Israel Shall neither slumber nor sleep.  The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand.  The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul.  The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore.”

We are children of the King.   All the days of my life I want Jesus to walk with me.  I shall not be moved because he has delivered me and put me high upon a rock.  He is the Rock of my salvation; the Great I Am; the First and the Last.

“Shadowed beneath thy hand May we forever stand True to our God, True to our native land.”  We should have the confidence to stand firm on our insurance policy in Psalm 91 (NJKV) – “He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.”  Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence.  He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler.  You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.  A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you.  Only with your eyes shall you look and see the reward of the wicked.  Because you have made the Lord, who is my refuge, Even the Most High, your dwelling place, No evil shall befall you, Nor shall any plague come near your dwelling;  For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways.  In their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.  You shall tread upon the lion and the cobra, the young lion and the serpent you shall trample underfoot.  “Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name.  He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him.  With long life I will satisfy him and show him My salvation.”

Nothing and no one can stand against us.  Not one thing.  If we only will lift our voices in praise to God for the things he has done, is doing and will do.  As he promises in Deuteronomy 28:6-7 (NKJV), God will bless our coming in and bless us when we go out.  His Angel Armies are encamped all around us.  The Lord will grant that our enemies who rise up against us will be defeated before us.  No weapon formed against us shall prosper and every tongue that rises against us, we shall prove wrong.  They will come at us from one direction but flee from us in seven.  

Let us now all stand and join hands and sing with confidence our battle song - “We Shall Overcome” on page 533 of the United Methodist Hymnal (for those of you who may not be familiar with the hymnal, it is the red book under the pew seats).