daring to set people free

This week's theme is "Reforming the Church" with insights drawn from chapter 5 & 6 of Kelly Fryer's book Reclaiming the "C" Word. One of the songs that Ken has chosen for worship is an African American Spiritual, Mary, don't you weep. As I was working on slides for this weekend, I wanted to find out more about this song's history. What I found were 2 sermons preached about freedom relative to slavery. While our circumstances are much different, aren't we also struggling to find our voice in this strange land, to transform ourselves, our church, our country and our world?

The sermon, "Without A Song," is based on the 137th Psalm, where the Israelites, in Babylonian captivity, are asked to sing for their captors' amusement. In a lament that echoes down even into our own time—in Verdi’s opera, Nabucco, as in songs by the Medallions and Steel Pulse—the Israelites respond: "How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?" Franklin's response was direct, even blunt: The Israelites should have sung, he told his congregation, because "Some things you can’t say you can sing." In contrast with the Israelites, who had yet to reach their Promised Land, African Americans were in what many countrymen considered their Promised Land—but it remained "a strange land" for black citizens nonetheless. If that "strangeness" of segregation and prejudice were to be transformed, black Americans would need to find their individual and their collective voice. It was that voice that could transform themselves, and the nation, with its powerful reminder that, even for an unknown, individual slave surviving in a harsh, horrific system, "a change is goin' come". As C. L. reminded his congregation of an old hymn that described how God gave Moses the power to part the Red Sea and save the Israelites, a current of anticipation and hope snaked through his audience, particularly when Franklin sang out in his strong baritone of a slave named Mary: "Oh Mary, don't weep. Don't mourn; / Pharaoh's army got drownded; / Mary, don't weep, and then don't mourn." - source

By the mid-nineteenth century there were some four million black slaves in America. Some of the most immoral and unjust practices in the human community have been defended by appeal to the Scripture. In the South, when churches did pay attention to the institution of Slavery, it was more often than not to defend it by appealing to the Bible. Slaves who had become Christian knew better. They found in the Bible the promise of freedom. And in their songs they sang of their hope. - source