Sermon 2.8.09 Uplifted Rev. Lynn James, LMHC MK 1:29-39 The morning I planned to write this sermon, I woke up humming something that just wouldn t go away. You know how you get a song in your head and it can be like a fly buzzing around, an annoying distraction that interrupts your thoughts. As I was making coffee, Jack asked me What are you humming; it sounds familiar. I sat down at my laptop to write and the humming sound just got louder until finally I gave in and turned my attention to it. (hum) Then the lyrics came to me and I just had to smile; what a wonderful song it seems the Spirit sent me to accompany the gospel reading from Mark we read this morning: Precious Lord, take my hand, Lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; (I couldn t think of how the rest went, so I went online and looked it up on Wikkipedia) Through the storm, through the night, Lead me on to the light: (Refrain) Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home. When my way grows drear, Precious Lord, linger near, When my life is almost gone, Hear my cry, hear my call, Hold my hand lest I fall: Refrain Wikkipedia also described its history, including who wrote it and why. Does anyone know the story? It was written by Rev. Thomas Dorsey. There is another musician by this name who lived during the same time period, Tommy Dorsey, the great swing era band leader and
trombone player was born in 1905 and died in 1956. Rev Thomas Dorsey was born in 1899 and lived until 1993 and it is he wrote this hymn. Tommy Dorsey the trombone player and band leader was a white man; Rev Thomas Dorsey was a black man, born just 35 years after the thirteenth amendment ended slavery in America. Rev. Dorsey not only wrote this hymn but he is also considered to be the father of gospel music. Gospel music-there are many definitions, but basically it is what happens when you take the blues, stir in some jazz, and then top that combination with lyrics that sound like a prayer or an offering of praise to God. Now because of this sermon, I enjoyed a refresher course in music history. I was reminded that the Blues got its start in those African American spirituals that lifted up the souls and the voices of the slaves in the fields, calling out hope to one another in songs, in shouts and hollers that went back and forth in a call and response cadence. Cantors, choir directors in the cotton fields called not from a pulpit or lectern but from a corn or cotton row, calling out for the tired congregation s response, as they stood up and bent over again and again, not in the pews and kneeling rails, but in the hot sun, as their fingers picked through not the pages of a hymnbook but dirt and the leaves of cotton plants. Spirituals are a testimony to the reality that Church happens wherever spirits are lifted up and God is called down. A cantor is the person that the music takes hold of first, who then winds up the song and sends it bursting into the heavy hearts of God s beloved, lifting their burdens just for awhile. The blues took that music of the cotton fields and added a unique chord progression that used minor chords and flat notes to convey emotions of sadness and longing. Rev. Dorsey grew up a preacher s kid, nurtured in the black church tradition, but he also loved the secular music of blues and jazz. Both blues and jazz emerged from the African American slave cultures.
Both were highly improvisational; they were Spirit-led. Gospel is what happened when Rev. Dorsey cooked up this stew of blues, jazz, and the church music that filled his life as a boy. Gospel music is full of echoes from protest songs, defiant hopes; it is the musical resistance code of generations of slaves, mixed with the often wild and adventurous musical slides, sudden jumps to an unexpected next note of jazz, tied together with the aching and bent note melodies of the Blues. What a convergence of emotion, of experience, and of the lifting up of the soul in trying and troubled times. It is interesting how sad music can settle you down sometimes and even lift you up. To hear the sorrow of someone else resound with your own, it can just be comforting, like finding someone else is on your wave length, walking in your shoes, knows how it is, and has put it into words that you were at a loss to express. Rosalind has given me permission to quote her this morning. She was sharing with me about how she coped after her husband died suddenly at the age of 57, 30 years ago. She told me that she pulled out her sewing machine and she said, I just sewed my blues away. It gave me something to focus my mind on when all I could think about was sadness. That s the same healing energy that the Blues spring from-taking a tragedy and turning it into something beautiful, meaningful, and comforting. Rosalind turned her grief into quilts, heirlooms for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Sewing and Singing and Spirit combine to sustain hope. Precious Lord Take My Hand was born after Rev. Thomas Dorsey s first son was stillborn, and his wife died in childbirth. Overcome with grief he locked himself in his room for days and when he came out he had written this song: his lament, his prayer for Jesus to take his hand and help him stand. This hymn was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr s favorite song. Mahalia
Jackson sang it at his funeral in April 1968 as she had sung it, at Dr. King s request at many civil rights rallies to inspire the crowds. Aretha Franklin sang it at her funeral in 1972. This hymn has been around. I woke up humming it in a couple days ago, in the year 2009 as I was wondering what I might find to say to you about the gospel lesson this morning- Mark s story about Jesus healing people, about Jesus taking the hand of Simon s mother in law so that her fever left her body and she got out of bed and joined the company. Then I got to wondering, about some of the new age religion that I keep hearing about. When did faith become something that we expect should make a true believer not have to contend with a fever sometimes, that if you just think right or pray right or meditate right or even praise Jesus right, it is an inoculation against the sorrows of life? When did preachers and New Age teachers start making promises that faith, or their secret formula will bring about wealth and health? If what are they or we are telling people results in them feeling betrayed and abandoned by God when hard times hit, then it is false preaching. Jesus never promised health or wealth, prestige or popularity. He did promise that God is always looking for ways to bless us. God is so full of gifts and love that every moment is another opportunity for God to show us something cool, something beautiful, something comforting, something inspiring. Every moment of marveling and every second of sorrowing are filled with God s companionship and desire for something good to come out of it. We are not promised a smooth or easy journey, but the scriptures are filled with the promise that we will be held up by God s hands and sustained when life events trip us up or flatten us face first in the ditch.
The hope is not in never falling or failing or hurting or wailing; the hope is that we can and we will, by the Spirit s strength, get up and go on. When life pushes us down, we need to be assured that just as Jesus lifted up Simon s mother-in-law Jesus will lift us up too. When illness lays us out and we cannot get up and get out, we have got to have hope that Jesus will lift us up too. When we hear week after week that our neighbors down the street here are facing illness after illness, catastrophe after catastrophe, we want to offer some good news, some gospel that is strong enough to withstand their life experiences which are absolutely devastating. I think a little gospel music is a credible prayer, a helpful tradition, a powerful testimony to all those other souls who hollered out and reached out, who raised their voices and kept on marching. When times are tough, when you can t catch a break, when it seems, like Mark writes about, that demons are running the show, that is when you need Jesus to take your hand, lift you up and help you stand. That is when you need the gospel preached not in sermons, not even in words, but in neighbors pitching in to do your laundry, to make a meal, to mow your yard, to milk your cows or to carry the nearly frozen calf from your pasture to your bathtub and help you coax it back to life, to take your kids out for an ice cream cone or a basketball game, when you need a friend to drive you, to pray with you, to stand by you, to take your hand, to help you stand, and more than anything to let you know by what they say and do that the forces of illness and need will not drive them away. The demons of our time are busyness that prevents us from being neighbor, of twisted faith beliefs that teach that when life is going well God is giving out blessings and when life is filled with misery, then God is giving out punishments or lessons. These are the demons that
Jesus confronts throughout his ministry; all those things that divide people from one another and hold compassion hostage by swapping pity for pitching in. Passages like we read today can be a source of hope or a stumbling block, depending on how we make sense of it. Simon s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever and Jesus takes her hand and raises her up and she is healed. What do we do with these healing stories when we or are loved ones are sick and they do not get better? What do we pray for when we are at someone s bedside and things don t look promising? I think people often read these passages and wonder why Jesus healed her but not the child at St. Jude who is battling cancer or our loved one who dedicated his life to serving God but died young from complications of diabetes. Here is the thing we need to remember about Jesus healing miracles that we read about; they did not grant the person immortality or endless immunity. Simon s mother-in-law recovered from her fever, but this doesn t mean that she now is forever free of future fevers. We are so hungry for magic that we tend to read into these miracles more than the meaning they were intended to convey. The truth is, when we can let go of Jesus or any faith system as a secret set of sayings that can save us from pain and suffering, sickness and heartache, then we can begin to see the real magic of each moment we live. We can focus on those miracles in our lives that do lift us up, make us better, heal us, restore us, keep us strong and healthy, and keep us standing when the ground is shaking beneath our feet. We can find something true, real, and trustworthy to hold onto: God, our faith, one another. We can focus on the healing that happens every day as the cells of our bodies regenerate, the mood that made us be a pain to be an hour before suddenly lifts, a song comes on
the radio that makes our spirits want to shout and our toes want to tap, a friend e-mails a joke that makes us laugh and we sleep better because of it, a child learns to read, to love, to give. Martin Luther King did not cling to this song because he believed that Jesus would make sure nothing bad happened that no storms would tear at his home and his family; in fact, he whistled these words while he did jail time. He hummed this hymn while hearing threats against his children and his friends. He proclaimed this faith even after violence took his life but could not silence his voice or stop the march he led toward justice. Simon s mother-in-law did not experience healing and then hide away in her home so that she would not get sick again; no, she found herself restored and she immediately joined the disciples in giving herself away. Throughout the Christian scriptures, what does Jesus spend most of his time doing? Healing; not condemning, not threatening, not seeking revenge, not lecturing, not stirring up judgment, and not dividing the good people from the bad people, the saved from the damned. When he confronts evil, he confronts it by healing not hating. The demonic forces of Jesus day are not so different from ours: he is constantly confronting those who had sold out, were gaining wealth, status, advantages through corruption and greed, those who had mistaken God s rules for religious rules, those who were neglecting the needy and powerless, and those who had given in to despair, given up on hope. So, I ask you this morning, do we believe that Jesus is bigger than the demons of our day: the hatreds, the isms, the unemployment statistics that are rising daily, the self-absorption that even nice people like us can often exhibit, the pollution, the wars not only between our country and other countries, but within our homes, our schools, our towns?
Do we believe that Jesus is bigger than even death, that longevity is not the measure of our ultimate meaning? Do we believe that at any point, we could discover a turning point; any moment could be the moment we ve been waiting for? Do we have faith to take Jesus hand and let him lift us up, let him help us stand, let him help us hold on, let him help us reach out, let him help us hope, let him lead us home. If you believe, please join me in confessing that belief, in unison now I invite you to respond: WE DO! Amen. (copyright 2008, Lynn James, all rights reserved)