Divided House Becoming One
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, presciently paraphrased it, when, as an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, in 1858—Stephen A. Douglas being the pyrrhic victor-- he said, in reliance upon Matt. 12 :25, and Mark 3:25 http://bible.cc/mark/3-25.htm :
"A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other. "
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/house.htm
Similarly, the epic battle between “sinners” and “saints” in the black community, since slavery, which has so long, and needlessly divided it against itself, and sapped its united vigor, is dissolving: empowering the whole world through its dynamic fusion.
No single event or person is responsible for this cessation. Essentially it is a recognition that black people love, and are beholden to, all kinds of black music—the principal plane on which the battle was fought. They will not only listen to it, but will dance to it, and will buy it, regardless. This incremental recognition has accrued gradually, inexorably, even grudgingly. Its triumph is accented by the prevalence of eclectic musical genres and instrumentation in contemporary worship, as well as praise dancers in worship. Such was rare, if not unthinkable, prior to the 1990s, even though certain “holy dances” have always been an extemporaneous part of black worship, in many, though not all, churches going back to slavery days.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/614115/the_evolution_of_black_history_dance_pg2.html?cat=2
It was in the black church, and by extension, the black family, that this epic battle, between “right” and “wrong” and godliness and ungodliness, has held sway, since the days of Thomas A. Dorsey in the early 1900’s. Dorsey, a popular blues musician popularized blending the blues with spirituals to create “gospel music”. Stevie Wonder, for example, performed a concert at the National Baptist Convention in 1998 in Kansas City, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed.
This spiritual and cultural reunion is about more than music and dance, however. It is also about the veritable epigenetic “soul of black folk,” as expressed through religion, and, more broadly, through life itself. Taken to its ultimate expression, it is about the “soul of all folk,” since all humans on earth descended from Africans genetically and culturally. Acts 17:26 .
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/jm-ledgard/exodus
Much of the thrust toward black self-assertion, expressed in some manner by every “leader” from Booker T. Washington and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, through Rev. Al Sharpton and Minister Louis Farrakhan, has been against the outer constraints imposed upon the liberty of the freed slaves, since Emancipation in 1865, which cruelly circumscribed the full ambit of their constitutional and statutory rights, privileges, and immunities.
The internal thrust toward black self-assertion now underway is against the inner constraints, which have similarly circumscribed the spirit, creativity and initiative of the freed slaves since the failure of Reconstruction in 1877. Leaders of the freed slaves obligingly imposed equivalent inner constraints upon themselves in conformity with norms decreed by others, as they struggled “up from slavery” wrongly believing assimilation and dissimulation would save them from discrimination and stigmatization.
Thus, a middle wall of partition was erected among black Americans. On the left were the hopeful assimilationists and on the right were the traditional “indigenes,” i.e. those who were content with their own indigenous essence in all its dimensions. Ephesians 2:14 says: “For he is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of partition between us…” Everybody “wore the mask”, i.e. dissimulated, to quote poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who carefully observed black folks’ behavior,
and who then wrote in inimitable verse, “We Wear The Mask”:
WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw8.html
Dissolving the middle wall of partition, which divides these two groups is the looming goal of “a divided house becoming one.” Cries arose from all our tortured souls—secular and non-secular—and the clay was vile beneath all our feet for many a mile. Flip sides of one coin we were and are.
Both the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Prince Hall Masons, the oldest institutions in black America are scions of European institutions, including their discipline and ritual and dogma. While these venerable institutions, along with their august founders—Richard Allen and Prince Hall, respectively—have stabilized and nourished black people over their two hundred years’ of existence, it is now time to push out into the deep. Luke 5:4 “And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
A new age has come. And certainly we, each of us, is blessed to see it. We join with late poet,Margaret Walker Alexander, of Jackson State University, who prophetically sung in the concluding stanza of her 1942 poem, “For My People:”
“Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs by written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control”
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/354.html http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/walker-margaret.html
I had long sensed that something new and wonderful was evolving, as I watched and heard Ray Charles, Bobby “Blue” Bland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bland Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Rev. Al Green, and others, make music “naked and unashamed” Gen.2:25 of its church or blues overtones in the 1960’s and '70's. Other musicians rushed in feeling and sensing the same, like the Commodores, with “Jesus is Love.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQPKBkW6a1s&feature=related
Little did I know that I was born to play a part in this rapprochement between the sacred and the secular, the churched and the “un-churched,” and gospel and “the blues,” the historical and the theological.
Just like Joseph, in the latter day, rescued and revived Israel nee Jacob and his sons from starvation and want, though they had sold him into slavery in Egypt; so, also shall this rapprochement be salvific for the children of Ethiopia, who have suffered, mightily, themselves since selling us into slavery. God has worked it out. What they intended for evil, he intended for good. “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people[a] should be kept alive, as they are today.” Gen. 50:20 (ESV)
Having personally fought for that “freedom” wrought by the civil rights movement, in education, public accommodations, housing, employment and voting, I have also studied deeply and read voraciously. I knew there was something fundamental going on in black culture, which had long been a bulwark of protestant conservatism. And, I came to know that something fundamental was going on in me. In 1992, I fell critically ill, being hospitalized for 12 days. Then and there, I promised the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that if he restored my life, I would give it to him. Well, he did and I did. I confessed Jesus Christ as head of my life at Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Kansas City, Missouri, on Palm Sunday 1993. I was licensed to preach in 1994. Following four years of study, under our Board of Examiners, I was ordained as an Itinerant Elder in 1998, by the late Bishop Vernon Randolph Byrd, the 105th elected and consecrated Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
This digression into my personal transformation makes the parallel point that change is endemic. I, too, became, as each of us must “become, all one thing." Until, and unless, one is reconciled to one’s self, all is lost. One is left two separate souls in one dogged body, to paraphrase DuBois.
Blues and spirituals and their adherents seek congress, a renewal of their connubial bond with each other, unfettered by others’ self-righteous opprobrium. It is the season and each is in season. When they get together, so will their respective constituencies—which heavily overlap, so much so, one cannot tell the “wheat from the tares!” Matt. 13:24-30
http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/reformationink/mltares.htm
This disunion, this estrangement has severely weakened the black community, just like faulty timing disables an engine. Ministers who have recognized this injurious alienation and who have worked to overcome it, have included Rev. C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin, and his good friend, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At critical times during the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, would troll for, and obtain the support of, denizens of the diverse dives frequented by blacks, places which the traditional black church excoriates as “juke joints”. Jesus also patronized the “juke joints” of his day. And he, too, was criticized by the so-called righteous. Mark 2:15 “While Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.”
The scriptures, once again, are instructive:
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. Mark 3:24 (NIV)
If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. Mark 3:25 (NIV)
And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. Mark 3:26(NIV)
We—Africans in America—are descendants of the two tribes of Ethiopians of whom Homer sung in The Odyssey. We were also the tallest, fairest, most just of men of whom he sung in The Iliad, from whom the Greeks acquired their gods. Our unity will bring about Satan’s downfall.
http://books.google.com/books?id=jcpQqkHr328C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=iliad+ethiopians+land+of+the+gods&source=bl&ots=PVbONmQHtx&sig=7gi4qQGeKTVThH67ZvqifVdgASI&hl=en&ei=p57yTKfmIcWqlAeP4aX0DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=iliad%20ethiopians%20land%20of%20the%20gods&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=2wtYvc2ZLT0C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=ethiopia+land+of+the+gods+iliad&source=bl&ots=eU2IduiRN3&sig=eSsoFZGpWInoEvzbTLA7S4YGKKo&hl=en&ei=EqHyTJ9rxZuWB47SrIIN&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false http://tseday.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/ethiopia-birth-of-the-gods-by-diodorus/ http://endingstereotypesforamerica.org/black_and_white_morality.html
Everything has a shadow. Neither can the two, the shadow and its object, be separated from each other, where there is light. As Smokey Robinson has said “It would be easier to take the wet from water, or the dry from sand.”
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/What-Love-Has-Joined-Together-lyrics-The-Temptations/5505A3B5B4C3948248256D2F002C6A9B http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzfqStzknhA&feature=related
The blues and spirituals are “what love has joined together” in our people. Those who resist this union have long “kicked against the pricks.” Acts 9:5. The music of black people, along with their elan, their “cool,” their mojo,has saturated the globe, as evidenced, in part, by the Michael Jackson phenomenon. This divine love, perfect union, this consummation has been hitherto thwarted by well-meant, though unnatural and often hypocritical, resistance from church folk. Somehow, they saw something ungodly in the celebration of physical love, passion between a man and a woman in song and especially in dance, notwithstanding the Old Testament book’s “Song of Solomon,” and the profligacy of David, “a man after God’s own heart.” Acts 13:22.
It was “sin”-- blues, jazz, etc. --they ominously intoned. “When, in truth, under their cosmogony, practically everything is excoriated as sin, outside church. Yet the holy scriptures condemn all, even the so-called saints! “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” http://bible.cc/romans/3-23.htm Rom. 3:23. This holier-than-thou dogma and creed have given rise to wide-spread hypocrisy, and scandalous apostacy of historic proportions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy
Some of the principal proponents of this version of piety have been caught in homosexual and/or extramarital relations, over the centuries; including that abomination of degradation involving sexual abuse of little church children.
http://www.enotes.com/catholic-child-abuse-article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases
Another Lincoln quote concludes the matter---
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm
#30