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Featured in the February 2,2012 edition of the eNewsletter...

A Message from Rev. Marie Buffaloe
Parish Associate Pastor

During the worship service at a presbytery meeting I attended decades ago, we stood to sing a hymn. It was new to me, and it looked a bit challenging. As someone who takes pride in being familiar with most hymns, I thought, “this is going to be a struggle to sing.” Boy, was I surprised. The music began and the voices swelled with great enthusiasm. As I looked around, many in the sanctuary seemed to know the song by heart, not even needing to look at the words. They were all African-American Presbyterians and the hymn was “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (No. 563 in our blue hymnal).

James Weldon Johnson was a young school principal in 1900 when he wrote those words as a poem to introduce Booker T. Washington to the pupils of his black public school in Jacksonville, Florida. His musician brother, J. Rosamond, later added music to create this hymn that is now known as the Black American national anthem. Johnson continued writing poems and homilies into a well-known book called God's Trombones. The lyrics might sound familiar since the Rev. James Lowry quoted the third verse from memory at President Obama’s inauguration:

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
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;
Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand,
True to our native land.

Why had I never heard this popular and poignant hymn of praise to God? Perhaps for the same reason the recent Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is just another workday or vacation day. It is not our holiday or our people's hymn to sing.

When we ignore the racism that continues to linger in us and around us, we miss the opportunity to remember and repair a painful part of our personal and national history. The interest and popularity of the best-selling book and movie The Help is one indicator that we continue to wrestle with those memories of institutional racism.

Let us be brave enough to reflect on racism of all colors and classes that continues to divide our communities and cultures. Let’s not give up on the dream that “deep in our heart, we shall overcome” the sinful inequalities that divide us. May we “lift every heart and sing; sing a song full of the faith that the dark path has taught us and sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.” Maybe with God’s help we can live out the Sunday School song we learned long ago: “Red and yellow, black and white; we are all precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”