But You Still Sing It

I agonized over just what to say at a time such as this, when a man who seems to represent all of our worst tendencies will be inaugurated as president again on a day meant to celebrate a man who represented most of our best. Here is my sermon for today, based rather loosely on the Lectionary’s Gospel lesson, John 2:1-11 (the wedding at Cana).

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After I’m done up here talking, we’ll do something worth way more than any words I could possibly offer today. We’re going to sing “We Shall Overcome” together. It’s a fitting selection for this weekend, as we as a country celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. tomorrow. We will sing it, and, later, “Lift Every Voice,” to honor and uphold - and hopefully meaningfully reflect on - that legacy. Of Dr. King, and of the many civil rights leaders who held America accountable to her promise of freedom and equality for all.

“We Shall Overcome” became the anthem for the civil rights movement at the Highlander Folk School, located not far from where I grew up in East Tennessee. The school had been adapting many folk songs in service of the civil rights movement, including this one. And it’s said that when Dr. King came to speak at the school in 1957, Pete Seeger was there, and led everyone in singing “We Shall Overcome” at some point during the event. As Dr. King and his companions drove off afterwards, he was reportedly humming the tune, and said, “There’s something about that song that haunts you.”

It haunts you. It’s such an interesting choice of language, there. It conjures up images of ghosts typically, but what it really means is to be “persistently and disturbingly present.” It’s a song that gets in your being and stays there. It persists in and insists on the possibility of its promise, even against a backdrop of seeming impossibility. Reminds us of that spot deep in our heart that still believes.

The song would later feature prominently in his speeches, most famously in the oft-quoted line, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

It’s the big cosmic view of justice that says I may not see its fruition in my lifetime, but I’ll tend to the potential while I’ve breath. I like how Wendell Berry captures this idea, “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”

We shall overcome, someday.

An eye towards that kind of scale is how the Gospel of John begins. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.”

This is a big story, going all the way back to “in the beginning,” and we’re promised that the darkness does not overtake the light in that big story. Even when the darkness feels quite dark. That we can be the light, and that we, as people of light, shall overcome.

It’s one thing to read those words or hear the history of a song like “We Shall Overcome,” and another to be able to locate ourselves within that big, long arc, to recognize ourselves as the ones capable of bending it. Which is why, I think, the Gospel of John goes from this grand cosmic prologue to the granular level - people gathered together at a wedding. We’re taken there to reveal the divine power, God made manifest in Cana.

The miracle performed here, very simply, is the transformation of water into wine, you could say. But its effect, to me, highlights the everyday miracles already at work at a gathering such as this: togetherness, community, fellowship, and joy. The quiet act of turning water into wine allows these gifts to continue on. The celebration continues, undeterred by the threat of scarcity and met instead with God’s great abundance.

I call it a quiet act because the person in charge, we’re told, has no clue what happened to bring about such abundance. Nor does the bridegroom, or presumably any of the guests aside from the disciples, Mary, and of course, the servants who drew the water. But that abundance reaches them all, whether they know its source or not. God is always at work in our togetherness, in ways seen and unseen. God of all time and every place is made known in the intimate places of our lives together, like this wedding. Our gathering together means something along that long moral arc. The light that overcomes the darkness was revealed at one such gathering, the first miracle of Jesus’ ministry performed so that the party could go on.

It was through gatherings of folks that “We Shall Overcome” came into being. The Highlander was very intentional about its gatherings; it would bring Black and white Americans together to tell their stories and listen to one another. Its founder, Myles Horton, operated under the belief that, as he wrote, “The people would find their identity not within themselves but in relationship with others.”

From that relationship emerged the song. It’s an amalgamation of many pieces, bits of European melodies and of the songs of enslaved people in America, a tenure as a labor movement song in the 40s, to what we know now, formed largely at the Highlander Folk School. It grew out of the people who needed it sung. It sprang forth and emerged.

Now I was born in the 80s, and grew up in a predominantly white community in Appalachia, so I don’t have the lived experience of “We Shall Overcome” that some of you might. I grew up familiar with it, though. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger were certainly in the musical rotation at my household, so I heard their versions, and I also learned something of its significance in a historical sense.

But it does change when you sing it with people instead of just listen to it or learn about it. I first started singing it with others, as a movement song, at the memorial services held following every execution in this state. A faithful group gathers at the capitol rotunda to pray for the end of all violence, to memorialize both the victims of crime and the one killed in our name the night before. They’ll gather again on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, barring miraculous legal intervention. This time, to memorialize James Ford, whose death warrant was signed last weekend, as well as Kimberly and Greg Malnory. Lord, have mercy.

These services at the capitol, and I’ve been to too many, always end with “We Shall Overcome.” I recall realizing one day that among those gathered was someone who himself marched at Selma. And I remember the time we sang it and a construction worker at the capitol walked by. I noticed he was singing along and as he walked away, he lifted his fist in solidarity.

And suddenly you realize this song has transformed for you. It’s not the song on the recordings, or of the history books - it’s the one you are adding your voice to, the one whose storied history you are joining, the one that lives, and breathes, and dare I say, haunts. And it happens because you sing it together. By singing it with others, you start to believe in it - really believe in it.

And so we can emphasize the supernatural dimensions of Jesus’ miracles, I suppose - water to wine, remarkable healings, raising Lazarus from the dead. But I think this seeming magic is always less the point than what these miracles say about relationship and justice. The miracles - signs as John calls them - are almost incidental to questions of whom Jesus calls in and how these miraculous acts point us towards ways of being that are fully within our reach, no superpowers required.

Like in singing about the hope that haunts us. Singing it into being.

One of the verses we’ll sing is “We are not afraid,” which I want to end by giving special attention to. That one has its own story from the Highlander. The school was raided by vigilantes and police one night, as it was hosting a youth choir - children, to be clear. These young people were watching a movie when it happened. Before the raid, the city shut off the lights, so when these men and their billy clubs came in, these children were surrounded by darkness.

But the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overtake it.

A 14 year old girl named Jamila Jones, who had participated in Montgomery Bus Boycotts just a couple years prior as a mere 12 year old, started singing, to the tune of the song she’d learned in the movement, “We are not afraid, (and others joined her) we are not afraid, (and still others) we are not afraid today…” And eventually these supposedly powerful, armed men had to ask children to stop singing so loudly.

A group of brave teenagers can bend the arc of the moral universe. The light shines in the darkness both cosmically and granularly, at our weddings, and movie screenings, and schools, and churches.

And thus a new verse was born.

I have this recording of Pete Seeger singing the song live that I love. It has sustained me for the past few months. And in it, he gives this verse - the best verse, he calls it - its own introduction. He says, “now you and I, like everyone else on earth, we have been afraid…

But you still sing it. (He says) you still sing it. We are not afraid. We are not afraid.”

It would be a lie to sing “I am not afraid.” I am. Like Pete said, you and I like everyone else on earth - we each know fear. Perhaps we know it especially well in this moment in our country and our world. In our Wednesday night programs this fall, talking about healthy communication in conflict, we talked about how under the surface of so many of our conflicts lies fear held in common. We might disagree on almost everything, but we share that we are scared for our children, of our changing world, of feeling helpless against forces beyond us.

I am afraid. I imagine you are afraid, too. Perhaps you see tomorrow’s inauguration and the direction this country is going as a potential healing balm to those fears; for others, it greatly exacerbates their fears. The point is, there is fear saturating all sides, driving how we act and interact with one another.

But over and over, the scriptures tell us, fear not. Do not be afraid.

Perhaps when we work through that common fear, together, perhaps then… we find new paths to seeing the dignity of all people. To peace. To beloved community. To how we overcome, and we shall. Because we learn to act out of love, not fear.

And so this is the sign I hope for. That when we sing this together in a few moments, “I am afraid” is miraculously converted in our singing and togetherness to “We are not afraid,” like water to wine. Because we believe that the light that overcomes the darkness is revealed in places like this church, in this moment, in our everyday lives, and that we are part of the story of that long moral arc. That we shall overcome someday.

And so we still sing it.