Up With Slavery (The Ballad of Uncle Ruckus)

"...we've gone from black is beautiful to black is ghetto." - Dr. Carl Ellis

We went from being property to President

To homeowners and residents

By God’s grace

We overcame the cotton fields and hatred

But still never quite made it off of the plantation…

Hobbled by our own lust

For the so-called “American Dream”
Took our newfound freedom for granted
'Cause all we cared about was forty acres and the C.R.E.A.M.

Livin’ in white rooms with black curtains
We’ve got a culture that still hurtin’ –
“Cash Rules Everything Around Me”
And we’re its loyal and humble servants
Blackface, you know
Has a different look to it these days…
It exists in the form of
Gold Chains, Bentleys,
Swisher Sweets, and Three-ways

I know what you’re thinkin’ –
What in the hell happened to the ‘Talented Tenth’?!”
Well, the dollar became their Almighty Allah
And you know they gotta pay rent
It’s a high price to pay
When you render unto Caesar;
Pawned your soul for a “Jesus Piece”
And Sickle Cell Anemia

We’ve stopped wearin’ X’s like Malcolm
‘Cause we’ve crossed over and sold out
Faster than Lando Calrissian did
When he lost the Millennium Falcon
We don’t talk about “Founding Fathers”
‘Cause daddy’s nowhere to be found
Until he shows up on the Maury Show
Actin’ like a clown…

Shuckin’ and Jivin’ –
Never claiming his daughters
Now she’ll grow up and repeat the cycle
‘Cause it’s all that men have ever taught her
No, he ain’t tryin’ to stay
But he’ll pay to have her give it up
Or to “make it go away”…

If this is what you call
“Being on the come up”
I’d much rather go back
To just being a slave


"For he who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a bondservant of Christ."

- 1 Corinthians 7:22 ESV

Soli Deo Gloria,

Shon

Black & Blue: Francis Grimke’ on the Afro-American Pulpit and Race Elevation

Hard to believe that this sermon is from around 1896...

What you will see below is an excerpt from the book, The Faithful Preacher. It is a sermon by an African-American minister, Francis Grimke’, where he deals with the issues that plague the African-American religious experience in terms of Christianity. Amazingly (as well as unfortunately), this message is extremely prophetic and timely. It appears as though the pastor’s warnings have gone largely unheeded by our community, with the rise various forms of religious ideologies that seem to have more traction in the present day climate of Christianity (i.e. Prosperity Gospel, Black Liberation Theology, etc.). I post this with the hope and prayer that all will be challenged and convicted by what they read here, regardless of color or status…

Soli Deo Gloria,

Shon 

If we turn now and examine carefully the character of the ministrations of the Afro-American pulpit, its three leading characteristics will be found to be emotionalism, levity or frivolity, and a greed for money.

First, it is emotion. The aim seems to be to get up an excitement, to arouse the feelings, to create an audible outburst or emotion, or, in the popular phraseology, to get up a shout to make people “happy.” In many churches where this result is not realized, where the minister is unable by sheer force of lung power and strength of imagination to produce this state of commotion, he is looked upon as a failure. Even where there is an attempt to instruct, in the great majority of cases this idea is almost sure to assert itself and become the dominant one...

 The second characteristic of the Afro-American pulpit is levity, frivolity, a lack of seriousness. There is entirely too much place given to making fun, to joking, to exciting laughter. The minister too often becomes a jester, a buffoon, a clown. Thus all solemnity is destroyed, and the House of God in many cases becomes a mere playhouse for the entertainment or amusement of the people. This has become so prevalent in many of our churches that the people have come to expect it with the same regularity as they expect to hear preaching. If the minister after he has preached before closing does not make a fool of himself and set the people grinning, a sense of disappointment and incompleteness is felt. Again and again I have sat in churches and have been saddened and disgusted by what I have seen in this direction. And the most serious part of it all is that this levity comes at the very time when it is most baneful. If it came before preaching, it would not be quite so bad, though even then it would be a thing to be regretted. But coming as it does after the sermon, the effect is to entirely obliterate whatever good impression has been made and thus to defeat the very purpose for which the church has been organized. Sometimes I have said, what is the use of preaching—why not introduce the buffoon, the clown, at once, and when he is through bring the service to a close? 

The third characteristic of the Afro-American pulpit is a greed for money. Everything seems to be arranged with reference to the collection. The great objective point seems to be to reach the pocketbooks of the people. Here is where the greatest amount of interest is manifested; here is where there is the greatest concentration of energy. However tame the services may be up to this point, here everybody seems to wake up, and new life seems to be infused into everything, as if to say, “Now is the time when the real business for which we have met will begin.” There is no harm, of course, in raising money. The church cannot get along without it. Its just debts must be paid; its obligations must be met. The complaint is not against raising money but against the abuse of this, against the undue prominence that is given to it in the Afro-American pulpit. It overshadows every other interest. The ability to raise money is more highly esteemed than the ability to preach the Word effectively. The greatest financier, the most successful money gatherer, receives the best place and is most highly esteemed by those in authority. The result is, the church is rapidly becoming a mere institution for raising money, with preaching, singing, and praying being only incidental, and the ministry is rapidly degenerating into a mere agency for begging. The perceived problem is not how to elevate the people, how to bring them into the Kingdom of Christ, how to save them from their sins and sanctify them, but how to get their money.

A ministry whose chief characteristics are emotionalism, frivolity, and greed for money is not a ministry to inspire hope and is not a source of strength but of weakness. And this is the charge I make against the Afro-American pulpit today. It is not living up to its opportunities; it is not doing the work that it ought to do. It is not putting the emphasis where it ought to be put. It is frittering away its energies upon things of minor importance, to the neglect of those things that are fundamental and without which we cannot hope for any permanent prosperity. And this is why as a people we have made so little progress morally. The fault is due very largely to the character of our pulpit ministrations. If there had been less effort made at emotional effects and less jesting and less prominence given to finances and more time and attention given to the great fundamental principles of religion and morality (the bedrock upon which character is built) and to the patient, painstaking instruction of the people in the practical duties of life, the outlook would be very much brighter than it is today. The moral plane upon which the masses of our people move is confessedly not very high and in view of their past antecedents could not be expected to be high. But if they had had the proper kind of instruction from the pulpit, there is every reason to believe that they would stand very much higher today than they do. The thing most to be deplored in our condition today is not our poverty, nor our ignorance, but our moral deficiencies, and for these deficiencies the Afro-American pulpit is in a very large measure responsible. The very fact that our people have had a long schooling in slavery, the tendency of which has been to blunt the moral sensibilities and to degrade the whole moral nature, makes it all the more important that special attention should be given to their development in this direction and renders the character of much of our pulpit ministration all the more reprehensible.

In palliation of this it has been said, I know, that the people prefer the noise and excitement that come from ranting and bluster. There may be some truth in this, but the mission of the pulpit is not to cater to the vitiated tastes of the people and is not to give them what they want but what they ought to have—to lift up a standard for them, to set before them right and wrong, whether it accords with their tastes or not. The plea that the people prefer a certain thing can never be an excuse or justification for giving them that thing unless it is good in itself, unless it would be beneficial to them. The problem that the Afro-American pulpit has to solve is not what will be most congenial to the people but what will be most helpful to them; not what kind of preaching they like best but what kind of preaching will be the most effective in developing in them a true manhood and womanhood, in making them good fathers and mothers, good husbands and wives, good citizens and neighbors, what kind of preaching will yield the largest returns in purity, honesty, sobriety, sweetness, gentleness. And the pulpit that has the wisdom to answer this question intelligently and the courage to act out its convictions is the pulpit that we need and that we must have if “on steppingstones of our dead selves” we are “to rise to higher things” [Booker T. Washington].

Posted via email from THE CENTER (ROOM 116)

 

Middle Passage

From the Middle Passage to character assassination

To the assassination of leaders in a nation fueled by the hatred

Of lies propagated as truth; but at the root of it all was a sinister plan

To destroy the dignity of Man and lay waste to his beauty

Since the beginning, our adamic nature rejected divine legislature

Hating himself in the process by denouncing his most prominent feature

Self-made man hates the helping hand of another

So, inevitably, he can’t stand on his own two feet

So he’ll ride the backs of his brothers…

(Or what he calls, “others”)

And by that, we always mean “less than”, never “equal” or “greater”

Because to admit that would mean he’d have to give up some acres

Next thing you know, we’re down the road hundreds of years later

Hands and feet now unshackled, but hearts and minds remain in slavery

Fast forward …

Now our apathy toward our past has damned us to repeat it

Beat us down and left us in a coma

Only to wake up and find ourselves in a state of full-blown xenophobia

And everyone says, “Yay! Our president is black!”

But does it really matter when the state of the union is still whack?!

Think about this way:

They’ve had black leaders in Africa since way back

And over there, it’s still jacked up…seriously corrupt

(But we’ll save that for another discussion)

So what’s really the matter?

Our pockets got a little fatter

We got our seats back at the front of the bus

But, what does that really have to do with…us?

By us, I mean all of God’s people

Because our final destination leaves us all under one steeple…

Dr. King’s dream comes to fruition in Revelation 5 -

That’s why he knew he’d probably never get to see it in his lifetime

Anything less than that is a gross misinterpretation

As “We shall overcome” is reduced to bleak sensationalism

Sayin’, “YES WE CAN!” to “hope and change”

But without the true Agent of hope, everything remains the same

A dream deferred only dries up like a raisin in the sun

When we place our hope of its awakening

In something other than the Risen One

That’s why Phyllis Wheatley says that mercy brought her from a pagan land

And Jupiter Hammon took no issue with being another’s slave hand

They understood that captivity served a greater purpose

And they wouldn’t truly have freedom ‘til they reached the Kingdom of glory

The invisible hand of Providence makes all of the suffering relevant

Through the proclamation of the Gospel

Is where we see God’s truest benevolence

So I soldier on as a witness to posterity

As the witnesses who came before me who spoke with such boldness and sincerity

Emancipation through propitiation - blood bought freedom

The highest price that any could be paid with

Behind the dark and shameful past that we try to conceal

Is the mystery unfolding, just waiting for the glory to be revealed

God made flesh; crushed for our sins

Tending to our greatest need

To be freed from the master of death

And if the Son of Man has set you free

 Then you are free indeed

 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”
(John 8:31-38 ESV)


 And they sang a new song, saying,
 “Worthy are you to take the scroll
  and to open its seals,
 for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
 from every tribe and language and people and nation,
 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
 and they shall reign on the earth.”
(Revelation 5:9-10 ESV)



Soli Deo Gloria,
 Shon

Posted via email from THE CENTER (ROOM 116)

How to Kill and Be Killed 101: Teach the Gospel, Save the World!

"The fact of sin in Christ's scheme of redemption is fundamental and must be kept to the front. Men must not be allowed to forget the fact that they are sinners and that the wages of sin is death. This is a doctrine that men don't like to hear about. They know that they are sinners, but they try to forget it. This is why often they plunge into all kinds of frivolities in order to get away from the serious thought of sin and its fatal consequences. This is why, unfortunately, in order to comply with or not to offend that kind of sentiment, many pulpits have little or nothing to say about sin.

One thing we may be sure of: as this aspect of man's condition drops out of our preaching, things will steadily grow worse, and men will become more and more set in their evil ways. For if there is no such thing as sin, or no evil consequences to follow, then there is no reason why we shouldn't open all the floodgates of passions and evil inclinations and desires and let things go at full speed, no reason why we should not adopt as our philosophy of life the motto, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' It is to save men from that stupid, foolish delusion that Christ makes imperative in His plan of rescue the necessity of stressing, and stressing with ever-increasing emphasis, the fact of sin as man's most serious problem...

And here we are directed not only to teach but what we are to teach...

In this campaign for saving a lost world, for bettering conditions, the contents of this Book [the bible] must be carefully studied and taught, line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, in season and out of season. Thus we should understand and see that careful provision is made, under compotent teachers, for the study of the Word of God...and yet how often we find men in our pulpits searching heaven and earth for something new to preach about, while this treasure-house of wisdom and knowledge, of things necessary to salvation, is neglected, passed by, and overlooked...They have preached on almost everything except Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God whose blood alone cleanses from sin. The thought of sin, from which we need to be saved, has largely dropped out of most of our preaching...

People attend the churches, but rarely are their consciences pricked. They attend the churches but hear little about their sins and shortcomings. They attend the churches, but their self-complacency is never disturbed by what they hear, or at least rarely. They hear and go away feeling no sense of lack on their part and no wish or desire to live more worthily than they are living. Divine unrest rarely stirs within them; no welling up of great and ennobling desires is awakened within them. The people listen and go away to gossip, to tattle, to keep on in their evil ways...

The question is often asked, what is to be the future of Christianity as it comes into competition with other religions and with Communism, Nationalism, Capitalism, and all antagonistic forces? To my mind there is absolutely no need to worry about that matter...The only thing that we need to be concerned about is to see that we carry out faithfully the instructions of our Lord; that we be true to the solemn trust committed to us; that we go on teaching His word, line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, in season and out of season, and give ourselves no concern about its future. Its future is assured. God is behind it. It cannot fail. 

Let us stop worrying about the future of Christianity and get down to the hard work in carrying out the instructions of our Lord."

(Mark 16:15; 1 Peter 1:18-19; Romans 8:3-4; 1 Corinthians 1:17-24; Matthew 16:18; Revelation 1:17-18, 6:2; Zechariah 4:6-7; Daniel 2:34-35)

 Excerpts from Francis Grimke`, Christ's Program for the Saving of the World (February 28, 1936)

 

Soli Deo Gloria,

Shon

Posted via web from THE CENTER (ROOM 116)

Before There Was King: Lemuel Haynes--Black Puritan

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. - Galatians 3:27-29 ESV

{I guess this is my way of gettin' Black History Month started a couple of weeks early. But, Lemuel Haynes is definitely worth learning about. Not only is he a major player in the abolitionist movement in the U.S., but also has a significant place in the reformed faith as a person of color. Enjoy...}

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833) was an influential African American religious leader who argued against slavery.

Little is known of his early life. He was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, to a reportedly Caucasian mother of some status and a man named Haynes, who was said to be "of some form of African extraction". At the age of five months, Lemuel Haynes was given over to indentured servitude in Granville, Massachusetts. Although serving as an agricultural worker, part of the agreement required educating him. Through accompanying his masters to church, he became exposed to Calvinist thought and religiosity.
At about twenty years of age, he saw the Aurora Borealis, and, fearing the approach of the Day of Judgment as a result, he soon accepted Christianity. Freed in 1774 when his indenture expired, Haynes joined The Minutemen of Granville. In 1775, he marched with them to Roxbury, Massachusetts following the news of the Boston Massacre. In 1776, he accompanied them in the garrisoning of the recently captured Fort Ticonderoga. He returned to his previous labors in Granville after the northern campaign of the American War of Independence.

In response to the events at the Battle of Lexington, Haynes began to write extensively criticizing the slave trade and slavery. He also began to prepare sermons for family prayers and write theologically about life. The Scripture, abolutionism, and republicanism impacted his published writings. Haynes argued that slavery denied black people their natural rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Paralleling the recent American experience with oppression to the slave experience, Haynes wrote: "Liberty is equally as precious to a black man, as it is to a white one, and bondage as equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other".
By the 1780s, Haynes became a leading Calvinist minister in Vermont. His contemporary White republican and abolitionist thinkers saw slavery as a liability to the new country, but most argued for eventual slave expatriation to Africa. The American Colonization Society (founded in 1817) was one such group. Included among its supporters were people such as James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. In contrast, Haynes continued to passionately argue along Calvinist lines that God's providential plan would defeat slavery and lead to the harmonious integration of the races as equals.

After his death, white abolitionist thought would argue for the freedom of African Americans, but they tended to continue to see African Americans as inferiors. Echoes of Haynes' arguments for equality would again be heard only in the time of Martin Luther King.

John Saillant (2003, p. 3) writes, "[Lemuel Haynes'] faith and social views are better documented than those of any African American born before the luminaries of the mid-nineteenth century]".

for more on Haynes, click here.

and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. - Colossians 3:10-12 ESV

"Here then I could conclude; but I must not forget the poor negroes; no, I must not. Jesus Christ had died for them, as well as for others." - George Whitefield

Soli Deo Gloria,

Shon