"Free at last, Free at last.
Thank God Almighty!
We're free at last."

Do you remember those words ringing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that blazing August Afternoon in 1963? They closed what James Reston described as "a peroration that was an anguished echo from all the old American reformers, Roger Williams calling for Religious liberty, Sam Adams calling for political liberty, old man Thoreau denouncing coercion, William Lloyd Garrison demanding emancipation, and Eugene Debs calling for economic equality-Dr. King echoed them all . . . He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Ghandi and the cadences of the Bible. . ."

"Free at last Free at last.
Thank God almighty!
We're free at last."

That poignant, joyous, exuberant exclamation closed not only that electrifying address at the March on Washington, those words are carved into Martin Luther King's tombstone.

Where do those words come from? From what unique source do they surface? Well, they come from what Richard Newman calls "songs of faith, hope, freedom and the spirit" born of a peoples' suffering, oppression, dehumanization, slavery. They come from an aggregation of songs sung by some men and women in this congregation at mid-century during the years of Civil Rights protest and progress: Remember?

"Oh freedom, oh freedom;
Oh Freedom over me, over me.
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free."

Or, "We shall not be moved. . ."
Or, "Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom. . ."
Or, "We shall overcome. . ."

Those songs, sung by Americans of every race and culture in the twentieth century, emerged from, stood on the shoulders of, found their deepest roots in what W.E.B. DuBois called "Sorrow Songs,"-a "Sorrow Song" verse or two heading each of the chapters of his searing reflection, "The Souls of Black Folk." As DuBois reviews different perspectives on slavery, he writes "not even the past-South, should it rise from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways."

We shall sing some of these songs this morning. James Cone, a preeminent Christian Theologian, a powerful interpreter of Black Theology, has been my guide. The African-Americans with whom I served on the New Century Hymnal Committee made significant contributions to my own faith-to my heart and soul as reflected in this collection we put together in the early nineties. And as one plunges deeper into the ethos of these songs and spirituals, I can agree with Professor Cone when he writes, "I am . . . convinced that it is not possible to render an authentic interpretation of black music without having shared and participated in the experience that created it. Black music must be lived before it can be understood. . ."

Nola contendre. Few of us in this congregation may claim that experience. But these hymns and songs we sing today are included in our hymnal because the hymnody and the faith of others, arising from dissimilar conditions and circumstances, can enrich, deepen, broaden, our own humanity and deepen our own faith. We claim each other in Christ. We may at best empathize with our radically different socio-cultural experiences, but fallen, broken, finite, limited, sinful as we are, we stumblingly confess a universal Christ and sing, as we will later in our service, to the tune composed by a great African American musician, "In Christ there is not East or West, in Christ, no South or North, But one great community of love throughout the whole wide earth."

I

We begin this morning with hymns of faith. Hear the words of Professor James Cone:

The Black slaves' response to the experience of suffering corresponded closely to the biblical message and its emphasis that God is the ultimate answer to the question of faith. In the spirituals, the black slaves' experience of suffering and despair defined for them the major issue in their view of the world. It was taken for granted that God is righteous and will vindicate the poor and the weak. Indeed it was the point of departure for faith. The singers of spirituals had another concern, centered on the faithfulness of the community of believers in a world full of trouble. They wondered not whether God is just and right but whether the sadness and pain in the world could cause them to lose faith in the Gospel of God. They were concerned about the solidarity of the community of sufferers. Will the wretched of the earth be able to experience the harsh realities of despair and loneliness and take this pain upon themselves and not lose faith in the faithfulness of God? There was no attempt to evade the reality of suffering. Black slaves faced the reality of the world "laden'd wid' trouble, an burdened wid' grief" but they believed that they could go down to Jesus in secret and get relief. They appealed to Jesus not so much to remove the trouble (though that was included) but to keep them from "sinkin' down."

Hear it now?

"Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work's in vain;
But then the Holy Spirit, renews my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sinsick soul."

And yes, "Lord, I want to be a Christian" when everything's against it, when the trouble of the world says "No." "Lord I want to be Christian," not like the folk running this plantation, going to church and keeping us in chains, no-I want to be a Christian in my heart."

O, Good God, don't we all!

II

And now we move to hymns of hope: "The Black experience in America is a history of servitude and resistance, of survival in the land of death." So writes Professor Cone. And he continues,

Slavery meant being snatched from your homeland and sailed to an unknown land in a stinking ship. Slavery meant being regarded as property, like horses, cows, and household goods. For Blacks the auction block was one potent symbol of their subhuman status. The block stood for 'brokenness,' because on sale days no family ties were recognized . . . Slavery meant working fifteen to twenty hours a day and being beaten for showing fatigue. It meant being driven into the field three weeks after delivering a baby. It meant having the cost of replacing you calculated against the value of your labor during a peak season, so that your owner could decide whether to work you to death. It meant being whipped for crying over a fellow slave who had been killed trying to escape.

Amid this bleak, besieged, dehumanizing existence, in the face of a living hell: Hope. Hope! While in bondage, valued only as property, slaves understood their slave identity as a radical contradiction of their creation as Children of God. Professor Cone writes,

To be a child of God had present implications. It meant that God's future had broken into the slave's historical present, revealing God had defeated evil in Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. . . [Thus] hope in black spirituals is not a denial of history. Black hope accepts history, but believes this history is in motion moving toward a divine fulfillment. It is the belief that things can be radically otherwise than they are; that reality is not fixed, but is moving in the direction of human liberation.

Against everything denying it: hope! Thus the capacity to transcend terrible burdens and to sing, "Glory, Glory Hallelujah!"

And yes, on hearing our Lord's urgent admonition to serve as light to the world, while everything conspires to crush and quench the light, the radiant capacity, in hope, to sing, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."

III

Let us look at hymns of freedom:

Hallelujah to the lamb
Jesus died for every man.
He died for you. He died for me;
He died to set the whole world free.

Professor Cone:

The divine liberation of the oppressed from slavery is the central theological concept in the black spirituals. These songs show that black slaves did not believe that human servitude was reconcilable with their African Past and their knowledge of the Christian Gospel. They did not believe that God created Africans to be slaves of Americans. Accordingly they sang of a God who was involved in history-their history-making right what whites made wrong. [Contending that God wills their freedom and not their slavery] the spirituals focus on biblical passages stressing God's involvement in the liberation of oppressed people. Black people sang about Joshua and the Battle of Jerhico, Moses leading the Israelites from bondage, Daniel in the Lion's den, and the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace. Here the emphasis was on the God' liberation of the weak from the oppression of the strong, the lowly and the downtrodden from the proud and the mighty. And blacks reasoned that if God could lock the lion's jaw for Daniel, and could cool the fire for the Hebrew children, then God could certainly deliver Black people from slavery.

Therefore, as Richard Newman reminds us, these songs came loaded with symbolic language designed to conceal their purpose from the master class. Slaves sang them filled with coded words and secret signals. "The slaves themselves were God's people, Israel. Moses was a leader and deliverer. Egypt or Babylon represented the slave holding states, Hell, the most recalcitrant and deepest South of those states. Pharaoh was a slave owner. The River Jordan was the Ohio River or similar body of water between the North and the South. The Red Sea was the Atlantic Ocean. Home, Canaan, camp meeting, or the Promised land were Africa, the free states, Canada or Liberia. Any agency of travel or movement-trains, shoes, chariots, wheels-spoke of escape."

So, "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land;
Tell Old Pharaoh to let my people go."

And finally, a modern text, using the images of Hebrew liberation to commemorate one of the great causes of New England Congregational abolitionists, a mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad in July 1839, the African slaves' freedom finally won in a case argued before the Supreme Court of the United States by John Quincy Adams. The theme:

"Our liberator rescues. Our liberator lives."