Rector's Note: Why we’re singing Lift Every Voice and Sing this Sunday-5.21.26

This Sunday our celebration of Pentecost coincides with Memorial Day weekend. Typically, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, we recall those who have died in service to our country, and we list our own beloved deceased in the worship leaflet. Dave Kipphut often sets up a visual “Missing Servicemember Table” recalling those fallen, missing or imprisoned in war.

Finally, our sacred music often includes the hymn America the Beautiful.

This year, given the primacy of Pentecost, a few of those Memorial Day practices will be different. We will still incorporate our list of beloveds and a prayer for those who have served. However, Dave Kipphut will be out of town and unavailable to set up the display. The music will focus on our Pentecost celebration. And the final hymn will be Lift Every Voice and Sing, often called the Black National Anthem.

While I love the hymn America the Beautiful and its call for the nation to “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law,” the choice of Lift Every Voice and Sing is especially powerful this Sunday. Written in 1900 by civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson, and put to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, Lift Every Voice and Sing powerfully bridges both Pentecost and Memorial Day beautifully.

…Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us …

Johnson, then principal of the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Fl., originally wrote the text as a poem to be read by the school children to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. His brother, a composer, put it to music so the children could sing it. The song became an anthem of the civil rights movement and a cherished hymn of the Black experience. At liturgy, we are most likely to sing it on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, at the honoring of our other Black saints, or during Black History Month.

… We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at lastWhere the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Placing Lift Every Voice and Sing as our recessional hymn this Sunday adds a particular quality to the prayer for our nation that is traditionally reflected in the final hymn on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.  Because Pentecost empowers us to remember and proclaim both dangerous and liberating stories, it may help to remember one of Memorial Day’s forgotten origin narratives.

In 2011 the historian David Blight wrote an article for the New York Times entitled Forgetting Why We Remember,  discussing the history of the day. The event developed from a day of bereavement to an official commemoration that “helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause,” Blight wrote.

But the “earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day”, he said, happened in 1895 at the close of the Civil War in Charleston, NC, which had been laid waste by the Union bombardment.

“Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war,” Blight wrote.

In a Harvard archive Blight discovered lost narratives of the largest of these held on May 1, 1865, when 10,000 freed-people as well as missionaries and teachers, staged a parade and remembrance at the sight of the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club. The track had been an outdoor prison for Union soldiers, 257 of whom were buried in mass graves. Records indicated that black workmen had gone to the site, reburied the dead in ordered rows and built a fence around the area, erecting a sign that acknowledged the cemetery as “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The May 1 event included a procession of 3,000 black school children carrying roses, black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. There were patriotic songs and hymns and Scripture readings by black clergy. The crowd dispersed to decorate the graves of the dead, hold picnics and hear speeches. It was the first Decoration Day.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast 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.

It’s tempting on Pentecost to let Memorial Day take a back seat and to quiet its official stories, which tend to equate liberty and freedom with violence, smoothing over war’s worst horrors and catastrophes. But it’s better, I think, to put it under the light, to bring it to our worship and to ask God to keep us on the path on which Pentecost first placed us in the fiery aftermath of Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension.

This Sunday, we also remember that our country is again at war. We are again asked to bring the Holy Spirit into a world that longs for justice and peace. On this day when Pentecost and Memorial Day observances converge, it’s worth reflecting deeply and prayerfully on what it means to be true to our God and true to our native land.