The Wheel Keeps Turning

Greetings Pilgrims!
 
With the last Sunday of Black History month nearly here I wanted to offer up this excerpt from a sermon from Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, “The Gospel and the Blues.”
 
-much love,
Felix (she/her)

It’s a strange affair to be Black and live in America, and even stranger to be Black and a person of faith in these yet-to-be-United States, to carry around the burden of a socially constructed idea called race and yet be filled with a divinely inspired mandate to eradicate all limitations to the human soul. Being Black means you are born with a Blues song tattooed on your heart, and at the same time you still have a Gospel shout that is welling up in your soul about to come out.
 
Another way to say it is that we live with repression and revelation simultaneously swimming in the same tributary of our spirit. There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time. Madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, “How are you doing, Mother?” she said, “I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”
 
For the most part, many of us are living in between, not quite at “Oh Lord” and not quite at “Thank you, Jesus,” but somewhere in between. If you choose to be conscious and understand the system at work, study the history of repression, know what hate will do when it’s turned inward onto your own spirit, examine the forces of consumption, get a picture of colonialism, understand the root of imperialism, and begin to deconstruct the powers that be. At some point, you will find yourself leaning upon the Blues and facing despair, and wondering if you should give up.
 
For those of you who have fallen into a level of cynicism, thinking that we “cannot” and “nothing will work,” let me tell you, when you get up tomorrow on Monday morning, it will be December first. That means nothing to you, but let me break it down, because you should shout every December first. December first was the day … Rosa Parks sat down so you could stand up.
 
When you get up tomorrow, you say, “God, I thank you for Rosa. That she could sit down so I could stand up.” And only God can teach you to do two things that sound contradictory at the same time, that she sat down and stood up at the same time. We must make our history sacred.