Column by Mary Lee Talbot
The Rev. Jacqui Lewis is delighted to be the opening act for comedian Lewis Black. “Just to ground us, I am Jacqui Lewis, and he is Lewis Black. I am Black, and he’s not. That way you can tell us apart,” she quipped.
Jacqui Lewis preached at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning ecumenical worship service in the Amphitheater. Her sermon title was “After a Long Dark Night of the Soul, Joy,” and the scripture reading was Psalm 30.
She quoted from The Message, a modern paraphrase of the Bible by the Rev. Eugene Peterson, verses 11–12 of Psalm 30. “You did it: you changed wild lament / into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black mourning band / and decked me with wildflowers. / I’m about to burst with song; / I can’t keep quiet about you. / God, my God, / I can’t thank you enough.”
The psalmist was giving God praise and thanksgiving for release from a crisis. The crisis “could have been personal, like a disease, a sick child or loss of a loved one. It could have been collective, like the destruction of the Temple or oppression when the social structure is dismantled,” Lewis said.
She continued, “The psalmist lifts up God because God rescued the psalmist and their people. God lifted them like taking them from a deep well, rescued them from the grip of debt and delivered them from deadness.”
Lewis said that in the ancient world, most religions believed that suffering was caused by a god. “I don’t believe that, so don’t get stuck there,” she said. God’s anger was temporary; love always dominated. “The ‘no’ was always in the context of an ongoing ‘yes.’ ”
In Psalm 30, verse 5, the psalmist wrote that people weep for a night but that there is joy in the morning. The King James version of the verse reads, “For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: / weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
Lewis’ family is from the Mississippi Delta. Her mother was Emma, and her grandmother was M’dear (“And this was before Tyler Perry,” she said), and she had 13 sons. “They were all raised in the Delta with the smell of magnolias and Jim Crow,” Lewis said.
Her mother, Emma, began picking cotton when she was 4, and she went to St. James Chapel with civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. They sang together in the choir. It was also the place where Emmet Till was lynched for whistling at a white woman, a story that was a lie.
“The song of my people, during slavery and after, was that God was angry with their Blackness, but when they got to heaven, their mourning would end, and their dancing and liberation would be in heaven,” Lewis said. But liberation, womanist and other new theologies dismantled this theology. “No one is destined for suffering; all are destined for joy.”
God is on the side of the disinherited, and we must be on God’s side, Lewis told the congregation. “We must join in the weeping and mourn the state of the state so that the birthright of joy is available to all. Can I get an amen?” “Amen,” responded the congregation.
She continued, “If grief gives way to dancing; if God’s people love as the way, the truth and the life; if Jesus is our mentor, then we must acknowledge our role in rescuing people from the pit, from death and dying when society loses its mind. If God is the God of liberation and reparation, that is our job.”
Lewis reminded the congregation that God is not a genie with a wand. “God uses us. There is lots to cry about and lots to grieve. How can we not grieve when we see the erasure of human beings? Lord have mercy, genocide is the only way to describe it. Those masked people pretending to be ICE agents and kidnapping immigrants remind me of slave catchers.”
She continued, “We are seeing white nationalism on steroids in the name of our church. Can I say ‘Oh, hell no’? In the name of Jesus, they are ripping books out of libraries, and it is dangerous for our queer siblings, and if you believe we are post-racial, see me after the service.”
There is a wealth gap between a white family of four and a Black family of four of $240,000, based on the history of slavery. “It is dangerous to drive, walk or eat while Black. Just ask me about the faces of people when I walk into a neighborhood restaurant on a ‘nice, white people preaching tour,’ ” she said.
She told the congregation that we are not finished making God’s realm on Earth. “Your concerns are my concerns, and my concerns are your concerns. The Zulu word for this is ‘ubuntu.’ You know we all come from Africa, and we are not humans by ourselves; all humans are our people. You suffering is my suffering, and your thriving is my thriving.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken.”
Lewis was with her daughter as her daughter was giving birth to her first child. “There was a lot of hurt and a lot of pain, but I realized that something was dying and yet something beautiful was being born.”
She said to the congregation, “Something is gripping us, and if we are having labor pains, then what’s coming is new, fabulous, kinder, more gentle. A place where all belong, where all have enough. What if we are the midwives to a new thing? We have to wait actively; we all have to find our voice and be brave.”
Together, she said, “we will rescue people from the pit. There will be love, joy, peace, well-being, enough for all. In the urgency of now, this is our job. Together. May it be so.”
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor of Chautauqua, presided. Amy Gardner, senior vice president and chief advancement officer for Chautauqua Institution, read the scripture. The prelude was “Partita on Hymn to Joy,” by John G. Barr, played by Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, on the Massey Memorial Organ. For the first anthem, the Chautauqua Choir sang Jubilate Deo in C, music by Benjamin Britten and words from Psalm 100. The choir was under the direction of Stafford and accompanied by Owen Reyda, organ scholar, on the Massey Organ. The offertory anthem, sung a cappella by the Chautauqua Choir under the direction of Stafford, was “Do not be afraid,” music by Philip Stopford and words by Gerard Markland. Laura Smith, organ scholar, played the incidental music and the doxology during the presentation of the offering. Smith performed Sonate No. 1/Symphonie No. 1 pour Orgue (et Orchestre), by Alexandre Guilmont for the postlude. Support for this week’s chaplaincy and preaching is provided by The Edmund E. Robb-Walter C. Shaw Fund.
