The Journey: Day Twenty-Six--Sorrowful Joy

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Twenty-Six: Joyful Sorrow

Welcome to day twenty-six of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

[1]Excerpted from, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

Day Twenty-Six: Joyful Sorrow[1]

Enslaved African Americans blended sustaining and healing because they first holistically experienced sorrow and joy. The following well-known slave spiritual illustrates this truth.

Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows like Jesus,
Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Glory hallelujah!

A slave who was initially puzzled by the tone of joyful sadness that echoed and re-echoed in spirituals eloquently explains the paradox.

“The old meeting house caught on fire. The spirit was there. Every heart was beating in unison as we turned our minds to God to tell him of our sorrows here below. God saw our need and came to us. I used to wonder what made people shout, but now I don’t. There is a joy on the inside, and it wells up so strong that we can’t keep still. It is fire in the bones. Any time that fire touches a man, he will jump.”

African American Christians understood that life is lived in the minor key. They knew that they could not avoid or evade suffering.

Frederick Douglass recalls that the spirituals reveal “at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” As the slaves reflected on the human condition, they did not demand answers. However they did insist upon candor about suffering and courageous affirmations of joy. The combination often led to a jarring contrast when they juxtaposed earthly suffering and heavenly hope.

An eloquent image of life’s alteration between ups and downs, sorrow and joy, occurs in one of the lesser known verses of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had.

One morning I was a-walking down,
Saw some berries a-hanging down,
I pick de berry and I suck de juice,
Just as sweet as de honey in de comb.
Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down,
Sometimes I’m almost on de groun’.

Wild, Sad Strains

Lucy McKim Garrison sent a letter to the November 8, 1862, edition of Dwight’s Journal of Music that powerfully displays this melding of agony and joy found in the spirituals.

“The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves never could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice-swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in rest in the future—in ‘Canaan’s fair and happy land,’ to which their eyes seem constantly turned.”

Today’s comforters can imitate the model set by enslaved African Americans who knew how to mingle the many moods of faith, who knew how to sing with “tones loud, long, and deep,” and who “breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” Today’s comforters can replicate the soul-stirring honesty of the Psalmists of old who knew how to write psalms of complaint and of celebration, of lament and of longing, who knew how to pour out their souls fully to God.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. How well are you able to mingle suffering and joy?

2. Are you able to celebrate God’s goodness even while experiencing life’s “badness”?

The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration: Part I: Jesus First

The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration
Part I: Jesus First

For years now, Kwanzaa has been supported as a way to bring African American tradition into the Christmas celebration. However, what is severely lacking in Kwanzaa is the Christian legacy of African American Christmas celebration. This “mini-series” of blogs will explore The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration.

Jesus First

A major reason for celebrations like Kwanzaa is the lack of knowledge about the Evangelical Christian legacy in African American history. Thus it is important to explore how and why African Americans turned to Christianity given the hypocritical religious culture of many of the Christian slave owners. In the midst of suffering through the ordeal of the sin of slavery, how did God save enslaved people from the slavery of sin?

Of course, it is equally important to acknowledge the inner battled that resulted from such hypocrisy. Daniel Alexander Payne explains. Born to free parents in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1811, during his ordination in 1839, he describes the testing of faith caused by Christian duplicity. “The slaves are sensible of the oppression exercised by their masters; and they see these masters on the Lord’s day worshiping in His holy Sanctuary. They hear their masters professing Christianity; they see their masters preaching the Gospel; they hear these masters praying in their families, and they know that oppression and slavery are inconsistent with the Christian religion; therefore they scoff at religion itself—mock their masters, and distrust both the goodness and justice of God. Yes, I have known them even to question His existence.”[i]

If spiritually famished African Americans were going to convert to Christianity, then they had to convert on the basis of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as revealed in the Bible, not on the basis of Christianity revealed in the lifestyles of the Christians they knew.

Christ’s suffering for humanity’s sin was the key that unlocked their hearts and enlightened their eyes. “Jesus quickly became the ardent personification of the slaves’ own suffering.”[ii] Their suffering at the hands of Christians caused them to identify with a suffering Savior who suffered at the hands of religious leaders.

At the same time, African American Christians clearly recognized and constantly emphasized the difference between Christ’s sinlessness and their personal need for forgiveness from sin. The recurring theme of the conversion narratives was salvation from sin, not from suffering. Yes, Christ shared with them the experience of unjust suffering. But more importantly, they shared in Christ’s suffering for their sins.

Pastor James W. C. Pennington, reflecting on his conversion, seamlessly expresses his understanding of suffering and of sin. Without minimizing for a moment the evils of slavery, he maximizes for all eternity the horrors of his own enslavement to sin and Satan.

"I was a lost sinner and a slave to Satan; and soon I saw that I must make another escape from another tyrant. I did not by any means forget my fellow-bondmen, of whom I had been sorrowing so deeply, and travailing in spirit so earnestly; but I now saw that while man had been injuring me, I had been offending God; and that unless I ceased to offend him, I could not expect to have his sympathy in my wrongs; and moreover, that I could not be instrumental in eliciting his powerful aid in behalf of those for whom I mourned so deeply."[iii]

Rejecting the “slaveholding gospel” of the institutional Church of that era, the enslaved African Americans gave birth to a regenerated Christianity that reflected fundamental Christian doctrine while maintaining compatible African traditions. Their cultural practice of biblical Christianity provided the new orientation toward existence that they needed given their shattered external circumstances and sinful internal nature. It created the new narrative of present resilience made possible by a Savior who suffered with them because they were sinned against. It also created the new narrative of future hope made possible by a Savior who suffered for them because they were sinners.

Christmas with Jesus First

Therefore, Christmas for African American believers was a celebration of the One Person they could both identify with and entrust themselves to. One unnamed slave described his Christmas conversion joy. “After my conversion I was happy, and I spent a whole week going over the community, telling everybody what happened to me. I was the happiest person in the whole world. I have gone on praising the Lord since that time.”[iv]

More than anything, Christmas was an internal celebration of a free gift to an enslaved people. It was the remarkable wonder that God in Christ had broken into a broken world and unshackled the bonds of their soul, even if the physical bonds yet remained shackled.

Pastor Peter Randolph expands on the nature of a converted Christmas response. “The eyes of my mind were open, and I saw things as I never did before. With my mind’s eye, I could see my Redeemer hanging upon the cross for me. I wanted all the other slaves to see him thus, and feel as happy as I did. I used to talk to others, and tell them of the friend they would have in Jesus, and show them by my experience how I was brought to Christ, and felt his love within my heart—and love it was, in God’s adapting himself to my capacity.”[v]

The African American Christian Christmas was a joyous internal celebration of the greatest gift ever given: Jesus Christ. A suffering people empathized with a suffering Savior. A suffering people submitted to a Savior who submitted His will to His Father. A suffering people rejoiced that unto them a child was given, unto them a Savior was born.

Of course, their internal joy was mitigated by their horrible external situation. In Part II we will see how African American Christians responded on Christmas to their external situation with the truth that hardships do not make it too hard to love. We’ll see something of the family Christmas joy that moved beyond the suffering.



[i]Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Baker Books, 2007, p. 104. Quoted in Payne, “American Slavery Brutalizes Man,” in Foner, Lift Every Voice, p. 177.
[ii] Andrews, Practical Theology, p. 18.
[iii] Pennington, “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, p. 52, emphasis added.
[iv] Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, p. 140.
[v] Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, p. 1.