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We Live in a Good Friday World, and Easter will have the Final Say
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| 4/14/2009 |
We live in a Good Friday world, and Easter will have the final say. So much death surrounds us, I often wonder if we will keep our courage to love, our audacity to hope, and our perseverance to heal.
At the turn of the 20th century, a girl was born in a modest row house in South Philadelphia, near 18th and Catherine Streets. Her mother worked cleaning the marble floors in Wanamaker’s, and her father sold coal and ice in the Reading Terminal Market. She attended the Union Baptist Church in South Philly, and there she discovered she could sing. As she grew, she sang every part in the church choir from bass to soprano. Realizing her gift, she wanted to enroll in the premier high school for the arts so that she could receive formal training, but the high school said, ‘No,’ with these words that the girl remembered later in life, “We don’t take colored.”
Her beautiful, powerful voice could not be silenced. She was accepted to Yale University, but could not afford to go. So she began to sing professionally in classical music. But, she did not get many bookings in her own country. She became a sensation in Europe. The Scandinavians loved her, and her singing once caused a near riot in Russia.
In 1935, this woman from South Philadelphia sang in the Salzburg festival in Austria. It’s a shock, but not a surprise, that upon learning that she was black, a Nazi party official forbid her name to be printed in the official program. After the concert, Arturo Toscanini found her backstage and said that a voice like hers only appears once a century.
In 1936, she had a concert scheduled in the premier venue in her home country--Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. When the manager learned that she was African American, he followed the policy of the hall’s owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and canceled the concert.
She truly experienced the reality of living in a Good Friday world. Yet Easter would have the final say, three years later.
On this Easter Sunday, we remember that on Easter Sunday in 1939--70 years ago--Marian Anderson left her family’s row house near 18th and Catherine and made her way to 30th Street Station to get the train for Washington D.C. She had not traveled the night before, because she could not stay in any hotel in the District. Upon arriving at the Lincoln Memorial on that Easter Sunday, it was very cold. Still, 75,000 people had gathered, and Marian Anderson sang,
My country tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee we sing.
Was it a protest, or a note of defiance that changed “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing,” or was it just a lapse of memory? Whatever, Marian Anderson made clear that the “Land where my father’s died,” and the “Land of the pilgrim’s pride,” was her land, too, and the forces of death and evil would not keep her from the gift of life that God had entrusted to her. On that Easter Sunday 70 years ago, Marian Anderson rolled away the stone, and, in a Good Friday world full of racism and hatred, Easter had the final word. From every mountainside, she let God’s freedom from death ring.
The meaning of the concert made a great impression on the 10 year-old Martin Luther King. Speaking about it five years later in an oration contest, he said Marian Anderson “sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ . . . rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty. . . .”
It’s not so hard to connect Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial—an event that historian Raymond Arsenault argues transformed the Lincoln Memorial into the iconic symbol of American freedom and consecrated its turf into national sacred ground—to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the same place 25 years later when he imagined freedom, still deferred for him and so many, ringing from every mountainside. And it’s not so hard to connect that iconic moment to Barack Obama standing there the evening before his inauguration as the first African American president. Marian Anderson and Martin King did not live to witness what they helped create by rolling away the stone. Though they both lived in a Good Friday world, they believed that Easter would have the final say.
Because it’s not so hard to connect Marian Anderson’s courage to roll away the stone to her Baptist Church in South Philadelphia, where she learned to sing the Easter spiritual,
My Lord, what a morning!
My Lord, what a morning,
When the stars begin to fall.
It is not hard to connect the faith of her church and our church to that morning some two thousand years ago when women found their way in the dark to the tomb where they believed the dead Jesus would be forever. As followers, they had hoped that life would triumph over death, hope over despair, and love over hate. But they went dejected, only able to imagine a dead body behind an immovable stone. They arrive, and a mysterious messenger tells them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.”
The next detail always startles me: “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Why the terror, and why the fear? I wonder. Maybe it is easier to live in a Good Friday world. Maybe that world is more predictable and requires less courage. In a Good Friday world, our minds are not called to stretch toward a God that can vanquish death, for death will always have the last word. A God safely up in the clouds, or behind the temple curtain, is not a God to whom we will be asked to hold our lives accountable. I think the women at the tomb were paralyzed with fear because they now knew that God had broken into the world and started vanquishing death. Easter was a beginning, not an ending. In that moment, the women were too scared to begin what was being asked of them.
Are we that scared? Are we convinced that the Good Friday world is permanent and never changeable? Or do we hope in Easter?
As I look upon so many in this church this Easter, I see many of you who’ve had plenty of Good Friday in your life. You know, as well as Marian Anderson did, that Easter has the final say. And I know that many of you are experiencing Good Friday right now, and I only wish that we were the kind of church where the many who have experienced that Easter has the final say could take you by the hand and say, “Do not be afraid.”
I was not surprised to learn that Marian Anderson almost canceled the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The reality of a Good Friday world must have filled her with considerable fear. Was it her faith in the Risen Lord, her faith in Easter having the final say, that gave her the courage?
Truthfully, we can say we will always live in a Good Friday world. The empty tomb was the beginning of Easter having the final word. We have still a long time to wait, and much to do. But as to the question, “Who will roll away the stone, and begin the work of the Risen Christ who is out ahead?”
You will. We will.
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