Pharaoh Among Us: Preaching Hope

Kenyatta Gilbert draws connections between today’s musicians and hip-hop artists and activists of the past. Offered here is an excerpt from his full essay in Liturgy 32, no. 3. The entire issue of Liturgy is on Pilgrimage, with this essay exploring the journey of African American experience and the language describing it as a traceable lineage particular especially to black preachers.

New Testament scholar Rev. Dr. Raquel Lettsome was the first woman to serve as the executive minister at the historic St. James A.M.E. Church in Newark, New Jersey. According to Lettsome, “God not only calls preachers to have a prepared Word, God calls for prepared preachers.” She contends that the preparation of the preacher can be summarized in one word: discipline. 

 Raquel Lettsome’s sermon Hidden Hope launches from Exodus 2:10, tracking the daring women (Hebrew midwives, mother Jochebed, sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter) who rose up at pivotal moments to secure the future of an endangered man-child, the prophet Moses.

 Lettsome sets the sermonic stage for drama and suspense, asking the question: Can hope be destroyed? Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months (Exodus 2:1–4).

 She assumes her listeners are well-acquainted with the story line and cast of characters. The sermon unfolds with an artfully sophisticated blending of sociolinguistic biblical criticism, theo-symbolic coding, and pastoral care. The sermon’s alliterated title and first segment signal to listeners that the preaching moment will be an exercise in aesthetical creativity. 

We are not paranoid. There really is a plot to destroy us, a plot that requires us to reckon with powers and principalities, rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in high places (Eph. 6:12) … . Truth is, just about all of us have already gone through, know about, and/or survived some assassination attempts in which people or circumstances seem to have conspired against us to kill our joy, peace, sanity, self-esteem, educational aspirations … . character. Because ultimately the thing on the hit list is our hope.

Because of its inductive movement and narrative outline, Lettsome leaves no useful detail unmanaged to set the stage. One might see this sermon distilled in three simple propositions: Hope is important. Faith is futile without it. Hope must be protected.

 Lettsome calls persons and principalities that plot our demise “hope assassins.” They “destroy dreams and vanquish hopes … [and] can fire at point blank range––a word of doubt here, some discouragement there, a roll of the eyes, a carefully placed sigh, or just be close enough to stab us in the back …. They fear us even though we have done nothing to them.” She continues that “the way we make it through these plots is God hides us. This was the case of Moses.” 

. . . Pharoah’s strategic plan to annihilate the oppressed Hebrews’ hope, she outlines, was to box them, limit their employment prospects, and conscript them into forced labor; confine them to slave status with no rank or respect; and if plan one and two fail, then assassinate them. The sermon’s message is unmistakably working on multiple levels, biblically and contextually. Lettsome follows the biblical narrative, but the beauty of her composition is in the sermon’s relation to the occasioned event.

The references and the complete text of this essay is available at www.tandfonline.com.

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, associate professor of homiletics and founder of The Preaching Project (www.thepreachingproject.org), Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, DC., is the author most recently of A Pursued Justice: Great Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights (Baylor Univ. Press, 2016).

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, “The Trek from King to Common: Exodus Imagery and Sermonic Lyricism in the Age of Hip-Hop,” Liturgy 32, no. 3 (2017): 38-46.