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.

Exodus and Hip-Hop: Partners for Preachers

Claiming a heritage that weds rhetorical image to the realities of black life in America, Kenyatta Gilbert draws connections between today’s musicians and hip-hop artists and activists of the past. Gilbert’s scholarship has an expansive reach only begun to be introduced in this excerpt from his full essay in Liturgy 32, no. 3 which is available at www.tandfonline.com. 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. 

The development of faith identity in African American churches has traditionally invested symbolic significance in the Exodus narrative. Whether one considers the celebrated Black poet and abolitionist Phyllis Wheatley’s “Letter to Reverend Samson Occum” (1774) or A.M.E. Zion preacher Absalom Jones’s “Thanksgiving Sermon” (1808) based on Exodus 3:7–8, since the late eighteenth century, appropriation of the Egypt-to-Canaan saga has been an essential part of Black Christianity’s literary and socioreligious imagination. 

. . . African Americans have found points of congruence between their narrative world and that of the Israelites. Frederick Douglass exited his Egypt to become a prototypical Black Moses; Nat Turner’s clandestine escape (despite his short-lived freedom) struck terror into the hearts of Pharaonic Virginian slaveholders; Marcus Garvey coaxed several thousand Black vassals to embrace his Afro-Atlantic nation-building crusade; and Martin L. King, Jr.’s theological vision of a beloved community heartened the hopes of the societally dispossessed, although Promised Land habitation would elude him. African America’s reifying impulse to coronate a Moses figure is centuries old. 

 Dr. King’s death-warning sermon, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered in 1968—thirteen years after his stirring message to a packed assembly at Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church on the eve of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—is arguably the most well-known audio-visually archived sermon preached in the modern period. . . second only to his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” establishes a crucial referent for observing how acts of utterance become acts of imagination that carry generative power to evoke new perceptions of reality––symbolically significant perceptions that stretch beyond the rhetor’s leitmotif. As the saints of old had intoned the sacred lyrics of suffering and deliverance in “Go Down Moses, Down in Egyptland … tell ole’ Pharaoh to let my people go” from their wearied throats as a tool of hope in the antebellum South, King’s sermon in Montgomery in 1955 had in similar fashion triggered a tactical, poetical war of unmasking systemic evil and deceptive human practices in America by means of moral suasion and subversive rhetoric.

 Celebrated as the “Moses of the twentieth century”. . . the Kingian impulse for speech-act beauty––drawing on aesthetical principles that reveal the tremendous creativity and deeply rooted rhetorical imagination and expression of African American preaching—remain continuous in the speech-acts performed by an emerging generation of Joshuas and Calebs who have found sure footing on a lyrically potent sacred ground for announcing hope in the face of human tragedy and collective suffering. One way to notice how the appropriation of the Egypt-to-Canaan saga continues to shape and fund an aesthetical language-world for African-descended people to interpret their social plight and construct identity is to give specific attention to how two African American lyricists employ what I term the Kingian impulse whose arrested speech-act performances conspicuously and inferentially embrace the cultural metanarrative of God’s emancipation of the Israelites from bondage to freedom.
 

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.