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Paul and Silas are in trouble. They have healed a slave girl that her masters did not want healed (for it cost them a lot of money). They are seized, attacked, stripped, beaten with rods, thrown into the inner most cell of the prison and shackled, feet to the floor. What do they do?
They break into song. And everyone around is listening to them. What a witness.
The Civil Rights movement in our own country used song as well—we all know “We Shall Overcome.” Maybe you couldn’t march in Selma or Washington, but you could sing. Maybe change seems slow to come, and hope is a flighty bird, but you can stay strong if you raise your voice in song. And we sing “We Shall Overcome” still today.
Each generation looks to its crooners, or rock stars, or even hip-hop artists, to tell their story, to talk of love, to express rage, to declare defiance, to dream of a different world. Maybe that is why the death of the song-maker, like Prince, is such big news. We may not be able to explain it, but we know there is something powerful about song.
On March 13, 1990, Nelson Mandela spoke at Sweden’s Uppsala Cathedral on his first trip outside of South Africa after being freed from 27 years of imprisonment under the apartheid regime. Amongst other things, Mandela had come to pay homage to the musicians who had brought South African freedom songs to the world and, in so doing, brought the unjust situation in South Africa to world attention, and kept it in the forefront of many people’s minds.
Some 12 years before, Anders Nyberg and the Swedish singing group Fjedur travelled to South Africa as part of a musical program with the Lutheran Church. They spent ten days amongst the South African people experiencing the poverty and oppression that made up daily life for millions. They returned to Sweden with their lives and perceptions changed, and with a new repertoire of songs. Over the next few years the group released recordings and booklets of some of the South Africa freedom songs that they had learned, and they soon were sung throughout Europe, striking a chord especially in the nations of Eastern Europe that were struggling for their own freedom and national identity. Tours of North and Central America took the songs even further.
Nyberg shares a story of teaching a song to a group of children near Stockholm. He encouraged them to sing it loudly, so that then-president Botha of South Africa would hear them; the song had Zulu lyrics calling upon Botha to release Nelson Mandela from prison. Several days later the children approached Nyberg with great excitement. “He heard us!” the children cried. A newspaper headline announced that Botha was preparing to release Mandela. While the children’s voices did not literally reach from Sweden to South Africa, the voices of millions around the world had joined in songs of freedom that Mandela and others credited with pressuring and shaming the South African government into change. Such is the power of song.
As Mandela stood in that cathedral so far away from his home, he said
“Imagine how our hearts beat as your voices wafted across the great distances that separate us and penetrated through the prison walls, as over the walls of Jericho, to reach us in our cells. Every day we heard your voices ring: Free the political prisoner! We heard your voices sing: Let my people go! As we heard that vibrating and invigorating cry of human concern, we knew that we would be free. We saw that no prison walls or guard dogs or even the cold seas that are like a deadly moat surrounding Robben Island, could ever succeed to frustrate the desires of all humanity. We drew strength and sustenance from the knowledge that we were part of a greater humanity than our jailers could claim. Intended for oblivion, we were discovered by the little people whom we had never met. They wrote to us to give us encouragement and hope. They celebrated our birthdays with us. They remembered us at Christmas. They defied the elements to demonstrate about us. They prayed for our freedom. They did what they could not afford, by contributing some of their earnings so that we could study and purchase what little we could to relieve the rigors of prison life.
In the end, the high and mighty also heard the voice of the little people…we are here today to say thank you.”(from Seasons of the Spirit, May 8, 2016)
The most familiar of these freedom songs appears in our hymnal “We Are Marching in the Light of God/Siyahamba” in the section called Trusting in the Promises of God. In fact, it is the last hymn in the hymnal, I’m sure by design.
For we know that our world is far from perfect. We know there is much to do in God’s name. It doesn’t matter if we are imprisioned or free; it doesn’t matter if we are old or young; it doesn’t matter if we are healthy or ill. We are called to live in God’s love. We are called to testify to God’s grace. We are called to raise up the plight of the poor. We are called to gather and pray, to study and talk, to work and sing.
That’s what Paul and Silas did. That’s what helped free Mandela. That’s something we can do too.
Let us join together in singing “We are Marching in the Light of God/Siyahamba” together.
We are marching in the light of God,
We are marching in the light of God. (2x)
We are marching, oooo,
We are marching in the light of God. (2x)
May it be so. Alleluia. Amen.
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