My last blog spoke of a busy birthday weekend for me with both a Jireh concert and a Montreal Gospel Choir performance as part of an event marking black history in Burlington, Vermont. In this blog I want to highlight an unexpected pleasure for me on my birthday – something that happened quite by surprise and was the perfect way to mark my 55th birthday.
I made the remark to a couple of my fellow MGC members in the weeks leading up to our choir’s second career performance in the United States that if there were any border troubles and for some reason, or perhaps some unwelcome choir member we were refused entry at the Quebec – Vermont border, it actually might turn out to be more interesting that way than performing at the scheduled event.
And I, who really do love performing anywhere, love especially performing to the people of Vermont. This is a people as mellow as the Green Mountain Coffee that they serve, but you can count on them to raise their hands and participate actively in a gospel concert. In the earliest years of Jireh, and before that with Union Gospel Choir, I had the pleasure of being before an audience who not only loved my Lord Jesus but outwardly indicated the same in the way that they responded to his music. Rarely seen in Canada, this gospel fervour, I must admit.
The building of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington was what my ideal church building would look like – simple, but infused with light with windows on both sides of the sanctuary on the main floor and the balcony floor. My own chosen church in Montreal does not possess such easy access to light. We are a multi-campus church that has a goal of having a location in each borough of Montreal. I may just drive across town to some foreign borough should we ever find a location with the quality of light that the Unitarian Universalists of Burlington possess!
The choir performed, and I must say we performed just a little better than usual because we were actively encouraged by the greater part of the black audience and even those of the whiter solidarity set. My wife, Carol, as director is world class. I love watching her lead – she has all the skills on and offstage to excel in her chosen field. Then came my birthday surprise as Reverend Toussaint King Hill from Atlanta, Georgia was introduced as the speaker at this black history month event.
Carol and I went to see a civil rights era movie recently. “Hidden Figures” is set in the very early 1960’s in the state of Virginia and follows the story of 3 black “computers”, women who used their dexterity with adding machines and sometimes, when given the opportunity, their math abilities to enable NASA to send men and spaceships into orbit and to bring them back to earth again. Civil rights history in the United States is so close at hand to us as Canadians and is so troubling because my privileged class of whiter peoples in all their institutions were so slow at bringing equal rights and access to education to their neighbours who didn’t share the same ancestry. It is striking to Carol and I, this injustice, as we can testify as a married couple that there are far more things that we share in common than there are things that would divide us.
Faith in Jesus Christ is perhaps the greatest unifying element that Carol and I share. Carol loves hearing preaching even more than I do as she continues daily to hear the word of God set forth (through means of the internet) while I get my preaching fix but once per week at church. This was my once per week prescription that the introduced Reverend Hill was bringing today and for Carol, it was a sampling of something too rare for our northern breed – African American preaching in the tradition of the great Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Reverend Hill is a distinguished alumnus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, without doubt one of the greatest colleges among all the outstanding educational institutions in United States. He prepared there, as Martin Luther King Jr. himself did, to be the pastor of a church. Reverend Hill received his present call as pastor in 2006, to West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. This was the church that Ralph Albernathy also pastored for many years, another renowned civil rights leader, colleague and friend of Martin Luther King. Could there be a better speaker possible for a black history month event in Burlington, Vermont on a sunny day in February?
The sermon, for our speaker did not shy away from his gifting even in this Unitarian setting, started slowly, a cadence well-known in the southern states. As the sermon developed, Reverend Hill added different “tracks” – biblical, historical, musical, mythical, inspirational, political and educational. Instead of going serially from one track to another as a less-gifted speaker might, he wove the traps into a tapestry – one theme appearing for a minute before it stepped behind another track. There was a large white handkerchief ready next to the pulpit for Reverend King’s use. By midway through the sermon, it was obvious that our speaker would be needing the handkerchief even in these northern climes. He was working the tapestry which was meant to both honour and inspire a people. You certainly didn’t have to be black to be inspired and moved by his words. You didn’t need to be a believer to have a great appreciation for his subject of the afternoon, but for those of us who were of the faith in Jesus, he rallied us to proclaim it and to acknowledge Jesus with him.
Carol could not have hoped for a speaker who better represented the preaching style that is native to the churches that birthed the gospel music that Montreal Gospel Choir sings. His connection with American Civil rights history and his practice as a preacher to continue in that tradition along with his obvious faith in God and love of Jesus made him the perfect person for us as a choir to back in this event. Sometimes pastors are accused of “preaching to the choir”. Because of the willingness of Reverend Toussaint King Hill to come north at the invitation of Patrick Brown, sponsor and organizer of this event, he had the opportunity to preach to a choir very different than the gospel choir that he has in his home church. As Montreal Gospel Choir continues to develop in its unique way, Reverend Hill’s sermon on February 26, 2017 will no doubt provide a frame of reference to us in faith and in singing. Preach it, brother!
There are details of Jesus’ story that only Luke has: an angel choir appearing to shepherds to announce the Saviour’s birth and the angel of the Lord giving instructions that they will find this Saviour, newly born and wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. God, who is in control of all things, could have arranged that an angelic choir-backed birth announcement be staged somewhere that would have a bigger audience – the temple in Jerusalem comes to mind. If Luke were making this up this kind of setting would have been more spectacular, of greater import.
The family manger scene that we had in our family (pictured to the right) received a lot of attention as little hands loved to wind up the music box attached to the stable structure and listen to it play ‘Silent Night’. This amazingly durable piece of workmanship was made in Italy and must be well past 50 years of use.
Our engagement to each other has, from our very first moments together, always included the engagement to a joint “projet de société” of being in, about and all through a gospel choir. As friends, we began Jireh together out of being brought together in Union United Church Gospel Choir. The years added River’s Edge Gospel Choir and then Montreal Gospel Choir. This Sunday, that last choir and its’ 90-some singers will be blowing the lid off of the church that Carol and I call home. We didn’t imagine something big like that when we began our life together but with God life has been ordered, blessed and the kind of thing you could describe in the most positive words the prophet Jeremiah can muster, “a future and a purpose”.
The future, from that point was working on the farm. My Mennonite heritage, through my father, is evangelical Christian. His father’s barn impelled passers-by with the words of John the Baptist from Mark 1:15, “Repent, and believe the Gospel”.