Preach!: The Power and Purpose Behind Our Praise

By Otis Moss and Andrew Young

America’s premiere preaching father and son team, Otis Moss, Jr. and Otis Moss III, share their preaching, insight, and inspiration in their first-ever book together with sermons on social justice and other progressive Christian topics. Each of the six sermons in "Preach! The Power and Purpose Behind Our Praise" can be downloaded in audio. Includes a reflection guide for study.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780829819588

Book preview

Introduction

THE POWER AND PURPOSE BEHIND OUR PRAISE

I am a product of a mother and father who birthed me into the world of black religion. No other man has impacted my life, taught me the truth wrapped in the man we call Jesus, and showered me with the idea that love is the most powerful force in the universe, in the way that my father and mentor, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss Jr., has done. In many ways, I am an extension of my father and in other aspects I am yin to his yang. He is bebop and I am influenced by hip-hop. He has an affinity for westerns, while I am a connoisseur of The Matrix. We both love The Godfather (I feel another book emerging, for the trilogy of The Godfather is a great theological work clothed in cinema ripe with biblical ideas).

When I reflect on my faith journey, my pastor and father figures prominently into my narrative. What I have tried to do in this introduction is to lay the groundwork for my faith journey and to share my cultural theology and principles for preaching that are so profoundly influenced by my relationship with my father. The power and purpose behind our praise is deeply rooted in our culture, community, and faith journey as a people.

The creative lens of the black church has colored my spiritual worldview. Through this lens I have witnessed the Western divisions of sacred and secular dissolve under the weight of the blues and gospel motif of the black church experience. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up¹ with the eternal virtues rooted in Christ. The sounds of John Coltrane’s saxophone, James Baldwin’s prose, Zora Neale Hurston’s folk-ways, Fannie Lou Hamer’s grassroots, prophetic political rhetoric, Martin Luther King Jr.’s democratic Christian witness, Howard Thurman’s Southern-inspired spiritual mysticism, the urban-blues–centered postmodern beats of J. Dilla and Mad Lib, and the poetic, honey-dipped voice of Jill Scott are the chords composing the song of my spiritual journey.

My father and mother are children of the South and products of the rich religious heritage of the black church. Dr. Otis Moss Jr., my father, mentor, and pastor, is now pastor emeritus of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, where he served for thirty-three years before retirement in 2008. Growing up in Olivet, I witnessed the Southern patterns of rhythmic speech and prophetic Christian witness drawn from the Old Testament prophets. The integration of prophetic imagination and worship was the hallmark of my father’s ministry. His creative vision created a unique ecumenical community located in the Baptist tradition, but clearly not bound by Baptist parochial restraints. Having parents who were veterans of the civil rights movement created a theological synergy where questions of love and liberation danced around the dinner table and found voice in casual conversation. This unique narrative guided my spiritual formation and is the basis for my theological understanding today.

Christ of the prophetic wing of the black church stands as a savior and liberator rooted in love and committed to healing. This idea was organically developed and employed in the American context by Martin Luther King Jr. His democratic vision, grounded in Christian ethics, is the primary tributary feeding my theological witness. Talk of liberation, revolution, or social justice is nothing but empty rhetoric if the tough question of love is not added to the equation. Reinhold Niebuhr’s dialectical formulation states that love is the demand for, the negation of, and the fulfillment of justice² and we can readily see this in the transcendent perspective Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. As such, love is the only force in the universe capable of forcing the arc of the cosmos to bend toward egalitarian creativity. If love is not in the mix, democratic ideals, liberal ideology, and progressive doctrine are all empty slogans and exercises in futility. There is no liberation without love; faith without love is nothing more than doctrine with possible destructive proclivities, and justice without love is mere legalism. The foundation of my personal theological project is this single yet elusive idea of how to engage and implement a life of love within institutions and communities scarred by the cruel, unloving nihilism of modern, and now postmodern, culture.

The progressive wing of our nation shudders at the idea of engaging a concept that cannot be empirically defined. The conservative community abandons the challenge of love because of the theological implications. An engagement of love theologically could force fundamentalists to question doctrine and realign political alliances. Simultaneously the theme of love has been jettisoned from prophetic doctrine in favor of edicts with little or no flexibility.³ The black church, from my perspective, has bumped up against this idea more frequently because of its unique history. This is not to say the black church claims an exceptionalist history, but its unique position in this country forced it to see America from the underside and engage the love ethic of Christ as a community bruised and scorned by a society claiming democratic ideals.

The love ethic of Jesus and the jazz aesthetic are two components of my theological grounding. This may sound strange, but the cultural motif of jazz and the theological weight of love anchor my theology. If I may briefly explain my cultural theology, I believe it will shed light on my view of the church as a dynamic living organism empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The jazz aesthetic of the black church is one of the theological pillars supporting my personal spiritual journey. This aesthetic sums up a portion of my theological narrative, which combines the Africanized faith of my ancestors with the democratic optimism demonstrated by the folk philosophy of the jazz aesthetic. It is the one true American art form born in the crucible of Southern pain and frontier optimism. The womb of slavery, manifest destiny, and New World exploration created the conditions to impregnate a French colony (New Orleans) with Africanized democratic ideals hidden in the complex musical notation of an artistic form now called jazz.⁴ The music was formed in and from Creole culture.⁵

Africans, French, and Native Americans brought to New Orleans, and later the world, the only truly democratic music to be born in these yet to be United States. Improvisation and African polyrhythmic composition layered with European scales created a new sound and a new way of being in the emerging South. European instruments, such as the piano and bass, were married to the drum and saxophone. Each jazz composition had a strict thematic structure, but every instrument had the right to solo. This was unheard of within the confines of French chamber music, but it brought to light a new democratic idea where each instrument was welcome to share in the composition. The player of each instrument was affirmed and allowed to speak musically from his or her cultural context. Never during a set would the piano oppress the drum or the saxophone tell the bass he or she was three-fifths of an instrument. They all flourished together and brought something new to the composition. European chamber music maintained a strict class hierarchy where only certain instruments were considered worthy of playing before aristocratic audiences; jazz stated radically, All are welcome and every instrument has a gift to be played before the people. This new democratic aesthetic brought forth by jazz was nurtured by the call and response of the black preaching and religious tradition. The congregation was always creating something new before God and the people. This is my theology; a theology informed by the church and the democratic ideals of jazz music.

BIRTH OF THE COOL: THE HISTORIC DESCRIPTION

Like jazz, worship in the African American community has always been dynamic and fluid. Our historical struggles, socioeconomic status, and theological reflection are woven into the fabric of African American religious experience. I want to take a brief look at the development of the middle-class models of worship in the African American community, to understand why such models are not equipped to reach the hip-hop community unless a new paradigm is created.

Scholars Albert Raboteau and Gayraud Wilmore give a complete history of the early development of the black church.⁶ The African American church, according to Herskovits, is a matrix of African rituals, beliefs, and values infused with the unique American experience of slavery and liberation ethic of the gospel.⁷ The church has been and is a sacred space of creative freedom and imagination. The black church historically has been the place where men and women of color could be full human beings away from the oppressive watchful eye of slave masters.

The majority of African American institutions find their genesis in the womb of the church.⁸ Historically black colleges, black insurance companies, the civil rights movement, civic organizations, and labor unions were born within the walls of the church. The black church is critical to our understanding of black cultural productions such as blues, jazz, spirituals, linguistic nuances, and political ideologies of the black community.

This invisible institution⁹ or faith community, developed on plantations near streams and around hidden fields, is the place where people of African descent reflected theologically on their collective experience of pain in America. The earliest independent black churches were Silver Bluff Baptist in Silver Bluff, South Carolina; Africa Baptist in Mecklenburg, Virginia; and First African in Savannah, Georgia. The dates of establishment range from 1773 to 1788. Argument will continue for years to come as to which is the oldest, but what must be noted about these churches is their move from an invisible to a visible institution. The church was prone to institutionalize Southern social forces, which would create acceptance and rejection of various worship styles.

Most scholars agree that, during the 1700s to 1800, many black churches from the Baptist tradition exemplified a worship style that could be connected to their West African roots. African chants, metered music, spirituals, and praise hymns were the norm. Call and response worship services sprinkled with spirit possession called catching the Holy Ghost or getting happy were normative. The era of Reconstruction brought a change in African American worship. As men and women found a degree of mobility in the segregated South, the growing black middle class rejected African influenced modes of worship. The call and response of spirituals, African chants, and ring shouts of the earlier generations were looked down on by the new black middle class. The word African, during this period through the early part of the twentieth century, was dropped from the names of many churches. Churches founded in the 1700s and 1800s were called First Africa or Second Africa, but with the rise of a new middle class, seeking acceptance in the larger society, the word African was separated from the religious vocabulary.¹⁰

With an increasing stratification between rural and urban worshipers that was intensified by the culture of classism, worship changed rapidly in the black church. Churches now defined themselves not only by denomination, but also by class, and in some cases, color. Educated people who were trained from the Eurocentric perspective populated many middle class churches, especially those that were a part of predominantly white denominations. European anthems, hymns, and liturgy were appealing to the congregants. The modes of worship associated with Africa and the fields of the South were rejected for a European paradigm of worship. This is the beginning of what many of us call the traditional church.

These churches looked toward the broader culture to validate their existence. The African American Baptist tradition developed into three distinct trajectories. The first was