Reclaiming Kumbaya a Sermon by Rev

Reclaiming Kumbaya A sermon by Rev. Fred Small First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist May 31, 2015 I was a child when I first heard the song “Kumbaya.” It might have been when I heard the Weavers at one of their last concerts at Carnegie Hall. It might have been when I heard Joan Baez in her early 20s, her voice achingly pure, perform at Rutgers University while a thunderstorm raged outside. It might have been at any number of gatherings of young people with guitars, swapping songs old and new, that we sometimes called “hootenannies” until a TV show coopted and ruined the word. In the early 1960s, when I was a young boy discovering the world of folk music and the left- leaning politics with which it was intertwined, “Kumbaya” was everywhere: a resonant, poignant, powerful song of community and hope; a shared prayer for peace, courage, and endurance. But as the Sixties surrendered to the Seventies and Eighties and the culture lurched rightward, “Kumbaya” was banished to summer camp. When it finally resurfaced in the zeitgeist, it was no longer a song, because who would be so pathetically naïve as to sing it? “Kumbaya” had become a warning. Don’t be a sap. Don’t compromise. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t fall for reconciliation. Don’t be seduced by community. Stay strong. Stay tough. Stay cynical. Because we’re not exactly gonna hold hands and sing “Kumbaya”! It was a sad fate for a song that began as an affirmation of faith. The first known recording of the song was made in 1926 by a folklorist named Robert Winslow Gordon. Searching for songs in the African-American hamlets of the Georgia seacoast, lugging a hand-cranked cylinder recorder, Gibson came upon a man named Wylie singing a haunting, yearning spiritual in the key of A. “Oh, Lord,” Wylie sang, “Come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here.” In a community beset by the neo-slavery of sharecropping, the humiliation of Jim Crow, and the organized terror of lynching, “Come By Here” was a prayer for deliverance and justice. From the Georgia Sea Islands, “Come By Here” spread through the black church. By the late 1930s, its strains could be heard from the fields of Lubbock, Texas, to the Florida women’s 1 penitentiary. As the Civil Rights Movement gathered force in the 1950s and ’60s, “Come By Here” became one of its anthems. In making the leap to the folk music revival spreading swiftly among young middle-class whites, “Come By Here” became “Kumbaya.” In liner notes to a 1959 album, Pete Seeger wrote that missionaries from the United States had brought “Come By Here” to Angola, where it was retitled with an African word. In fact, no one has ever found an African word “kumbaya” that would make any sense in the song. More likely, scholars suspect, white listeners simply mistook “Come By Here” for “Kumbaya” in the Gullah accent of the Georgia coast. After frequent singing—okay, maybe too frequent singing—in the 1960s, “Kumbaya” was chewed up and spat out by a popular culture way too cool for it. In the 1988 teen film Heathers, Veronica had a dream that Heather Duke had a funeral where Heather Chandler's spirit appeared and declared, “My afterlife is so boring. If I have to sing ‘Kumbaya’ one more time I will spew Burrito chunks.” In the 1993 movie Addams Family Values, to coerce young Wednesday Addams into participating in summer camp activities, campers and staff burst into a disturbing chorus of “Kumbaya.” The camp-owners were later revealed to discriminate on the basis of class, race, and physical appearance. In 2004, the animated sit com South Park featured Randy leading a chorus singing “Kumbaya” while watching a Walmart burn to the ground. Just the word “Kumbaya” had become pure derision, an object of bipartisan scorn. The candidate of hope and change, Barack Obama, insisted that “The politics of hope is not about holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’” Meanwhile, over at the website RightWingStuff.com, you could browse tee shirts and coffee mugs depicting a drill sergeant choking an antiwar demonstrator and shouting, “Kiss My Kumbaya, Hippie!” But before we bury “Kumbaya,” listen to Vincent Harding, the scholar and civil rights activist perhaps best known for drafting Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech denouncing the war in Vietnam, delivered at Riverside Church in New York City precisely one year before Dr. King was assassinated. Vincent Harding died last year at the age of 82. Shortly before his death, he was interviewed by Krista Tippett for her show On Being. He told a story I had never heard before about “Kumbaya” and the deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964. 2 “Whenever somebody jokes about ‘Kumbaya,’” Dr. Harding reflected, my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types to come and help in the process of voter registration and freedom school teaching and taking great risks on behalf of that state and of this nation. I was deeply involved with the orientation that took place . in Oxford, Ohio. It was two weeks of orientation, and the first week was the week in which Schwerner and Goodman and their beloved brother Jimmy were there. They left that first week, and it was during that time that they had left the campus that they were arrested, released, and then murdered. Word came back to us at the orientation that the three of them had not been heard from. And immediately we knew that they were probably dead. Bob Moses, the magnificent leader of the orientation and so much of the work in Mississippi, got up and stopped things and told these hundreds of predominantly white young people who had come to do what they felt was good, necessary citizenship kind of work in Mississippi, he told them about the word we had received. And he also told them that if any of them felt at this point they needed to return home or to their schools we would not think less of them at all, but would be grateful to them for how far they had come. He said let’s take a couple of hours to spend time, whatever you need to do to make this decision. What I found as I moved around the small groups that began to gather to help each other figure out what to do, was that in group after group people were singing “Kumbaya.” “Come by here my Lord, somebody’s missing Lord, come by here. We all need you, Lord, come by here.” I could never laugh at “Kumbaya” moments after that because I saw then that almost no one went home from there. This whole group of people decided that they were going to continue on the path that they had committed themselves to, and a great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together “Kumbaya.” In his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, the late Christian scholar Marcus Borg described three stages of understanding the Bible. The first, precritical naivete, accepts the Biblical narratives without doubt or question. The second, critical thinking, subjects the Biblical narratives to the tests of scholarship and skepticism. The third stage Borg called postcritical naivete: “the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.” To me, postcritical naivete has a far broader meaning and application than just a method of Biblical interpretation. 3 Postcritical naivete challenges me not to be too smart for my own good—too savvy, too jaded, too judgmental, too seen-it-all, too been-there-done-that. For everything I know (or think I know) about the world, for every disappointment, for every disillusionment, let me not lose my idealism, my sense of possibility, my sense of wonder. Let me not be afraid to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” Amen, Aché, and Blessed Be. 4 .

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