Issue 8: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often difficult work. Holding beauty and naming pain and hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." Join us in this new series, "For the Soul." Out of suffering often, comes the most powerful worship. In places of brokenness, we encounter Jesus.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears.

Out of the challenges and obstacles arises contending hope for the vision of a life of thriving and freedom. We have to tell it to ourselves. The story has to be spoken over our own souls, so that we can believe it. Christ the anchor for all our hope — our only hope. 

Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson

Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.