A Change is Gonna Come: A Sermon for Gesimatide

 Intro: A Song for Change

In 1963, tensions were high. Police turned fire hoses and dogs loose on Black youth protesting for civil rights. In Birmingham, the Klan bombed  a Sunday school killing four young girls. In Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his home. Between these punctuating acts of terror, the structural violence of Jim Crow ground on adding indignity after indignity to Black life in America. In October of that year, the celebrated R&B singer, Sam Cooke, found himself on tour in Shreveport, Louisiana. On October 8^th, Cooke called ahead to a Holiday Inn to make reservations for himself and his wife. However, upon arrival later that evening, the desk clerk looked nervously at Cooke and his group and declared that there were, in fact, no vacancies that evening. Cooke was righteously furious and started yelling at the clerk, demanding to see a manager.

His brother Charles pleaded with him to just let it go and leave. His wife exclaimed “They’ll kill you!”

But Sam Cooke had had enough, “They ain’t gonna kill me,” he growled back, “I’m Sam Cooke.”

But despite his celebrity status and indignant insistence that his reservation be honoured, the hotel management was intransigent. They would not serve Black patrons. The Cooke party eventually departed and headed to another hotel, only to be greeted by police who arrested them for disturbing the peace.

To say that these events bothered Mr Cooke would be an understatement. Cooke was beside himself, but he worried that if he expressed his frustration with the injustice of segregation, it would negatively impact his popular appeal as an artist. But then he heard the Bob Dylan tune, “Blowin’ in the wind” and he thought this was such a powerful civil rights tune it ought to have been written by a Black artist. And so, finally, in January of 1964, Sam Cooke headed into the studio to record “A Change is Gonna come”:

“It’s been a long / A long time comin’,” Sam croons, “but I know / A change gon’ come/ oh, yes, it will…”

Gesimatide

A change is gonna come. This Sunday is the midpoint in a micro-liturgical season that’s often forgotten today in the Church. It’s the season of Gesimatide. Specifically, today’s Sunday is called Sexagesima which in the esoteric math of Church Kalendar makers roughly marks 60 days from Easter Sunday. (Don’t count, it’s not actually true, but if you want to get into that, find me after the service). Gesimatide is a series of three Sundays squeezed between the end of Epiphany and the start of Lent that acts as a hinge season between the end of the Christmas season cycle and the start of the cycle of Easter. Gesimatide is a transition time characterized by the message, “A change is coming.” For while we still hold onto the joy and glow of Epiphany and Candlemas, already we are looking forward to the long wandering of Lent, the desolation of Good Friday, and the hope of Easter.

God’s Secret Wisdom

It’s been a long, a long time comin’, but I know a change gon’ come. O yes it will.

Cooke was raised the son of a Baptist preacher in Mississippi. Sitting under the preaching of his father the Rev’d Charles Cook, Sam sang in the choir and formed his first singing group with his siblings at just 6 years of age. From there his music career blossomed, becoming the lead singer in a number of gospel and spiritual groups beginning thirties right through to 1957 when he made the cross-over to pop-music success. Yet even in the short period from 1957-1964 that Cooke dominated the charts as a pop icon, he never fully left behind the gospel and spiritual roots that formed him as a musician and that gospel sensibility peaks through the cracks of his music, even as a creeping agnosticism had taken hold amidst the travails of life as a Black man in America.

In the second verse of “A Change is Gonna come” Cooke sings, “It’s been too hard livin’ / but I’m afraid to die / ‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there / beyond the sky.” In the early 1960s, the situation for Black folk living in the United States was about as bad as it could get, “it’s been too hard livin’.” And in the face of that kind of struggle, what good is some promise from a long-ago childhood about salvation in the sky. Racism is a right-now struggle. White supremacy and segregation are an everyday affront to human dignity. A change needs comin’!

Yet while Cooke, in his iconic tune, rejects the possibility of a heavenly rescue from the struggle of Black existence, he nevertheless expresses something like a God-tinged hope in the possibility of real solidarity breaking out amongst “brothers” even in the face of a repeated hostile refusal of such solidarity by those that Sam offers the mantle of brotherhood to:

Then I go to my brother / And I say, "Brother, help me please" / But he winds up / Knockin' me / Back down on my knees / Lor', there been times that I thought / I couldn't last for long / But now, I think I'm able to / Carry on.”

I wonder if Cooke’s ability to find the ability to carry on in the face of indignity came to him because he remembered something of his father’s preaching back in the little Baptist church in Mississippi. For the preaching ministry of the Black Church does not detach the spiritual promises of Christian faith from the realities of this world’s struggles. We would all do well to hearken to this tradition, for in our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today we do not get the promise of heaven or salvation, or really any words of wisdom or comfort at all. “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ” Paul writes, “and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.”

There is no power here. There is no glory, or even much hope. All that’s on offer is a crucified God and a confidence that this God we see crucified in Jesus Christ is the content of the secret and hidden decree of God from before the foundations of the world.

The Black liberation theologian, James Cone, has pointed out that it is surpassingly odd that White Christians have not seen the striking parallel between the central image of our faith – the crucified God – and the central image of Black existence in America – the lynching tree. When pressed as to why Cone continues on with the religion of genocidal enslavers he insists, it’s because in the stories of the Old and New Testament, Black folks discovered that this was their story much more so than it was their enslavers! The God that Jim Crow and his lackies in MAGA and the Klan confess as they lay hands on and execute brown and black flesh in the streets of America is not the God that Paul proclaimed to the Church at Corinth.

Paul’s God is the God who determined from before the foundations of the world to be the God who is for us in Jesus Christ and to take upon his flesh every torment and struggle known to that human flesh.

Paul’s God is Jesus Christ, the crucified one, the lynched one, the deported one.

Paul’s God is found in fear and trembling and weakness and is ALWAYS with the brother who gets knocked down.

Paul’s God is found in Jesus of Nazareth. And it is this Jesus and NO OTHER that brings the fulfillment of God purpose and will and Law that gives even somewhat agnostic saints like Sam Cooke the confidence to sing, “It’s been a long/ A long time comin, but I know / A change is gon’ come / Oh yes it will!”

Conclusion: Cooke’s Death and Anthem

After recording “A Change is Gonna Come”, Cooke only performed the song live a couple of times before deciding to remove it from his set-list. It’s said that he stopped singing it after a friend told him it “sounded deathly”, and worried as he was about his success as a Black pop-star in Jim Crow’s America, the ever business-savvy Cooke was reticent to play it too often for White audiences. Tragically, Cooke’s friend’s assessment of the song proved to be prophetic as just a few short months later, Cooke once again found himself in an altercation over a hotel room, but this time was gunned down and murdered. Not even being Sam Cooke could save him this time.

Just two weeks after his death, a slightly edited version of “A Change is Gonna Come” was released as a single for radio play and the Civil Rights movement almost immediately seized upon it as an anthem. R&B Icons like Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin recorded covers and the song has come down to us as one of the key protest songs of one of the most fractious periods in American history.

Yet even as it was a product of its time, “A Change is Gonna Come” continues to resonate amidst protest and resistance movements around the world because in it, we hear something of that secret and hidden wisdom of God. Salvation does not come from the strong or the rich or the powerful, but in the weak, in the hidden, and most especially, in the crucified.

It is Gesimatide. A change is coming. The voices, of Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, Dr King, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all the other martyrs will not forever be silenced. For Christ came crucified, but he also came to fulfill the eternal purposes and law of God, AND THIS HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED.

It’s been a long, a long time comin’ but I know a change is gonna come. Oh yes, it will.