May 9, 2021 “We Shall Overcome” – I John 5:1-8

I John 5:1-8
“We Shall Overcome”
May 9, 2021 – Sixth Sunday of Easter

Slaves in fields in the South would sing as they worked, “I’ll be all right someday.” In 1901 Charles Albert Tinney, son of a slave and a free black woman, built on that musical hope and published a hymn entitled “I Will Overcome Someday.” This was the first verse:

This world is one great battlefield,
With forces all arrayed;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.
I’ll overcome some day,
I’ll overcome some day;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.

That hymn eventually transformed into a protest song sung at union strikes as early as 1909, “We will overcome someday.” In the late 1940s in the union work of the Highlander Folk School, with a changed tune and words influenced by Pete Seeger, it became “We shall overcome someday.” That song is now in our Covenant Hymnal, #751.

“We Shall Overcome” was the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it in one of his last sermons before his death. It became part of protest and justice movements around the world. It was sung in Prague during the Velvet Revolution and in Tienanmen Square in China.

The primary biblical source for Tinney’s hymn and the protest song is our text for this week, I John 5:1-8, particularly verses 4 and 5. Both those verses state that it is faith, belief, that leads to victory over the world. In the song “We Shall Overcome,” faith might be understood as simple trust in the coming victory, “Oh, deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome someday.” But in Tinney’s hymn faith was more explicitly Christian,

A thousand snares are set for me,
And mountains in my way;
If Jesus will my leader be,
I’ll overcome some day.
I’ll overcome some day,
I’ll overcome some day;
If Jesus will my leader be,
I’ll overcome some day.

Verse 5 of our text asks, “Who is it that overcomes the world?” and answers, “Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” In the Baptist church in which I grew up, we sang another hymn based on this text, “Faith is the Victory.” The chorus went,

Faith is the victory!
Faith is the victory!
O glorious victory,
That overcomes the world.

Talk of overcoming and victory feels daunting in these days when protest and political conflict seems prone to violence. My usual choice of Bible translation, the NRSV, translates the Greek word for “overcome” or “victory” as “conquer.” Which seems even more unfortunate as we wrestle with ugly European history around the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Yet the text does in fact speak to overcoming, to victory, even to conquest. We just have to be careful to understand what God means for us by that.

Just how this Christian idea of overcoming appears in the Civil Rights movement, particularly in its prevailing non-violent form led by Martin Luther King Jr., is a good clue to the meaning of the biblical text. The victory promised by John in these verses is in no way a violent trampling of others in order to achieve domination. Verses 1 and 2 start out the whole train of thought, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.”

As we have noted a couple of times this spring, much of the burden of John’s first letter is to call the Christian community to love for each other which reflects the love of God for them. Any “overcoming” of the world will clearly not be by force, but by the love which comes to us from God through Jesus Christ.

In the texts we’ve read from I John in these weeks after Easter, we’ve heard John giving his readers that direction, over and over. He mentions it again in verse 2 here saying, “This is how we know we love the children of God.” It was there in John’s Gospel as well this morning, as we heard Jesus say in John 15:17, “This is my command: Love each other.”

Traditionally, John’s church when he wrote this letter, to which he wrote this letter was the church in Ephesus. The Ephesian church was split between rich and poor, between those well off and those not. They didn’t trust each other. They didn’t help each other. They didn’t love each other. Turn to Jesus’ message to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:4 and read, “I have this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.”

There are lots of challenges facing Christians, facing churches in 2021. We worried about whether a church can continue to exist if it’s not meeting in-person. We worry about how to be relevant to younger generations. We worry about what feel like overwhelming changes in public morality. But the challenge to love like God does, like Jesus did, is still, just like it was in Ephesus, the biggest challenge we face.

One of the biggest challenges you and I have in regard to love is to accept that it’s our own responsibility. When love breaks down it is easy to convince ourselves that it is someone else who has failed or that someone else has the responsibility to show love, to forgive and forget and patch things back together. That’s been one of the problems in race relations in our country.

In 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. People around the world, especially Christians I think, were amazed and moved when family of those killed spoke words of love and forgiveness to Roof in a court hearing not long after. Nadine Collier spoke about her 70-year old mother, “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul… If God forgives you, I forgive you.”

Yet even as those words and other expressions of love and forgiveness were reported, some Black people pushed back. Why were their words of forgiveness so celebrated when nothing was done to prevent such acts of hatred and violence in the future? Why was there a general expectation that they would quietly and even lovingly respond to such things? We might add the question, “Where is Christian love from white people that is willing to repent of fostering a society where such hatred grows, where guns are so available to carry it out, and where such forgiveness is even necessary?”

In the history of that song “We Shall Overcome,” you heard the change from Albert Tinney’s hymn, “I’ll overcome someday” to “We shall overcome.” Not all African-Americans were happy about that change, which was mostly introduced by white activists like Pete Seeger. Bernice Johnson-Reagon was the daughter of a preacher and grew up singing “I will overcome.” She told an NPR reporter,

“In the black community, if you want to express the group, you have to say ‘I,’ because if you say ‘we,’ I have no idea who’s gonna be there. Have you ever been in a meeting, people say, ‘We’re gonna bring some food tomorrow to feed the people.’ And you sit there on the bench and say, ‘Hmm. I have no idea.’ It is when I say, ‘I’m gonna bring cake,’ and somebody else says, ‘I’ll bring chicken,’ that you actually know you’re gonna get a dinner. So there are many black traditional collective-expression songs where it’s ‘I,’ because in order for you to get a group, you have to have ‘I’s.”

As our worship team will tell you, I’m big on singing songs that express the “we” and the “us” of being together as the Body of Christ. I’ll even ask them to change “I”s to “we”s sometimes. But here’s a lesson from Black Christians for us about love. Until you and I start saying that specific personal “I” about it instead of some general “we” that just means Christians or Americans in general, there won’t be many changes. Unless, like Nadine Collier who said to a killer, “I forgive you,” you and I are willing to say to people around us, “I love you” and “I will speak differently,” and “I will act differently,” and “I will vote differently,” we’re not going to be able to say “We love you” and truly mean it.

Our text emphasizes personal acts and expressions of love when it turns in verses 6 to 8 to the sacrificial life and death of Jesus. It says, “This is the one who came by water and blood.” That could mean the water and blood which flowed from His side on the Cross or it could be His whole ministry, from His baptism in water to His blood shed on the Cross. In any case, the verse goes on to say it wasn’t water only but also blood, not just a beginning, but a completion in bloody, painful, sacrificial love.

One of the challenging ways you and I are being asked to show love these days is by joining in supporting statements about our country’s history of racism. At our conference annual meeting we received a statement to consider for next year. Part of it asks Native Americans and people of color for forgiveness for a history of racism here in the Pacific Northwest. At our denomination annual meeting next month, delegates are being asked to adopt a resolution repudiating the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the idea begun by Christian people in the 15^th century that European people had a divine right to spread out and colonize the rest of the world and subjugate other people, especially people of other colors.

A very natural reaction to statements like I just mentioned is, “Why should I ask forgiveness for something that happened before I was born? My ancestors weren’t even in the country then,” or “Why should I repudiate an idea people held 600 years ago? I certainly don’t believe that.” “Why should I feel responsible for something I had nothing to do with?” you might ask. Like Bernice Johnson-Reagon, you realize there’s no “we” to those statements unless people like you say “I,” and you’re not sure if you want to.

The short answer to such questions is because those long-ago actions and ideas still greatly affect the way society operates and people are treated today. But even more, when you wonder why you should take responsibility for something you did not do, think about Jesus. Why should He have received a baptism for repentance of sin when He didn’t need it? Why should He have hung on the Cross for sins He didn’t commit? Why should you and I accept responsibility for sins we didn’t do? Because Jesus did.

On Mother’s Day, I think about my mother and the time I hit another kid with a baseball bat. I didn’t mean to. I was 8 or 9 years-old and I was just careless, swinging the thing around without looking who was near. But that poor guy caught it in the head and went down. We walked him home while a massive goose egg rose on his forehead. When I told my mother what happened she took me to their house to check on him. He was all right, but she made me apologize. Then she stood there and said with all her heart she was sorry for what had happened. It wasn’t directly her fault but she took responsibility and apologized to that boy’s parents anyway.

Think about all the messes you made that your mother cleaned up even though they were not her fault. Think how she took responsibility for your mistakes and stood by you, whether you picked the neighbor’s flowers or hit another child at school. She probably apologized for those things even though you did them.

In our Gospel reading today, John 15:12, Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” “As I have loved you,” includes Jesus taking responsibility for, and doing something about, all the sins He didn’t commit. You and I are called to do no less in our love for each other, to be willing to own, apologize, and atone for racial sins committed and begun long before we were born, while also being honest about our own bias and hatred that is part of it all. Because that’s how faith in Jesus will overcome the world with love.

That militant sounding “Faith is the Victory” hymn I sang in my youth is really about overcoming with love rather than with force. The second verse begins,

His banner over us is love
Our sword the Word of God…

The last verse ends,

Then onward from the hills of light,
Our hearts with love aflame,
We’ll vanquish all the hosts of night,
In Jesus’ conqu’ring name.

“We shall overcome someday.” Verse 5 again asks and answers, “Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will want to obey His key commandment, to love one another as He has loved us, to enter the fray of the world with hearts aflame with love like His.

For us to overcome someday, each of us will need to say, “I will overcome someday. I will overcome… not with hatred… not with fear… not with power… but with love. I will overcome with love like the Love I’ve received. I will overcome by the love of Jesus taught to me by the Spirit who has shown me the water and the blood. I take for myself the water and the blood, the baptism of solidarity with my sisters and brothers and the blood of sacrifice on their behalf. I will love like He loved me.” May you and I be able to say that, so that together we can all still say and sing, “We shall overcome someday.”

Amen.