As we work our way through the Lenten Season, Holy Week looms. During Holy Week, probably the most sacred week in the Church year, we will sing one of my favorite hymns: Were You There? It has been sung in homes and in churches for decades. It is a Spiritual but, unlike most Spirituals, it does not end on a note of praise. This one ends as a ‘sorrow song’, even with the ‘Resurrection’ verse that is included in The New Century Hymnal. Many hymnals, including the Pilgrim Hymnal, do not contain that verse.
But as beautiful as it is, the hymn may have lost some of its import, especially in these troubling times – at least that is true for me. I often need to ‘name names’ as it were. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ is no longer adequate for me. Substitute ‘Romans’, as in ‘Were you there when the Romans crucified my Lord?’ Or substitute ‘The Military’, or ‘Occupying Empire’, or ‘Corrupt Government’, and you begin to see what I mean. Such substitutions begin to give cruelty a face. The verses may not always make for good poetry, but they make for good theology.
For example, Native Americans might well sing ‘Were you there when the white man took our lands?’ Again, it is concretizing evil. In that spirit, I have written some new verses, in the same vein that I did a couple of years ago, that might help us see the truth of this hymn for those of us living in the United States in 2016.
Were you there when Flint’s children drank the lead?
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when Muslim neighbors were maligned?
Were you there when the West Bank remained occupied?
Were you there when the ‘one percent’ had it all?
Were you there when ‘Black Lives Matter’ was scorned?
Were you there when Syrian refugees were barred?
Were you there when torture was praised yet again?
But someone will say: ‘Aren’t you getting a bit political!’ O yes! What do we think Jesus was doing when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday? He was confronting, non-violently, a corrupt and cruel political system in which occupation, brutality, and discrimination were the order of the day. And to it all he said NO! That action was a political statement. It certainly causes me to ‘tremble, tremble, tremble’, when I think of his courage to actually live out the proclamation of the Realm of God even to the point of execution.
This old hymn asks the question as to our courage in confronting the evils of our day. I will sing it this year with these new verses (what verses might you add?) and with a new commitment in the pursuit of God’s justice and compassion. Will you join me?