You are looking at someone who has been spiritually formed through suffering.

I know how to suffer, and I know how to suffer well. Our brother David Swanson just finished talking about white supremacy, disruption, and the church. I’ve existed in this Black body in the United States of America my whole life. Specifically, I was born a Black girl and was raised in the small town of Orangeburg, SC. The existence of white supremacy has not been a disruption in my life, it has always been a strong, dark spiritual undercurrent that is working against the liberation, love, and life that God desires for people who look like me. That has been the source of many of my laments. Yet, that is not the focus or source of my spiritual formation or faith journey. In the same way that we study David’s life to understand what informs his praise, his shout, and the writing of the psalms, I think you need to understand more about me to fully receive what God sent me to share with you all this evening.

I’ve been a part of this tribe since the early years of its inception, and several people here may know me for the different things that I have done — being an entrepreneur, ministry and nonprofit leader, author, podcaster, etc. I joined this community because I understood that we were seeking a third way for the North American church. My thought was that we were seeking to draw together people of the book and orthodoxy with people who were fighting for justice. However, when I physically entered the space of worship and conferences, I was often met with intellect and theory from people who perhaps loved God with their minds. And some who loved God with their souls, but fewer bore evidence in public that they loved God with their bodies.

The existence of white supremacy has not been a disruption in my life, it has always been a strong, dark spiritual undercurrent that is working against the liberation, love, and life that God desires for people who look like me. Share on X

A Proud Child of the Black Church

I feel compelled to introduce to some and reintroduce to others, the soon to be Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, a child and product of the Black church. Long before I entered any evangelical seminaries, wrote a single book, knew what a multi-ethnic church was, or preached any sermon to a predominately white audience, my spiritual formation included being a child usher at St. Stephens United Methodist Church in Orangeburg, SC. This is the church where my maternal grandmother was baptized as a child and where she became the “mother of the church” until she died and was buried there last summer at the age of 95 years old. My identity as a child of God was never in question in that space. I was loved and affirmed by several of generations of Black people in that church. Love is important for spiritual formation.   

Service is also important for spiritual formation. Being a child usher meant that I had a uniform. My sister and I went to church with our buttoned-down white collard shirts, navy blue skirts that covered our knees, white socks with the lace frill around them or white tights if it was cold outside. We wore black pat and leather shoes with the strap, and we had a gold name tag with our names on it and a blue ribbon that hung from it that read “usher” because our work of service advanced the kingdom of God. And sometime, depending on what our service was for the day, we covered our tiny hands with white gloves so we could carry the Bible down the aisle during the procession, because just like God’s arch, God’s Word is holy, and we wore our gloves when lighting a candle because that too was a sacred act. Service informs our faith.

When my mother got married to the father who raised me, we left our family’s home church to join his family’s home church, and my sister and I continued to sing in the children’s choir. I didn’t know much Word then, but in that space, praise informed my faith. One of the things that I looked forward to in this church was the praise and celebration of the annual calendar teas that my mother and paternal grandmother won several years in a row. During these celebrations, several families in the church would decorate their tables, pull out their family recipes, and bring their china and best dishes to host the women and display the elaborate generosity and hospitality of God. Hospitality informed my faith.

When my parents moved to Columbia, SC during my high years, they joined a traditional Black Baptist church. In that church the deacons and deaconess sat in the front row and often began worship, not with songs of praise but rather with moans, and hand claps, and the stopping of their feet on those wood panel floors. In that church, I was baptized by immersion in public and I was given a certificate of baptism as evidence that I had made a pubic profession of my faith, and I was given my first Bible where I wrote my name and began to read. It was a King James Bible, the first Bible and the first translation that I marked up and read cover to cover, and that has forever changed my life because making public professions and receiving God’s Word in a language that you can understand is critical to inform someone’s faith.

When I went off to college (the first stop being Newport, Rhode Island), I told God that if he would keep me when my mother was not there to love and nurture and when my father was not their to guide and protect, then I would serve him with my life. You are looking at someone who have been kept by God, and in that space, I found me a group of Black students who sung and studied the Word of God together weekly. They taught me how to fast and pray because practicing spiritual disciplines informed my faith. And I didn’t have a car, so they took me to church and for the next five years of my college experience, I attended Black Pentecostal services. During my year at the naval base in Rhode Island, I attended weekly Bible study with a student who would proclaim boldly in public that God was going to heal his eyes, and then he would go to the altar on Sunday mornings to pray and leave his glasses. Every week someone would pick up his glasses and return then, and every Sunday, he would return them to God at the altar. I was watching someone pray in faith with expectancy and that informed my faith. I was present when sometimes someone would stand up to speak in tongues, when another would stand up to interpret, and then a holy hush would fall across the sanctuary. Having a sensitivity to the work and move of the Holy Spirit and a reverse for God informs our faith.   

By the time I entered my second year as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, I was being discipled and taught the Word of God by a white, reformed, presbyterian woman. Studying the Word informs our faith. While I was studying, I was going to gospel choir rehearsal and performances, and I was going to Black Pentecostal and Apostolic churches and I was shouting as sometimes people ran around the church.

What I learned in the Black church was a discipleship of worship practices that included the whole person, a whole body dedication and devotion to the Lord. We need a humility to learn from those in different racial, ethnic, or immigrant communities, our brothers and sisters from a different social or economic class, perhaps a part of the global church, who are not afraid to offer up to God an undignified praise: Those who worship God with boldness for who God is and have been spiritually shaped through lament and suffering, yet persist in their hope and joy.We need the testimony and witness of those who show up like the psalm writers who sing, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:5, 11; Psalm 43:5). Between Psalms 42-43, this refrain is repeated three times.

What I learned in the Black church was a discipleship of worship practices that included the whole person, a whole body dedication and devotion to the Lord. (1/3) Share on X

We need a humility to learn from those in different racial, ethnic, or immigrant communities, our brothers and sisters from a different social or economic class, who are not afraid to offer up to God an undignified praise. (2/3) Share on X

An undignified praise: Those who worship God with boldness for who God is and have been spiritually shaped through lament and suffering, yet persist in their hope and joy. (3/3) Share on X

Offering God a ‘Yet’ Praise

How many of you know how to offer God a “yet” praise?

When your friends or family turned their backs on you and God said, ‘I’m not leaving…’

…I will yet praise God.

When enemy came up against you in one way and fled in seven because God proved himself as your banner and your shield…

…I will yet praise God.

When people have talked about you and scandalized your name for fighting for justice but God affirmed that he is the God of justice and righteousness…

…I will yet praise God.

When they tried to ruin your reputation, question your theology, and called you everything short of a heretic for calling out white supremacy and patriarchy in the church, and God reminded you that those are the same types of rebellious people who murdered the prophets and the same types of religious puppets who thirsted for power and got in bed with politicians to crucify our Lord…

…I will yet praise God.

When you cried out to God in your desperation, your brokenness, your humility, in your isolation, in your shame, or your loneliness (the stuff that you don’t tell anybody about), and God said, I am with you in the desert…

…I will go before you because you don’t know which way to good…

…and God said you are not alone in this fight for I have reserved 7,000 prophets for myself who refuse to worship idols…

…and the God of all provision said I just wanted to know if you were willing to risk it all, take your hands off the boy, look over there son, there is a ram in the bush…

…and God said open the spiritual eyes of the next generation so they can see that when it looks like the enemy is winning in the physical, there are significantly more than those in the spiritual realm warring on our behalf than those who have followed the wicked way and followed the enemy of our souls, and the dreadful spirit of the antichrist…

…and God, the Son said, ‘All authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to me; therefore, you persist in making disciples wherever you go…’ (Matthew 28:18-20)

…that is the God who is worthy of our praise, and I’m talking offering that God a “yet” praise.

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When I began preparing for this sermon at the beginning of the year, I read an article in the New York Times by health psychologist, Dr. Kelly McGonigal, and author of the book, The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage. In the article, she offers six joy moves and it was accompanied by a video where a woman in yoga pants modeled the exercise for the reader: reach, sway, bounce, shake, jump for joy, and one she named (actually taking credit for this), “celebrate,” the article says “it looks like tossing confetti in the air. I got to the end of the article and the video, I said to myself, “That ain’t but a good shout!”

I think it important for all of us to reflect on our spiritual journey and the formation of our faith. I only shared with you the early parts of the formation of my faith, which began and continues to become more ecumenical. When we think about disruption, I think we need to consider in this place the ways that some of us have been discipled into thinking that the right and reverent way (singular) of worship is quiet, contemplative, still, emotionless, and disembodied. But in those communities that have consistently experienced violent attacks on our physical bodies, we need an embodied faith and worship experience.

This psychologist wrote that she has become fascinated by the science of emotion, and reports that the research is clear that even a small dose of a “joy exercise” can improve your mood and has a “feel-better effect.” Able bodied people of any age can participate, and your moves can be as big or small, fast or slow as you like. Even children can participate so I am inviting you to come back to Jesus — not with your title, your intellect, your degrees, or your ministry brand — I am inviting you to come back to Jesus as a little child with joy and glee for even science says that the joy workout makes us happy. She wrote in the article that reaching our hands up and swaying from side to side, is like what we do at music concerts (and I would add sporting events), so we know how to worship. We just don’t engage our whole bodies when we do it in this place because like David’s wife, some are more concerned about how ridiculous they would look and what other people will say about them. Let me tell you something, if you are ashamed to offer God an undignified praise because you fear people in here, then you will never be able to stand for holiness and righteousness, to speak truth to power out there.      

As for the slave girls watching, David said, I’m not thinking about them. He said, “I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes” (2 Samuel 6:12-22). David was not worshipping God because of a singular event, but rather because he had asked God and tested God, and God had proven himself faithful throughout David’s life. A good shout requires us to have the right perspective and to take inventory of our lives.

When we think about disruption, we need to consider the ways that some of us have been discipled into thinking that the right and reverent way (singular) of worship is quiet, contemplative, still, emotionless, and disembodied. (1/2) Share on X

In communities that have consistently experienced violent attacks on our physical bodies, we need an embodied faith and worship experience. (2/2) Share on X

When I started shouting in my twenties as a college student, we would sometimes sing a song on the Naval Academy Gospel Choir entitled, “For Every Mountain.” The choir lyrics are “For every mountain, you brought me over for every trail you’ve seen my through for every blessing, hallelujah, for this I give you praise.” Those lyrics would cause me to remember how God was faithful to keep me through my many failures and exams that I didn’t know I would past, and a war that I didn’t know that we would enter, and loses that I didn’t know I would experience. It started with my maternal grandfather during my senior year of high school year, then my aunt during my freshmen year of college, and then my dear mother during my sophomore year of college, and the deaths just kept on coming year after year for sixteen years with no relief. And I shouted all the way through college and through my twenties and into my thirties where I experienced the difficulties of marriage, the loss of careers, the loss of income, the loss of a home, and the loss of community. You are not looking at someone who is offering up platitudes to you. I thank God that I don’t look like what I’ve been through.

You are looking at someone who knows how to cry out to God in the wilderness, who for the past two years has pastored and shepherded Women of Color through their laments as we survived a global pandemic;

and lost mothers, siblings, and grandparents;

as Black people lamented the senseless murders of George Floyd, Brittana Taylor, and Ahmaud Albery;

and as our Asian American and Pacific Islanders community watched an uptick of violence against their community and their elders,

and as indigenous women were going missing and the bones of their children were being found at grounds where boarding schools used to be,

and where our Latino and Latina and Hispanic communities saw their children being caged at the southern border,

and as our Haitian sisters watched their people be lassoed like an animals in an old Western movie.

And in spite of all that, I’m standing before you because God has been faithful to keep me and those that I love.   

Despite my suffering and lamentations, I am not a foolish woman. I will not respond like David’s wife who chastised him for celebrating his God or his undignified behavior. I will not respond like Job’s wife, who told him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). Naw, I’m gonna respond like the enslaved girls and continually hold the undignified shout in high honor because I read the whole book and because I continue to survey my life, and I can say:

For every lament that cries for our children who are being murdered in schools…

…There is a God who says that before I put you in your mother’s womb, I called you,

…and a Jesus who says “Suffer not the little children to come unto me for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

For every lament “If you had been here…”

…There is a word from God that says, “Loose that man and let him God.”

For every lament for death sentences we bring upon ourselves…

…There is one who declares that while we were yet sinners Christ died for the ungodly.

For every lament of “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,”

…There is a word from God that says, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

I just stopped by here to tell you tonight that in spite of our situation, regardless of what it looks like:

God is still holy,

God is still on the throne,

God’s kingdom is still advancing on earth as it is in heaven,

God is still faithful,

we still win!

And that’s why we offer our best undignified praise to God, because the God we serve is worthy of it!

Shout unto the Lord with a voice of triumph!

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If you are ashamed to offer God an undignified praise because you fear people in here, then you will never be able to stand for holiness and righteousness, to speak truth to power out there. Share on X

*Editorial Note: The plenary keynote lecture above, entitled “Lament & Joy: Formation of Our Faith,” was given by Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson. Reflecting on her personal faith journey, this present cultural moment, and the meta-theme of Awakenings 2023, Natasha engaged the practice of lament and joy as a crucible of spiritual formation, considering how we engage our whole persons and whole bodies in dedication and devotion to the Lord. ~CK

• Purchase the “Lament & Joy: Formation of Our Faith” video plenary here.
• The full Awakenings 2023 Gathering bundle is available here.