LET US WITH THE POET INVOKE SUNDAY THUS

 

V. LET US WITH THE POET INVOKE SUNDAY THUS*

        What has Sunday to say to us, this day on which the appeal

        of Christ strikes home to us with peculiar power?

                Rudolf Bultmann, July 28, 1938, This World and Beyond

Decades before Ellington, too.

And decades before I became conscious,

I was a boy from the country, dry-land farming before oil, winter wheat,

town boy on top of that, before we had to leave.

Ellington, black band leader traveling by night

during the time of Jim Crow, the segregated time

you knew from reading, before you crossed

the Atlantic. You might know it, too--

Come Sunday, from the jazz suite,

Black, Brown and Beige, 1943.

Musical history of Black Americans.

In ‘58 Ellington added text

and the song becomes an American Standard.

God almighty, God of love

Sitting at kitchen table with your sermon.*

You’re working with Matthew 11: 28-30--

Vengan a mi todos ustedes que estan cansados,--

take my yoke—Duke, riding passenger at night

crossing state lines, used to say, Wake me

when we get there. He wrote in the car,

more music than any American composer.

Your sermon from This world and beyond,

offers this petition, If only each day began

with quiet self-recollection in the presence of God.

I transcribe sentences into my notebook,

this book on loan from a university library,

to me of all people, Sunday is the day

for the soul. Here we find those hidden things,

slowing down the struggling empire, His yoke,

not mine. You remind us to give thanks

for this new beginning. This time is how

I know, how I connect Ellington to Bultmann,

all that we never learned when you both

were here. Here’s Duke: He’ll give

peace and comfort, to every troubled mind.

And here’s you. We are truly weary…

Work is not our master. Mi carga es liviana.

The time we live in graces me. So many

carry me in song and sermon. You invoke the poet,

thus: ...all week-day wanderers, burdened.

Come Sunday. Gustav Schuler ends

your sermon, Mahalia ends Duke’s song.

Go in secret. So many listeners.

These are the mountains from another land.

Jim Bodeen

28 January 2025

*24 July 2938, Rudolf Bultmann, The Marburg Sermons

St. Matthew 11: 28-30.