“Steal Away Home”
Romans 8:26-39
“Steal away, Steal away, Steal away to Jesus.
Steal away, steal away home, I ain't got long to stay here.
My Lord, he calls me, he calls me by the thunder.
The trumpet sounds within a my soul.
I ain't got long to stay here.”
I had my eyes opened when I was a research
assistant for one of my professors at Princeton Seminary, Brian Blount.
I was assisting him with a book on the interpretation of the gospel
in different cultural contexts, and I was helping edit a particular
chapter that had to do with the interpretation of the gospel in African
American spirituals that were born out of slavery here in America.1
(I speak not as an expert in this area or as one who has an insider's
understanding of the tradition, but I share this with you because I
learned something important about the gospel.)
When African slaves arrived on American Shores, if they were lucky enough to have survived the brutal Middle Passage, they were taught a new religion, a religion given to them
by their new masters: Christianity.
The slave owners taught their property
[sic] this religion believing that it would help keep them quiet,
passive, submissive. The Bible, after all, counsels the slave to be
the best slave that he or she can be, to obey one's master2.
After all, when the slave Onesimus runs away, the apostle Paul himself
returns him to his master, Philemon.3 This was the way ordained
by God believed the slave owners. Give them this religion, thought the
masters, it is a good thing...for us.
The slaves were taught this religion.
They learned the stories and reflected on the images, words, and themes.
But the reading of the slave owners turned out to be shallow readings
of the text, literalist, fundamentalist kind of readings. In the midst
of their suffering, the enslaved received not
the religion of the slave owner. What they discovered was faith, the
good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ; and this good news began to
transform their reality of suffering. This good news began to mean something
very different than the slave owners intended. Instead of promoting
passive submission, the good news proclaimed to them hope, and planted
the seeds freedom, and not just in heaven after death.
1 Brian Blount, Cultural Interpretation: Reorienting New Testament Criticism, Fortress Press, 1995.
2 e.g. Eph. 6:5, Col 3:22, Titus 2: 9-10
3 but with the subversive exhortation to receive him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved
brother(!)” (Philemon 1:16); cf. Gal 3:28.
As they discovered this faith, and as
they continued to suffer, they sang. They began to sing their theology
in the fields, in their gatherings, and in their homes. They began to
give musical expression both to their desperate experience in this world
and also to the good news of heaven.
What the slave owners didn't know was
that when the slaves were singing about hope and heaven they were not
only singing about life after
death, about the next world; they were also singing, often in
secret codes and embedded meanings, about their present.
They could see the hypocrisy of the
religion of their masters, and understood very differently final judgment.
Knowing that they shared the same religion with their overseers, the
slave sang to his mate, “I got shoes, you got shoes. All God's
children got shoes, When I get to heaven we're going to put on
our shoes an' shout all over God's heaven, Heaven! Heaven!”
Then looking up to the big house where the master lived, the slave would
add, “but everybody talking about Heaven ain't going there.”
The slave sang songs of hope; not only
in the next world, but in this one.
A solid case has been made for the identity
of the author of the spiritual that you heard just moments ago: “Steal
Away.” It is likely written by Nat Turner, the leader of the largest
slave revolt in the United States. Even if he did not write it, he sang
it to signal clandestine slave meetings in preparation for revolt against
the system that kept his people in bondage. “Steal away, Steal
away, Steal away to Jesus. Steal away, steal away home, I ain't got
long to stay here.”
Recall another favorite: “I look'd over Jordan, an' what did I see, comin' for to carry me home,
a band of angels comin' after me,
comin' for to carry me home.”
For the slave, it was not only about heaven. When the slaves sang “I
look'd over Jordan”, they were gazing north over the Ohio River,
and the band of angels was Harriet Tubman or some other conductor on
the Underground Railroad coming to take them away.4 Harriet
Tubman, would cross the river, take the slave by the hand and sing to
the bound, the enslaved “the Gospel train is coming” as she guided
them to freedom. To these slaves, making their way secretly north, the
gospel train had a more immediate destination than heaven after death,
it was the north, just over the Ohio River.
4 Blount, Cultural Interpretation,
p. 68. & Peter Paris, “The Linguistic Inculturation Of The Gospel”
in Making Room at the Table,
Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001, p. 90
The slaves understood something about
the gospel. They perceived something deep, something fundamental about
the good news that their oppressive masters could not. They understood
that their suffering, their struggle, their pain, was not the final
word.
They understood what our passage from
Paul is all about. Our life in Christ is not finally about “hardship,
or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword
(vs.35).” The gospel is about conquering these things through Christ
who loves us, and embracing the life that God has intended for us: free,
whole, loved, and at peace. Even in the midst of their hardship and
peril, the slave knew that this gospel is not to be denied.
What enslaves you this morning?
Is it an illness you cannot shake? Is it a loneliness that you don't think will end? Is it a fading strength or ability to do the things you used to do? A depression that you can't leave behind? A financial situation that seems hopeless, or a wealth that you spend more time acquiring and defending than anything else? What enslaves you? An expectation of yourself that you never seem to reach or a potential that you never seem to fulfill? A culture or religious doctrine that tries to tell you that the person God created you to be is not what God wants you to be? Is it a despair over problems or situations that we face as a world and a belief that they are too complex to understand & too big to solve? Does grief, or death, or fear of it for you or a loved one enslave you?
Perhaps it is good that you decided to come here this morning instead of sleeping in or reading the Sunday paper. If you are enslaved this morning, Paul the Apostle, Harriet
Tubman, and Mavis Staples are here,
and they are singing to remind you that we ain't got long
to stay here.
The conductor is crossing the river
even now to bring us to freedom, and this
conductor will not be denied...either in the here and now or in the
world to come.
One final word. If you are not feeling
particularly bound this morning, or if you have strength and hope to
spare, then perhaps it is good that you decided to attend this morning
instead of sleeping in or taking a hike. Perhaps the apostle Paul, and
Harriet Tubman, and Mavis Staples are here to invite you to sing; for
your strength, and your abundance in the here and now are also not the
final word. Perhaps the conductor who will not be denied is recruiting
you to cross the river in a particular ministry, to take someone by
the hand and guide them to freedom.
Paul knew. Harriet Tubman knew. And
Mavis Staples knows along with countless other believers who have received
a glimpse of God's heaven. They know that this song of freedom is meant
to be shared with all God's children.
To be guided to freedom, or to guide
to freedom, this is gospel. This is life lived fully. This is truth
of God's steadfast, stubborn love, and nothing, we are reminded this
morning, nothing will come between us and God's love.
So let us steal away. Let us steal away
home. Amen.
July 27, 2008
Rev. Paul Heins
First Presbyterian Church
Logan, Utah