Senior Day, Dr. Pierce, and Kanye West

“I was going to write the sermon to end all sermons … I was even going to dust off my Barth and my Calvin … and get you all excited about all the good things you’re going to do when you leave this place,” and then she said, “But then I heard the voice of God …”.

Dr. Yolanda Pierce began her sermon for our Senior Worship Service at PTS this way. I don’t know what everybody else thought she was about to say, but having studied with her this school year, I knew something good was coming.

She started talking about how she was there for the birth of hip hop. Growing up black in Brooklyn, she was there from the beginning, so the sounds of hip hop shaped her coming of age. She remembers when hip hop was the outcry of people in the streets who were tired of the poverty and the violence and the struggle that was daily life. It functioned like those old African American spirituals that took people out of slavery to freedom. But at some point hip hop sold out or lost its center, its soul, because artists began to glorify materialism, murder, and misogyny. Besides, newer artists like Kanye West were mediocre at best. So, she stopped listening.

From my view on the back pew, I could see some people giving their neighbors a raised eyebrow or a “Where is she going with this” kind of look. After all, this was the worship service for “Senior Day”. What does hip hop have to do with the hallowed halls of the ivory-tower, ivy-league seminary? What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? 

Dr. Pierce anticipated these questions, experienced them herself. When Kanye West released “Jesus Walks” in 2004 and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with a crown of thorns in 2006, she sat up and took notice. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”. 

West’s poetry may have continued to fall into mediocrity (”The way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way I need Jesus”?), she said, but his message “Jesus Walks” was reaching people whom the church fails.

To the hustlas, killers, murderers, drug dealers even the strippers
(Jesus walks with them)
To the victims of Welfare for we living in hell here hell yeah
(Jesus walks with tthheemm)

Youth who had never stepped into a church, who didn’t know the first thing about what to wear to a house of worship, let alone what one would do in one, were listening to Kanye West on their IPods, hearing him say 

We at war with society, racism, terrorism, but most of all we at war with ourselves
(Jesus Walks)
God show me the way because the Devil trying to break me down
(Jesus Walks with me).

What a simple message, Dr. Pierce said, for people who feel so lost in such complicated situations. “We at war with ourselves”!

It’s not just other people who try to bring us down. It is ourselves, our lack of self-respect, our lack of self-love. Where does one get this self-love if no one else is showing us love? - she asked. 

Jesus walks with you. What does that mean? God loves you - a young girl growing up in the ghetto of Brooklyn. Someone showed her this love, and that message, “God loves you; Jesus walks with you,” changed her life. 

–

A professor of African American Religion and Literature, Dr. Pierce has discovered this through exploring African American antebellum writers : “for African Americans, accounts of spiritual conversion revealed “personal transformations with far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual’s relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community.” The process of conversion could result in miraculous literacy, “callings” to preach, a renewed resistance to the slave condition, defiance of racist and sexist conventions, and communal uplift.” (From Dr. Pierce’s Hell without Fires).

My hope for the Princeton Theological Seminary community is that Dr. Pierce’s account of her spiritual conversion, as well as the accounts of other brothers and sisters of all walks of life, will yield the continuing transformation of a seminary, a church, and a world in great need of liberation.