A Beloved Community Celebration | September 27, 2026 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey
Jesu, joy of our desiring,
Holy wisdom, love most bright;
Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.
Word of God, our flesh that fashioned,
With the fire of life impassioned,
Striving still to truth unknown,
Soaring, dying round Thy throne.
Through the way where hope is guiding,
Hark, what peaceful music rings;
Where the flock, in Thee confiding,
Drink of joy from deathless springs.
Theirs is beauty's fairest pleasure;
Theirs is wisdom's holiest treasure.
Thou dost ever lead Thine own
In the love of joys unknown.
“Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” is frequently written “Jesu Joy of Our Desiring” in the early 21st century. The tune is still growing—as felt in the early 21st century jazz improvisation in the opening music—from the original simple German words written in 1661 by Martin Janus and commonly sung to an original Robert Schop melody, written in 1642.
Early twentieth century words and a piano arrangement by English poet laureate Robert Bridges and pianist Dame Myra Hess, respectively, speak to modern challenges and realities with a slower more stately tempo than the lively hymn of praise in the original.
Interestingly though, the 20th and 21st century music and lyricism somehow seem to convey a living spirit of what Howard Thurman called “the religion of Jesus” in the first three centuries of the common era—back before it became the official religious dogma for aspiring global empires.
In the Black Church, even just the name Jesus can be a cause for celebration. It’s like the disinherited celebrating the message of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. For half a millennium, these people have either been desecrated and destroyed or lived under a shadow of desecration and destruction (aka discriminatory to the point of lynching), courtesy of aspiring global empires like the one that desecrated and destroyed the body of Jesus.
Of course the very same desecrating and destroying empire celebrated Jesus’ memory, claimed to worship Jesus and required its citizens to worship Jesus also.
This story is rife with contradiction, if there ever was a contradiction. As Thurman states however, “The contradictions of life are not final or ultimate.” So participants in the Black Church come together and defy this contradiction with a beloved community.
In the book, Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground, author Kipton E. Jensen wrote of Josiah Royce, the philosopher who coined the term beloved community,
Royce understood in his own way that participating in a community united by love transforms the individual. This transfiguring relationship, this “mystery of loving membership in a community whose meaning seems divine,” is for Royce the “specific condition” of that particular genuineness or authenticity that constitutes “the graced or beloved community.” Similar to Thurman, Royce thought that religious communities allow us “to carry on, even after serious defeat and loss, and to believe that our experience of finitude will not be the last word.”
The Black Church is also one manifestation of C Eric Lincoln’s “Black Religion”: black religion that is not confined to any dogma or doctrine. Lincoln wrote:
Black religion, then, cuts across denominational, cult, and sect lines to do for black people what other religions have not done: to assume the black man’s [and woman’s] humanity, [their] relevance, [their] responsibility, [their] participation, and [their] right to see [them-selves] as the image of God.
Lincoln also wrote:
In short, black religion is a conscious effort on the part of black people to find spiritual and ethical value in their understanding of history. Their history. This is neither parochialism nor racism. Rather it is the realization that even as God is above history [God] acts in history, and that somewhere in the flux, at some time the individual is confronted with the question of what the acts of God mean…. Out of his [or her] understanding of God, in the context of [her or] his own experience, [a person] gropes for meaning and relevance. Assurance and reconciliation. This is religion. When the context of that groping is conditioned by the peculiar, anomalous context of the black experience in America, it is black religion.
So in my culture, finding the image of the Creator in one self (finding the image of the creator in everyone, black or not) is religion—is finding beloved community. “Jesu Joy of Our Desiring” does touch the image of the creator in me, particularly in the “peaceful music ringing.” For me, it is a no-holds-barred celebration of beloved community: a celebration that is to be found in every religious tradition.
People used to ask me why I chant the Fatihah (the opening chapter of the Islamic Qur’an) in classical Arabic instead of English and I would say, it’s like singing “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” instead of singing a children’s song like “Jesus Loves Me.”
Of course the word “music” is a modern western-ism, as I pointed out two weeks ago. So the Qur’an is not music, but it definitely is a celebration of beloved community, to me anyway. Chanting, singing, dancing, and drumming from other traditions express the same celebration energy—such as this celebration of beloved community from Yoruba land’s Ifá tradition expressed in the diasporic traditions of Cuban Santeria and Brazilian Candomblé.
Black “music” started with the Black Church, which I associated with an Akan Proverb a couple of weeks ago. The Akan Proverb was actually drum speech in a tonal language—not what is commonly considered “music.” But of course we are in a culture now, in which the word music has a specific meaning. All of these are for me, though, celebrations of beloved community.
Jensen writes:
For [Martin Luther] King [, Jr.] and Thurman, certainly, but also for Royce, although each expressed it in his own way, the notion of the beloved community signaled a loyal commitment to unconditional love, social justice, and an acknowledgement of the inviolable dignity of persons. Royce as well as Thurman and King were responding to the voice of their own conscience. Each of these philosophers was willing to make sacrifices in order to serve the needs of “those with their backs against the wall,” as Thurman put it, because they believed, each in their own way, that as King expressed it—“we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” In his earliest extant correspondence, which he wrote to Mordecai Johnson, Thurman wrote: “I feel the needs of my people, I see their distressing condition, and have offered myself upon the altar as a living sacrifice, in order that I might help the ‘skinned and hung down’ as you interpret. God wants me and His precious love urges me to take up the cross and follow Him.” The edges of the beloved community grow, creatively, by means of discovering our unknown brothers and sisters. Near the conclusion of Common Ground, Thurman proclaims:
One day there will stand up in their midst one who will tell of a new sickness among the children who in their delirium cry for their brothers who they have never known and from whom they have been cut off behind the self-imposed barriers of their fathers. An alarm will spread throughout the community that it is being felt and slowly realized that community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them—unknown and undiscovered brothers. Then the wisest among them will say: What we have sought we have found, our own sense of identity. We have established a center out of which at last we can function and relate to other men. We have committed to heart and to nervous system a feeling of belonging and our spirits are no longer isolated and afraid.
… Until the very end, argues [Walter] Fluker, “King maintained the belief that authentic community would come to America through the redemptive struggles of Black Americans and others who dare to follow their glorious example.”
What might following “their glorious example” look like today? After the movement of King and Thurman’s generation ended Black codes, massive incarceration was instituted to replace them. King was shot down and music programs in schools were shut down to keep the next generations from getting as creative as the previous ones.
Black Americans started conscious hiphop, but have to compete with “Gangsta Rap.” Who dares follow such an example? Where are the people who will follow such an example? What are they waiting for?
White Christian nationalism is practically preaching slavery again, splitting hairs along the lines of cultural differences, starting wars, and seemingly bent upon ecological collapse. The aspiring empire, wants you to be loyal to it, instead of beloved community—which was precisely why the Black Church developed in the first place.
In Howard Thurman: Democracy and the Soul of America, Thurman states in a Sunday sermon at Fellowship Church on May 20, 1951 (during the McCarthy era):
Now this morning I want to take the development that loyalty finally rests upon the devotion of the individual: the willing, self-conscious, and deliberate devotion of the individual to a cause which to him is supremely worthful…. And in relation to its supreme worth and significance, the ultimate basis of self-respect for the individual is established and guaranteed. In light of the commitment, the devotion to what is to the individual a supremely worthful cause, that commitment becomes at once the basis for the individual’s ethics; it becomes at once the basis for the individual’s values; it becomes at once the definition of the terms upon which the individual will live his life. It involves him, therefore, at every level of his other causes and at every level of his other commitments. It is an ultimate devotion.
… And of course, we need not be disturbed or our minds disarranged because of the different labels by which this is named. To me the ultimate cause that has the final definitive, searching, penetrating, invasive demand of the human spirit is God. You may say truth; you may say the supreme good. I don’t care. That is not my affair.…
So, maybe what the glorious example looked like the other day is an African-American woman I saw on a city bus, a short while ago. She was conversing with one or two other people about Saturday being the correct day for the sabbath. Never mind that it was a Friday when she was talking and Muslims were going to the masjid, or that her listeners were probably not Jewish.
It was possible to just hear her words, and roll your eyes at one more evangelical wannabe prowling the streets and disturbing people. At first I did, but then I noticed that other people on the bus were smiling and nodding their heads, even though most of the people listening to her probably didn’t observe the Saturday sabbath.
Then I noticed there was an almost musical vibe in her speech. She was in effect celebrating what she had found in her scripture study and her feeling for her inspiration, which was Jesus, and how it affected her life. To me it seemed that she was putting out a good vibe on the bus.
So I started listening to her sound as much as or even more than her words. I found myself appreciating something about the way in which she was saying what she was saying. For lack of a better term, I’d call it her vibe.
There was a Creator’s image/beloved community vibe she was putting out. It was saying something universal. I would have said something similar to her exact words when I was attending a Black Seventh Day Adventist elementary school, decades ago. Since then though, I have said numerous different things from numerous different traditions, but the vibe, the music, the celebration of beloved community was the same.
For example, that vibe is in a piece that I covered two decades ago. I was making five daily Islamic prayers, in the masjid on Fridays, and fasting the month of Ramadan. I was also deeply into musical storytelling, and seriously investigating indigenous traditions of Africa and the Americas.
I expressed a musical version of my beloved community sentiments with a lullaby calypso guitar strum of what I remembered then and still feel now of the Black Church, Roman Catholicism, Al-Islam, Lakota Tradition, and Yoruba Ifá. I sang my own rendition of “Jesu Joy of Our Desiring.” I called it the “Joyous Jesu Jam.”
In Thurman’s words, “Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
So nowadays, I imagine mixing recordings from numerous traditions into massive celebrations that break down barriers between cultures and religions to make giant celebrative, holy, affirming, Black Church songs. I might call them “Beloved Community Celebration Breakdown Boogies.” But that’s another sermon….
Right here and right now, may we individually and collectively know and become the divinely healing wholeness, the sacred and secular oneness of each and all directions, of all space and time throughout a sacred and secular cosmos of peace and blessings—in which we continually seek and grow in knowledge and wisdom of ourselves and of each other. May we wade in the waters of healthy and beloved community ecologies. Amen, Ameen, Ashay, and Let it be.
Comments