"It's The Spirit of the Lord" | Nathan LeRud | May 19, 2024

It was a Pentecostal moment in 1962 when the Sky Pilot Singers of Los Angeles gathered one Friday night before going upstairs into the church in which they were going to give a concert that evening.

The Sky Pilot Choir was the first mixed race gospel choir, the first integrated gospel choir, in the city of Los Angeles. They were founded I think in the late 40s or early 50s. They sang all kinds of gospel music: they sang black gospel, they sang white Southern gospel, they sang slave songs, they sang revival hymns– you name it. All music can be gospel music if it brings people hope.

So every time, before they would perform a concert or lead a church service, every time the Sky Pilot Choir would go on, they would gather first, probably to rehearse a little bit like this choir does, and then they would pray. Their leader was a formidable woman her name was Doris Akers. She stood about 5' 2" and she would raise her hands and she would command. She would say, "Pray, children, pray!" and they would start to pray.

They were shouting, they were murmuring, their eyes were closed, their eyes were open, they were stomping their feet, they were lifting their hands in praise– without a doubt they knew that they had been revived when they left that place. And then went in to sing.

Doris Akers was known to say, "I believe that prayer is more important in a choir than great voices." And the Sky Pilot Choir had some pretty incredible voices (so does that choir).

On this particular Friday night, so the story goes, Doris Akers, though, didn't think that the Sky Pilot Choir was sufficiently prayed up to go and lead worship. She said, "You are not ready to go in," and she said, "You're going to have to pray again." So they did.

And as the story goes, something in that room shifted. We read about it, a version of this, in the Book of Acts just now, while we experienced it in the room. I don't know if heard the sound of a rushing wind, I don't know if there were little divided tongues as a flame above their heads, but according to the people who were there that night, as they prayed, the spirit moved, and then Doris Akers began to worry, because she wasn't sure that she could stop it.

She said later, "I had to send word upstairs to the pastor and let him know what was happening." He was waiting in the auditorium with the congregation waiting to start the service. And finally she said, I'm guessing this is like 15 minutes past time, she says to the choir, "We have to go. I mean, I hate to leave this room, I know you hate to leave, but we do have to get upstairs and lead this service. And there is such a sweet, sweet spirit in this place."

That's where that song comes, from that phrase struck them, struck her: "There's such a sweet, sweet spirit in this place." And Doris Akers wrote a song about that experience. We're going to sing her song in just a little bit, when we get ready to stage these baptisms.

When I saw you know this– some of you will probably know this song right? "There's a sweet, sweet spirit in this place, and I know that it's the spirit of the Lord." When I saw that in the bulletin a couple weeks ago, I thought "oh you've got to be kidding me... like really? 'Sweet sweet spirit?'"

Because I think of sweet sweet... I mean I kind of grew up with this one right? It's kind of a– it's a little bit of a Sunday school anthem. I mean, Methodists do this when they pass the piece right? It's– I experienced this– no shade to the Methodists. I mean I love Methodists, but it always feels a little cloying, a little happy-clappy, a little "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam." Kind of, you know, like a Sunday school song.

And then I got to tell you, like, this week I saw a video on YouTube of Doris Akers, the woman who wrote the song, I saw her– I think she's in like she's like 85 years old, she's leading this thing from the piano. She starts real slow and bluesy, "There's a sweet sweet spirit in this place, and I know that it's the spirit of the Lord."

And I felt like I had heard the song for the first time.

She was born to an interracial couple in Missouri in 1926, a time and place when her parents marriage was illegal in that state, and pretty dangerous. Doris Akers learned to play the piano by ear by the age of six. When she was 12 years old– 12 years old– she founded a five-piece jazz ensemble and they toured the country. They were Dot and the Swingers, and they covered the music of Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington.

A couple years later, she teamed up with her friend Mahalia Jackson, and they wrote, "Lord, Don't Move the Mountain." That record sold a million copies. So she moved to LA. She became known as Miss Gospel. Ina Andrews and Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley covered her songs. You know her songs even if you don't know her name. "Sweet Sweet Spirit" is the one that most people know.

Elvis made great hay with "Lead Me, Guide Me Along the Way." You know that [sings] "Lead me, guide me–" I'm not, I'm not doing Elvis impression. I'm not doing an Elvis impression.

But "Lead Me, Guide Me Along the Way," right, that's– no no no– that's Doris Akers.

In 1992, the Smithsonian Institute named her the foremost black gospel songwriter in the United States. She died a couple years after that. She was never quite– she was never quite white enough to pass in the highly-racialized white Southern gospel establishment. She was held in suspicion by many Black gospel artists because of the lightness of her skin and because she led a mixed race choir. Only at the end of her life did this woman who didn't ever really fit in finally win the respect and accolades that had eluded her for most of her career in the music industry. She wrote more than 500 songs over the course of her life.

Doris Akers was a force. When she told you to pray, you prayed. I mean that is an overwhelming experience. Some of you know what this feels like, when you're gathered in a room full of friends, maybe a room full of strangers, when people are devoting themselves to prayer and something shifts. There's an electricity, there's a a charge, you feel that something is different.

This is what Moses experiences on Mount Sinai when that bird– when that bush starts to burn. Elijah and Elisha know what this feels like. Isaiah famously– we're going to hear this reading next week in church: "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on the throne, and the train of his robe filled the temple." That's what happened in that upper room on the first Feast of Pentecost, according to tradition.

That upper room actually, according to tradition, is the same room where Jesus shared his last meal with his disciples. You can visit this room in Jerusalem today– it's called the Cenacle. It's outside the city walls.

Some of you have been there. What you visit today when you go to the the original place of Pentecost, the original place of the Last Supper– it's basically this medieval abbey church that was built I think like 12th century over the site of an earlier Jewish synagogue.

But the tradition that associates this site with the Last Supper and with the Feast of Pentecost is an ancient tradition. So this is the room right that they're gathered in when this thing starts to happen. It's the room, it's their altar right, it's the room where they had their last meal together, the room where they last experienced him in the flesh, the room where he broke bread and gave wine and prayed over it and gave it to them, the room where they prayed with him, where they sang with him, the last place they were together before he was ripped from them, taken by soldiers, tortured and executed and laid to rest in a garden tomb.

And they been meeting in this upper room ever since some of them are having very weird experiences with his body. So they elect Matthias to take Judas's place. They're devoting themselves– the writer of the book of Acts says, "They're devoting themselves to prayer with a shared intensity of feeling."

I love that phrase. That's how the writer describes them. The disciples are there together with the women, Acts says, and with Mary Jesus's mother and with his brothers– that's a lacuna for another time. Jesus's brothers, who are they? Well that's we're not talking about the brothers today, but they're all there right? It's about 120 people, according to the book of Acts. It's a big room. If you've been to the Cenacle, you know this is a big space.

And something happens in that room. We got an echo of it, I think, just a minute ago when unexpected things started happening like that– choir starts to sing and people start to stand up and do readings in different languages, the choir–

The chord that you heard back there that the choir was singing, that's called the Petruschka chord. It's from the Stravinsky ballet by the same name. It's this dissonant, spooky, mysterious, chaotic chord. For the music theorists out there, it's a C major chord in the base and an F sharp major chord on top. Those are– that's it, that's the Petruschka chord. And that dissonance that you hear is a tritone. Those are two major chords separated by a tritone. That is an interval that's sometimes called "the devil's interval." Basically composers in the Western tradition didn't use it for like medieval and Renaissance, only kind of in the Romantic era did composers start to rediscover like how amazing an experience it is when that dissonant chord sounds in a space. It's a little bit eerie, it's a little bit terrifying, it is galvanizing.

And that's what happened on the first Pentecost 2,000 years ago. The way that the book of Acts describes, it– this thing is bedlam. And the people out on the street notice what's going on, and they laugh at them. "They are filled with new wine," that's what they say. That's the insult that is hurled at these people by the bystanders. These people aren't praying, they're just drunk. It's actually one word, it's actually some– sometimes it gets translated "sweet new wine," but it's just one word in Greek: it's "gleûkos." Some translations will render it "sweet new wine," and it's actually not properly wine at all, at least not wine as we understand it today. Gleûkos, which I think you can still get if you go to like Greece and parts of the Mediterranean, gleûkos is the um, it's like the frothy fruity beverage that is produced at the very beginning of the wine harvest, right. It's the fresh juice of pressed grapes just as they start to to ferment, so it's it's really sweet because the sugars in the grapes haven't yet begun to break down entirely into alcohol. So the Romans called it mustum, in Greek it's gleûkos, that's the word that these bystanders are hurling at the people. They're full of gleûkos, that's what's going on– sugar right? That's where we get our word from. It– it was this I mean, mildly intoxicating, it is fermented, beverage, but it's not legally in the– in the ancient world, gleûkos was not legally wine, because gleûkos was a beverage that everybody in society could drink. In ancient societies, women, children, and slaves were not permitted to drink wine– only men could drink wine. But everybody could drink gleûkos.It was not technically wine, it's the fruit of the harvest, it belongs to everybody. It can get you a little tipsy, right, but probably not like falling-down drunk. Gleûkos was noted for its sweetness.

Doris Akers was picking up on something when she described the spirit of Pentecost as a "sweet sweet spirit."

One way that we could kind of riff on that is she's describing– gleûkos right– it's a sweet wine that they're drinking. It's a sweet wine that's meant for everybody.

A sweet wine meant for everybody, does that sound familiar? I mean we use sherry– it's cream sherry. I got to tell you– I mean this is kind of state secrets a little bit, don't tell anybody: it's the cheapest cream sherry you can find at Fred Meyer. It's Sheffield, it's a big magnum bottle of Sheffield. I've had to like run over and buy it a couple times when we've run out. I know right where to find it, on the bottom shelf at Fred Meyer. It's also a sweet wine right? It's– it's I mean cooking sherry, kind of, right. It's a fortified wine. To get sherry, you add a little bit of neutral spirit during the fermentation process. So like gleûkos, sherry is a wine where you can taste the grapes' natural sugars. It's sweet because those natural sugars are being preserved. And culturally, sherry and port and some of these other fortified wines, they were kind of considered, I mean, maybe not like wines for everybody, but like your grandmother drank them, right? They were ladies' wines, I assume because they were used for cooking. So it's like, you know, you add a little bit to the sherry sauce and then you tipple a little bit, you know? And a lady can do that because it's just sherry. We have this before Evensong, we pray on sherry right? It's a– it's a lady's drink. It's sweet, it belongs to everybody. It's a sweet, sweet spirit.

And that starts to name what we're talking about when we sing this gospel tune, Doris Akers' gospel tune "There's a sweet sweet spirit in this place, and I know that it's the spirit of the Lord." We're not going to get drunk on it, right, not literally as Peter says to the scoffers in Acts. You guys, it's 10:00 in the morning, these are not drunk as you suppose. The wine that you drink at at this rail at Communion, it will not intoxicate you, although it can give you a kind of a spiritual high that will send you coming back for more week by week, year by year, try as you might to quit this stuff, this spirit of God thing, this sweet sweet spirit thing, this electricity, this charge that we encounter in this room or at this rail. I think I notice it when I pass somebody at the rail and I hand them the bread and I see the tears begin to fall and I realize I am present to a profoundly holy moment for this person. I mean I don't have to describe this to you, you guys know what I'm talking about, right? I don't think it actually has anything to do with the wine, or maybe has everything to do with the wine. We say that's how Jesus comes to us at this rail. And I have seen you experience this. Not every day– there are whole years that go by where I come up to this rail, I get my bread, I get my wine, and I go back and sit down, right, nothing magic happens, it's just what we do. And then there's that day where something shifts. I see this happen. I see you having these experiences. You bring all of who you are to this altar rail, you bring your sadness and your grief and your joys and your longings, and you stand or you kneel, sometimes next to the same person you've been receiving communion next to for 50, 60, 70 years. Sometimes you're sitting next to an entire– you're standing or kneeling next to a stranger whom you've never seen before and you will never see again. And we go down that rail, we hand you a little bit of bread, we give you a little sip of wine, I've been doing that now for like 15 years, and I have seen changes happen in your lives. I've witnessed some of you have transformative experiences of God at this rail. There's a sweet sweet spirit in this place. I am here to testify: I've seen it, I know that it's the spirit of the Lord. There are sweet expressions on some of your faces, and I know that those are the spirit of the Lord. That's the line I don't love: "There are sweet expressions on each face, and I know they feel the spirit of the Lord," because sometimes I've seen you come to this rail when you're angry, and the expression on your face is not sweet, and it's a little awkward sometimes, but in some ways those are the most beautiful experiences for me. When I know you well enough to know when you're a little bit angry or put off or just confused, maybe by something that I said or did, and you come to this rail anyway, and we give each other communion, because the thing that unites us is so much more important than whatever we we happen to be squabbling over. That is the spirit of God. I give you communion even when I know we're not okay, even when I know you're not okay– and I know what's happening for some of you– I know you're not okay. That's the reason I give you communion. I give you communion because I know you're not okay, and sometimes there's nothing I can do about it except hand you this little wafer of bread. We give you a little sip of sweet new wine it's our gleûkos right? It's Sheffield cream sherry. It works. It's the sweet brew of the Holy Spirit, that cheap sherry is some of the best stuff you will find in this town. It doesn't taste fancy but it is very sweet, it's sweet sweet stuff, it's so sweet that the only thing to do really is to sing about it.

When we were texting earlier this week, Katie– I sent her the link of Doris Akers, I'm like, "Hey this can't be like this, wecan't be Methodists right? We got to–" and she said, "Oh don't worry, I can make it trashy." So I have it on good authority. But what we're going to– what's going to happen now, we're going to sing "Sweet Sweet Spirit" while we invite these baptismal families up, and it's not going to be the Sunday School cloying, earnesty, like Methodist white version of it, which is a little precious.

There is nothing precious or polite about "Sweet Sweet Spirit" the way Doris Akers does it. So you can find the video or you can witness it here. This is as close to a room full of Episcopalians can manage to go to church. And I am going to invite you to go to church, you know how to pray this, you know how to sing it. It's the thing that keeps us coming back to the space week after week, year after ear.

[music]

Uh huh. If the Rosales organ can be a Hammond organ, this is whent we're going to get this spirit.

Will you sing with me? Will you stand?

[music "There's a Sweet, Sweet Spirit"]