Taken with permission from HuffingtonPost.com/BlackVoices.

It's a brand new year and we've gathered together some amazing sermons to help us enter 2012 with faith and hope.

First, Rev. P. Kimberleigh Jordan shares with us the history of Watchnight and it's importance on New Years. Lisa Anderson tackles sin and blame and how both should be handled in the coming year. Adam Clark asks us all to reconsider Kwanzaa as a new mode to express Christian faith. Finally, Reverend Otis Moss looks at how jazz has helped shape his love of God and how his love of God has colored how he views culture as a whole.

Watchnight: A Different Kind of New Year's Tradition

By Rev. P. Kimberleigh Jordan

United Church of Christ minister

Watch night -- that was the last day of the year -- was a night when almost everybody in the church had a part. People would come in from late at night, many people who never did come to church. We didn't care if you were a saint or a sinner; you could come in. ... they would have preaching and they would have class meeting, and everybody that could talk, talked: "thank God for this," and "thank God for that." That was a big night. At twelve o'clock, everybody would be down on their knees. And then we got up singing.

~ Susanna Watkins (1905-99), prayer band member quoted in Jonathan David, Together Let Us Sweetly Live: The Singing and Praying Bands (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2007), 169.

Ask me what I am doing this New Year's Eve? Or, last year. Ask me what my mom did for New Year's Eve, or what my great-grandparents did generations before. The answer is the same: attend Watchnight Service. As a clergywoman, Watchnight is a favorite worship service of each year. It is a gem, though not an official day on the liturgical calendar.Observed in numerous and varied churches -- many, though not all, are African American. Usually, Watchnight starts between 9 and 10 p.m. and includes prayer, praise, singing, scripture reading and preaching. Some allow for "testimony" time during which people offer public thanks to God for bringing them through the year. The old gospel song, "My Soul Looks Back in Wonder," expresses this testimony. Whether or not one stands to testify, Watchnight is a spiritual hinge between past and future. We gather to thank God for allowing us to have arrived at the end of the year with a "reasonable portion of health and strength," while invoking God's presence in the new and unknown future.

Watchnight is not only a Black Christian tradition, though there's significant Black history among the traditions. It's impossible to point to a singular birthing room for Watchnight services that will happen this weekend. Following are three historical streams that feed current worship services:

European Protestant Tradition

The 550-year-old Moravian Church, founded in Czechoslovakia, is the first community thought to have held Watchnight. Its purpose was to renew one's covenant with God at the turn of the year. The Moravians were enthusiastic international missionaries who spread their spiritual practices around the globe in the 18th century. One person who encountered them was John Wesley, founder of the Methodist denomination. According to Jonathan L. Chism, writing in his article "Watchnight,"Wesley felt believers should have an annual opportunity to renew their covenant with God and reflect on the state of their souls. Therefore, he incorporated Watchnight into his development of Methodist liturgical structures. The first American Watchnight was held somewhere around 1770 at St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. Among St. George's membership were two freed slaves named Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who in 1787 lead a walkout of St. George's in response to racial discrimination there. Jones later founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas and Allen founded Mother Bethel Church and theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church denomination. From Moravians to freed slaves, Watchnight took its place on the American religious stage. This weekend, many Moravian communities will hold Watchnight services as they have done for centuries.

Freedom's Eve

This is the most famous historical stream for Watchnight, where enslaved Africans gathered to await the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Eve 1862. Following the Union's defeat of the Confederacy, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation ending the dehumanizing American history of enslavement. While Lincoln's Proclamation was influenced by political, military and geographic strategies, the soon-to-be-free enslaved people saw Emancipation wholly as an act of God resonant with the biblical Exodus.

The tradition goes that these faithful people of African descent gathered, waiting out the night between bondage and freedom in prayer, praise, lament and gratitude to God for their own survival and witness. These spiritual actions of the people and God's actions in the community, not just the individual, are seeds that were planted and bloom yearly in Watchnight services from Harlem to Shaker Heights to Crenshaw.

Africanist Tradition

Though the tradition of Freedom's Eve may be more widely known, another tradition was more influential on Watchnights where I grew up. This tradition also focuses on enslavement, but before Emancipation. The belief was that enslaved people gathered with loved ones during the week between Christmas and New Year's. Watchnight was the final gathering, during which they prayed for God to protect and "watch between them" when they departed. As the story goes, many slave owners settled their debts by the start of the New Year, and selling enslaved humans was a lucrative means of producing revenue. Watchnight, therefore, was an opportunity to step faithfully into the unknown of another year in bondage. The spiritual, "This May Be the Last Time," expresses this poignancy.

In the Gullah Sea Islands, this tradition is still perceptible. I attended Watchnight at Ebenezer AME Church in Charleston, SC, and along with the usual liturgy there was a "watchmen" who called out the time until just before midnight when the whole congregation knelt to pray. In Bolden, Georgia at Mount Calvary Baptist Church, the Watchnight liturgy is followed by a Ring Shout in the church's annex. People from this community have become known as the McIntosh County Shouters and are one of few groups currently performing the Ring Shout, which is an ancient Africanist religious ritual of counterclockwise circular movement, rhythm and singing. Ring Shouts often lasted through the night until daybreak.

When I participate in Watchnight, I stand within these historical traditions. It is a place for my hopes and anxieties about the future, as well as my regrets, gratitude and forgiveness about the past. For me, Watchnight is also a sign of relationship with God who is beyond time and circumstances. This relationship is the legacy that was passed to me and that I aim to pass along to my children when I insist that they attend Watchnight each year. I am excitedly preparing for Saturday night's Watchnight Service with my family because I want them to experience this liturgy in which past and future mingle in the hearts of the people gathered before God "who was, and is, and is to come."

Meditating on Sin at the End of the Year

By Lisa Anderson

Auburn Theological Seminary

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

Audre Lorde

O Lord all my longing is known to you. My sighing is not hidden from you.

Psalm 38

I first approached the question 'what is sin, and what does it mean to be a sinner' as a theological problem when I was a seminary student back in the early 1990's. A logical place to begin such an inquiry for the most part my concerns, at least at the beginning were intellectual ones. I wanted to know what was wrong with us as a human race. What was the substance of our tendency to stray so far away from what was 'good' or 'right' or 'true' such that violence, degradation and the perpetuation of systems of social injustice -- on a large and small scale -- seemed to be the recurring and inevitable theme of human existence? Why God, I queried, are we like this? WHAT is wrong with us?

At that time the desire to understand if not alleviate the grandest injustices of human existence fueled my interrogations. Racism, classism, sexism, homophobia -- these obvious distortions of our individual and collective capacities to recognize, engage or cultivate the full humanity of ourselves and one another -- these sinful-'ims' begged for a critical spiritual analysis of their causes and continuations. And while my liberationist commitments animated my belief that such queries could make a practical difference in the struggle to interrupt their worst social and political effects, still I recall approaching the question from a decided scholarly remove. The facts, apostle Paul, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and because I was trained at a liberal seminary - James Cone, Rosemary Ruether, Gustavo Gutierrez -- just give me the theological facts.

And then in 1999 I began to starve myself to death, and with an experience of sickness that infiltrated into every fiber of my physical, mental and spiritual being, Christian sin-talk no longer appealed to me as a grand theological problem to be interrogated. Instead 'what is sin' and 'what does it mean to be a sinner' became intensely personal questions for me. They became personal not because I equated having an eating disorder, or indeed any sickness with being sinful. By the grace of God, I was never tempted to go down that road. But rather it was the window my sickness provided into what it means to be undone by a thing; to be twisted by a desire; to be unmade by a willing whose force pulled me away from the recognition of the good thing God had created me to be in the world, that gave me a sudden and visceral sense of what is wrong with us.

I am a sinner and I sin; we are sinners and we sin when we would stand outside of, or in opposition to the fundamental rightness of our status as beings created in the image and likeness of God.  Genesis 1:31 says, 'And God saw everything that She had made and indeed it was very good.' But when we lose sight of not only God's goodness all around, but the personal and singular aspect of that goodness we are called to embody for ourselves, and with and for one another in the world we fall into sin. We are, by God's design and for God's holy purposes His own very good and beloved people. But it is our tendency to fall so utterly and completely outside of this knowledge; to forget at the most profound and intimate levels of our lives that this is who we are - broken in fact, but beloved indeed -- that is the substance of our unmaking.

I recall what it felt like to fall away from this knowledge, and the larger backdrop against which that falling away took place. Caught up in the usual struggle to believe in and enact my belovedness as a Black Queer girl in America, one day the enormous weight of this struggle just became unbearable. 'Dear God, how can I continue to stand upright,' I cried, 'when there are so few practical and real-world affirmations of my existence on which I can consistently rely?'

I let myself feel the pain of the persistent failure of Christian communities on either side of the so-called Left/Right divide to embrace me as an integral as opposed to an exotic member of the faith. I let myself feel the anxiety around and take on the disdain for my flesh that is in part a sorry outcome of the historical ordering of the tradition. And as these feelings began to well up inside of me I responded, not by beating a path toward God's always ready embrace. Instead I began to long for, desire and actively refashion my being as something small, starved and disappearing right before the unseeing eyes of almost everyone around me.

An Eating Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified was the official diagnosis attached to my condition. And today, more than a decade later, when I can claim to be on the other side of that experience, I neither dispute the categorization nor the blessing of the medical interventions that saved my life. But there is also that part of the story that begs to be told beyond both the clinical certainty of a label of sickness and the kind of grandly theological articulation on the human condition that I first pondered.

How best to fully speak of it remains unclear; but twenty years after I first began to wonder 'what is sin' and 'what does it mean to be a sinner,' I know that our small and seemingly private tales of brokenness and shame; of fear and longing matter. They matter, not because we are called to heap blame on ourselves, or anyone else because of them. But we are called as a people, broken in fact, but beloved indeed, to bear witness to all that we are, as a testament to the fullness and richness of our Maker.

Christianity and Kwanzaa

By Adam Clark

Assistant Prof. of Theology, Xavier University

It's strange that the day after Christians celebrate the birth of child who was to become a liberator that they fail to see the liberating possibilities in the week long celebration of Kwanzaa (Dec. 26-Jan. 1.) The infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke portray Jesus as the bearer of concrete longings of a people for freedom from Roman rule. Kwanzaa was created out of the liberation narrative of the 1960s. The longing of African American people for freedom, selfhood and beauty grounds and shapes the vision, values and practices of Kwanzaa. It is derived from African first-fruits harvest celebrations and encourages it's observers to be thankful for good and beauty of Creation and act for the well-being and wholeness of the world.

Despite its ecumenical character, Kwanzaa remains controversial in black churches. Many popular websites professing to explore the relationship between Christianity and Kwanzaa encourage Christians not to practice Kwanzaa. These websites question the relevance of Kwanzaa to the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Some regard Kwanzaa as a rival "pagan holiday," "cultic celebration" or as idol worship. Others question the motives of the creator of Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga, who is cast as an anti-Christian thinker, hostile to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These religious detractors position themselves as defenders of the faith and see their attacks on Kwanzaa as a way of preserving biblical faith against the unbiblical principles of Kwanzaa.

What's ironic is that the people who denounce Kwanzaa do not have the same suspicion toward the celebration of Christmas. There is a sharp distinction between the biblical portrayal of Christmas and its contemporary emphases. Christmas Day originated when the church used the stories of the birth of Jesus to place a thin Christian veneer over the Roman holiday celebrating the Winter solstice. The American celebration of Christmas that features Santa Claus as its chief icon, lighted trees, shopping rituals, massive food grabs and spectacular gift giving resemble the festivals of Imperial Rome that honored the might of Caesar more than the humble story of a couple that gave birth to a Christ-child in a manger.

Thus the religious critics of Kwanzaa have it backwards. Instead of rejecting Kwanzaa and embracing the religion of consumer capitalism that co-opts the Christmas story, observant Christians should regard the practice of Kwanzaa as a new mode of expressing their faith. At the heart of the celebration of Kwanzaa are the liberative acts of rescuing and reconstructing African history and culture, cultivating communitarian African values and using them to enrich and expand human freedom and flourishing. This is accomplished through the Nguzo Saba, the seven principles of Kawaida (a communitarian African philosophy), which shapes the heart of Kwanzaa. The Nguzo Saba, understood within a Kawaida framework, is the hub and hinge on which the holiday turns and the core of its moral and social consciousness.

While there is value in all observances of Kwanzaa, people who practice Kwanzaa outside of its Kawaida framework are more susceptible to making the holiday superficial and become vulnerable to charges of "You're just dressing up pretending to be African" or "This holiday has nothing to do with the concrete needs of black people. It's bourgie!" Thus the practice of Kwanzaa without Kawaida is like observing Christmas without understanding the significance of Jesus birth to a people under Roman rule. It is the Kawaida that gives Kwanzaa its liberatory framework. Each principle represents not only a central value but a certain practice necessary to achieve human fullness and well-being. Christians find parallels in Jesus' mission to bring establish the kingdom of God on earth. Jesus' image of the kingdom points toward an alternative vision of life under God, a world transformed. Likewise, the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) initiates an alternative vision of life in black communities. The seven principles are: Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity) and Imani (Faith). Each day of Kwanzaa is devoted to the observance and practice of a principle.

As a celebration framed in the midst of the African American freedom movement, Kwanzaa must be informed by ongoing struggles and aspirations of African and other aggrieved peoples. The democratic insurgencies in the African countries of Tunsia and Egypt that initiated the Arab Spring, Occupy movements, the reconstruction of Haiti, and initiatives to address environment devastation in light of BP oil spills and Fukushima (Japan) nuclear meltdown should be embraced and celebrated as practices of Kuumba (creativity) "to do always as much as we can in the way we can in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it" and as actions that participate with Christ in making the conditions on earth resemble those in heaven.

Why I Am Unashamed and Unapologetic About My Faith

By the Rev. Otis Moss III

Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago

The antebellum preacher was the greatest single factor in determining the destiny of the enslaved community. - Howard Thurman

"The blues help you get out of the bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain't alone. There's something else in the world...this be an empty world without the Blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something." - "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by August Wilson

The Blues aesthetic described by August Wilson's character, Ma Rainey, symbolizes the spiritual impulse vibrating through my life. The creative lens of the African American Church colored my spiritual worldview. I have witnessed the western divisions of sacred and secular under the weight of the "Blues and Gospel" motif of the African American Church experience. "I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with the" eternal virtues rooted in Christ. The sounds of John Coltrane's saxophone, James Baldwin's prose, Zora Neale Hurston's "folk-ways", Fannie Lou Hamer's grassroots prophetic political rhetoric, Martin Luther King Jr.'s democratic Christian witness, Howard Thurman's southern inspired spiritual mysticism, the urban-blues centered post-modern beats of J. Dilla and Madlib and the poetic honey dipped voice of Jill Scott are the chords composing the song of my spiritual journey.

My father and mother are children of the south and products of the rich religious heritage of the African American Church. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr., my father, mentor and pastor, is Pastor Emeritus of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, OH. Growing up, Olivet resonated with a unique ecumenical community in the Baptist tradition but not bound by Baptist parochial restraints, southern patterns of rhythmic speech and prophetic Christian witness drawn from the Old Testament prophets. Having two parents as veterans of the civil rights movement created a theological synergy of love and liberation. This cultural and religious narrative cultivated my spiritual formation and theological understanding.

The Christ of the prophetic wing of the Black Church stands as a Savior and liberator rooted in love and healing. Liberation, revolution or social justice is nothing but empty rhetoric if love is not added to the equation.

The progressive wing of America shudders at the idea of engaging a concept that cannot be empirically defined. The conservative community abandons the challenge of love because of theological implications. Simultaneously the theme of love has been jettisoned from prophetic doctrine in favor of edicts, with little or no flexibility.# I believe the African American Church has bumped against this idea more frequently because of her unique history; politically forced to experience America from the underside and engage the love ethic of Christ as a community scorned by a society claiming democratic ideals.

The Gospel of Jazz

This may sound strange, but the cultural motif of Jazz and the theological weight of Jesus' love ethic anchor my spirituality. My cultural theology illuminates my view of the church - a dynamic living organism empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The African American Church combines the Africanized faith of my ancestors with the democratic optimism demonstrated by the folk philosophy of the Jazz aesthetic. This new democratic aesthetic brought forth by Jazz, was born in the crucible of southern pain and frontier optimism, nurtured by the "informed church's call and response"' and the democratic ideals of Jazz music.

The cultural motif of Jazz and the Spiritual weight of love illuminate my view of the church -- a dynamic living organism empowered by the Holy Spirit.

I did not realize I was Baptist until college. My home church was ecumenical. I thought most if not all Black people shared a single narrative of faith, but different liturgical tastes. Interfaith days at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church included our Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers sharing the pulpit with guest Christian ministers from the UMC, AME, AME Zion, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, UCC, ABC, Anglican, Reformed, and Catholic traditions to collectively work on community development and anti violence programs.

I witnessed different styles of preaching and worship, but heard a commonality of service, justice and compassion from all our guests. As a child, I thought the "White Church" was the different denomination because worship with my European brothers was radically different from my ecumenical partners in the Black Church tradition. In college, I realized growing up in an ecumenical Black Church was not the norm. Those on the "left" and those on the "right" made strong lines of demarcation. Students in predominantly White denominations were "joked on" for not being "Black enough" and students in Black denominations were teased for lacking "substance and couth." I witnessed these denominational wars and wondered how could descendents of enslaved Africans be involved in an argument about European Protestant history?

I believe denominations represent history and culture; when history and culture are married, history and Divine activity merge. This question of culture and history is different for people of African descent since the historical side of most mainline denominations is a fractured story of tears, triumph and forced inclusion. There is a sense of living in two worlds; one cast by the mold of protestant and Reformed history and the other shaped in the kiln of forced labor and creolization. I have been forced to confront this dichotomy, first in the Baptist tradition and now within the United Church of Christ as a Baptist/UCC minister. I truly embody the "Duboisian" ideal of a warring soul denominationally. How does one merge heritage and history, keep a distinctive tradition, celebrate a powerful history and validate a Creole liturgy and theology? I use the term Creole because it accurately reflects the "gumbo ingredient flavor" of African American religious life. We are not "pure Africans" nor are we European, but we are an amalgamation of rich traditions, and narratives shaped and formed in a kettle of Africanity. This is the challenge of all people of faith whose tradition transformed Protestant patterns of worship. We are a part of the United Church of Christ, yet, set apart, following a trajectory, ethos, and theological lens seasoned with the antebellum salt of abolition and captivity. This is also the great strength of the United Church of Christ. We are one of the few denominations honest about our creolization. Our merger of four distinct traditions and noble commitment of freedom through the American Missionary Association for people of African descent is unheard of among our denominational cousins.

It is time for people kissed by nature's sun to claim being African and share our unique theology with brothers and sisters of European descent. Black faith is NOT about Gospel music; we have a unique theological narrative, a different systematic theology, a radical cosmology and prophetic preaching tradition that the entire world would be blessed to witness. To all brothers and sisters in predominantly white denominations you do not have to work to be accepted -- be who you are! To my brothers and sisters in the COGIC, AME, AMEZ, and every Baptist convention, embrace who you are and speak prophetically of our rich tradition, we have much to teach the world. We must be unashamed and unapologetic about our Christ, our Community and our Culture.