Category: Youth Ministry
Jingle Bell
The Oklahoma Regional Church staff held our Christmas party on Friday. It was a great dinner and conversation around the table. Following dinner we returned to Tom & Kay Jewell’s home (the Regional pastor) for dessert, games, and a Dirty Santa gift exchange that followed the story below. Apparently, this story is shared each year as party goers move the Dirty Santa gifts around the room. Enjoy!
Once there was a store that sold lots of jingle bells—and only jingle bells. As the customers came in, and picked the jingle bells up, the bells would jingle their best, hoping that they would be taken to a nice warm loving home. The littlest jingle bell had many problems. Customers would pick it up, and it would ring for them with all it’s might. “Jingle Jingle,” it would say. Then the customers would set it back down, and say, “this little jingle bell won’t do,” and they would walk on, and pick up other jingle bells. As the season went on, there became fewer and fewer bells. At last, Christmas Eve finally came. All of the bells had been taken except the littlest jingle bell on the shelf towards the back. As the store keeper was about to close down for christmas, a man with black snow covered boots walked in, and said to the store keeper, “I have been in my sleigh. One of the jingle bells has broken off, and I need a replacement before I can leave, so the reindeer can know where I tell them to go. The little jingle bell raised its head high as it looked toward the man. It was Santa Claus! The bell became very excited. The store keeper said, “Well, I have one last jingle bell, and I can show it to you if you want, but I don’t think that it’ll be big enough for your sleigh.” The store keeper led Santa to the back of the store, picked up the little bell, and gave it to him. He held it up in his hand, and gave it a little jingle, and the bell jingled with all it’s might. Then Santa said, “you’re right. It is too small.”
Get Up, Stand Up
Sightings 12/16/2010
Rastafari Theology, Reggae Music, and the Postcolonial Legacy of Bob Marley
– Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
In the legendary song, “Get Up, Stand Up,” it is virtually impossible to forget the chorus:
Get up, stand up—stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up—don’t give up the fight!
In these lyrics Bob Marley offers a resounding critique of traditional modes of Western Christianity which had served as a means of domination and oppression in Jamaica. In many ways, this pivotal song serves not only as a call to action, but offers a more confrontational and militant tone than previous records either by The Wailers, Marley’s band, or other reggae bands of the era. The song is also a wake-up call to those who might miss the prophetic message of reggae music illustrated in the following lyrics:
Most people think
Great God will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth…
Serving as the signature anthem for The Wailers, the band often made this the last song they played at each of their concerts. In fact, “Get Up, Stand Up” was the last song Marley performed live on stage at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 23, 1980. By May 1981, this prophet and poet of the postcolonial era lost his own epic fight with cancer that prematurely ended his life at the age of thirty six. For these and other reasons, “Get Up, Stand Up” is the quintessential Bob Marley song insofar as it epitomizes the three movements—the three “Rs”, if you will—with which he will be identified forever: reggae music, Rastafari movement, and revolutionary action.
To date, no performer in reggae music has matched the level of notoriety and success achieved by Bob Marley. That being the case, Marley’s musical legacy is exemplary because it provides insights into the vagaries of postcolonial realities through an examination of how reggae music, Rastafari movement, and revolutionary action played out not only in Marley’s life but also beyond. Marley’s legions of fans worldwide are often unaware that reggae was a revolutionary music that emerged from the suffering of Jamaica’s poor masses in the island’s “concrete jungles.” Meanwhile, the Rastafari community was the target of police harassment and public alienation for decades, both during and after British colonial rule.
Dating back to its origins in the 1930s as a direct outgrowth of the intermixture of Christian millennialism and the pan-African ideology of Marcus Garvey, the nascent Rastafari movement believed that the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I (1892-1974), a direct descendent of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was God incarnate. In fact, the movement’s name, Rastafari, is derived from Selassie’s Amharic title and birth name—Ras Tafari Makonnen—prior to his ascendancy to the imperial throne in 1930. Since the late 1950s, reggae became the reigning musical genre within Jamaica’s popular music scene, and was increasingly identified with the burgeoning Rasta population working in allegiance with the country’s poor blacks in order to galvanize themselves into a full-blown social movement. In response to this upstart challenge, the postcolonial Jamaican government banned reggae from the nation’s airwaves for being politically controversial and even jailed or deported Rasta leaders considered threats to the status quo.
Once reggae became internationally popular in the early 1970s, however, internecine tensions among the Rastas grew volatile and effectively spawned countless quasi-Rastafari followers who embraced the most obvious symbols and trappings of the faith—dreadlocks, ganja (marijuana), and reggae music—without fully embracing the substance of the religion. Exploiting this situation as a prime political opportunity to mobilize the island’s disinherited populace for partisan gain, Michael Manley, the Jamaican Prime Minister, brought Rastafari political imagery, sacred rhetoric, and sociopolitical themes from the margins into the social mainstream.
In 1978, Marley, his family, and The Wailers returned to Jamaica from London after several years of self-imposed exile and subsequently performed at the “One Love” Peace Concert in the hopes of calming the strife between the island’s two warring political parties despite multiple threats against Marley’s life. Towards the end of the evening’s performance, Manley of the liberal People’s National Party and his political rival Edward Seaga of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party shook hands on stage at Marley’s behest. This marked a political sea change by the 1980s in which the Manley regime was displaced by the ultra-conservative Seaga interregnum, setting Jamaica on a decidedly troubling path away from progressive politics. In the decades that followed, heightened levels of desperate violence, illicit drugs, and pervasive poverty had besieged the political culture of Jamaica.
Reggae music is no longer heard as a mystical musical outcry against oppression. Instead it is often the commercialized soundtrack for a marketing campaign depicting Jamaica as a postcolonial playground. Likewise the Rastafari tradition is no longer a radical African-centered counterculture but an important symbolic trope utilized by Jamaican elites in order to maximize the nation’s marketability as a tropical vacation hotspot. In tracing the conjoined history of Rastafari theology and reggae music, the emerging postcolonial nation of Jamaica hijacked the musical and spiritual legacy of its reigning superstar in order to literally capitalize on its mythical image as an island paradise for tourists, most evident in the use of Marley’s songs “One Love” and “Three Little Birds” in a long-running advertising campaign by the Jamaican Tourism Board.
When did Bob Marley and The Wailers’ hymns to peace, love, and human harmony become appropriate fodder for state-sanctioned advertising jingles? Moreover, how did the spiritual warfare of Rastas as soul rebels railing against the amassed system of white colonial domination (commonly referred to as “Babylon” within Rastafari rhetoric) morph into the smiling and servile “Rastaman” pouring cocktails and handing out beach towels for tourists from around the globe? Given what has transpired since his untimely death more than thirty years ago, one can only wonder what Marley would think about the twin fates of both the music and the faith he represented so loudly and proudly. In order to avoid such a downward spiral, songs such as Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” should be heard anew in ways that will restore reggae music and Rasta spirituality to their original sacred as well as social significance in this post-everything era.
Juan M. Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Church Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He is author of The Origins of Black Humanism: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007).
Get Up, Stand Up
Bob Marley & the Wailers, 1973
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!
Preacher man, don’t tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don’t know
What life is really worth.
It’s not all that glitters is gold;
‘Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!
Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!
Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )
Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Don’t give up the fight! (life is your right! )
Get up, stand up! (so we can’t give up the fight! )
Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )
Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )
Don’t give up the fight! (yeah! )
We sick an’ tired of-a your ism-skism game –
Dyin’ ‘n’ goin’ to heaven in-a Jesus’ name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can’t fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )
So you better:
Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don’t give up the fight! (don’t give it up, don’t give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (… )
Don’t give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (… )
Stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up!
Don’t give up the fight!