“Choose Healthy Life,” is the best choice!
From the moment a bagpipe brigade led the procession into the service of Renewal & Healing at Union Baptist Church in Harlem on Saturday during a Harlem Week celebration, it signaled a special occasion. Clergy leader Rev. Jacques A. DeGraff made it clear in his opening remarks, telling the congregation that they were about to witness “powerful preaching and soul-stirring gospel,” and the words were hardly out of his mouth when the Coaxner Ensemble lived up to that promise.
They delivered a rousing chorus to the event’s theme, Choose Healthy Life (CHL), setting a musical interlude for a message from Grace C. Bonilla, president and CEO of United Way of New York City. She began by stating how proud she was of the accomplishments made by her organization and the “unique partnership of United Way in addressing the New York City health disparities,” saying they’ve reached over 50,000 New Yorkers.
Underscoring the theme of healing, the Rev. Dr. Demetrius S. Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church of Staten Island chose as his text Jesus’s healing of a blind man at Bethsaida. He recited some passages from Mark noting how Jesus spat upon the blind man’s eyes twice and, on the second time, asked him, “What do you see?”
“I see everything,” the man said. “Today, we need more healing than ever,” Carolina said. He was perhaps referring to Jesus’s method when he said, “There is a process by which you can be healed.”
Jesus not only made the blind man see, but he also calmed the storm, said Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. “Jesus, wake up. We are perishing,” Sullivan repeated in a call and response with the audience. What Jesus had miraculously done in the past was needed now, the prelate begged in the wake of Covid-19. “Our children need a parachute,” he said. His plea was given additional ballast when the ensemble sang “Mary Don’t You Weep,” and it also served as a spirited segue to Debra Fraser-Howze’s scripture from Mark, where Jesus frees a girl from a demon. Frazer-Howze, the founder and president of Choose Healthy Life, gave Jesus’s miracle an updated version in her own way of bringing calm to a person in need.
She stated that Jesus knew his purposes, and Fraser-Howze knows hers, especially in her capacity at the helm of CHL, as she noted in the program handout with heartfelt praise for the late Rev. Calvin Butts III: “He moved mountains with a single touch and the community is safer because he lived,” she wrote. “While his presence and leadership are sorely missed …his service continues to be an inspiration for all of us.”
The Rev. Lawrence Aker III of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Brooklyn rocked the joint, much in the manner of the Hip Hop referenced, saluting their 50th anniversary. His text was taken from Mark and his account of Jesus walking on water. He, like the previous ministers — and those who followed him — connected the past with the present conditions plaguing Black America, particularly, as he observed, “in our battle against racism.”
His energetic sermon was matched by Rev. Dr. Travis Boyd of Canaan Baptist Church and often brought members of the audience to their feet with resounding applause. He is a pastor who knows how to take the passage from Mark and make it tangible for us today, citing Jesus’ healing of the paralyzed. “Justice is not served,” he said, alluding to the uprising on Jan. 6. And he concluded his stirring address by declaring, “The God I serve makes a way out of no way!”
When Rev. Brian D. Scott, the pastor of Union Baptist, made his Altar Call, nearly everyone in the church assembled, and he continued in words that he had possibly heard from the choir’s version of “I’m Willing to Wait.” Among those gathered at the altar were a number of police officers, members of the Fire Department, and a host of first responders. The relative calm that had settled in the church was aroused when Elder Michael Adolphus of Amen Ministries, Inc. was at the podium, though it was hardly a place where he was anchored during his exhortation. His leading piece of scripture came from Luke, where Jesus heals ten lepers. We can’t be sure what remedy Jesus used to heal them, but Rev. Adolphus insisted that we “deal with the source of the sickness rather than the symptoms,” and there was an inference that this process was applicable to all our illnesses, be they biological or social.
The church, which I had not attended since my former student, the Rev. Ollie Wells, presided, was lifted by Rev. Adolphus and soared even higher when a vocalist from the choir presented a sustained version of “Never Grow Old,” and there was little left to do after this but take a deep breath and here the benediction from Rev. DeGraff. He ended the event or service in the same insightful way he began, once again offering a salutation to Fraser-Howze and her unwavering dedication to CHL, saying, “We cannot return to yesterday’s ‘normal,’ we died in ‘normal.’ We see and are working towards the bright sunshine of a new day of wellness and equality in the land.”
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