He Being Dead Yet Speaketh

John Jasper: Dem Sebun Wimmin / Those Seven Women (Part 2)

Today, I am continuing the He Being Dead Yet Speaketh Podcast series with a sermon by John Jasper. In this series, I am covering the sermons of great preachers of the who we do not have the privilege of hearing today because they did not have the technology to record their messages back then. There are some blacks who do not like to honor this slave preacher because of his way of speaking which carried over from his many years as an uneducated slave, but the fact of the matter is that preachers today stand on his shoulders. He was a man who did not let his limitations prevent him from serving God. According to William E. Hatcher and Mary J. Bratton, John Jasper is arguably one of the most famous black ministers of the nineteenth-century who gained popularity for his electrifying preaching style and his ability to spiritually move both black and white Baptists. He began his career in the early 1840s, preaching at funerals of slave and free black parishioners and giving occasional sermons at the First African Baptist Church. His popularity grew quickly and not only among those in Richmond, VA. After giving a guest sermon to the Third African Baptist Church in the nearby city of Petersburg, Jasper was invited by that congregation to preach every Sunday. Jasper’s accomplishments are even more remarkable given the fact that he was a slave in the tobacco factories and iron mills of Richmond during the first 25 years of his ministry work during a time when Virginia law expressly prohibited blacks from preaching. Following the Civil War, Jasper became a full-time pastor and in 1867 organized the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church, ministering to hundreds of local black Baptists, but many whites as well.  His sermons continued to attract eager audiences, but none seem to draw more listeners than his famous discourse, “De Sun Do Move” given in 1878. Jasper’s work extended far beyond preaching to the devoted and attempted to minister to all black Richmonders. The Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church became active in providing community services including aid to the elderly and the destitute. Jasper continued in this capacity until 1901 at the age of 88, after half a century of serving God. I will be sharing with you another of John Jasper’s sermons titled, Those Seven Women. But first let me share with you a poem he used to share from the pulpit titled, Everybody’s Got to Rise to Meet King Jesus in the Morning. I will be sharing the original version of both the poem and the sermon as they were recorded first, and then the plain English version of both the poem and the sermon.