‘I’ve Got Oil in my Vessel,’ traditional gospel blues, NC fiddler Joe Thompson, 1997.

Editor’s (admin’s) note. Second of ___ (I’m shooting for four) Advent meditations, prompted by a parish workshop exercise in which we were asked to craft a personal mission statement. My spiritual director suggested I operationalize it by asking myself: Who, or what, am I working for? Who, or what, am I resting in? And who, or what, am I living for? If my attention span permits it, and the daily barrage of bad news gives me enough time to think, I hope to journal on these questions in the coming weeks. (Adds: This post took a new tack midway when President Trump changed the subject, but these things happen.)

When I was asked to write a personal mission statement a couple of weeks ago, it came easier than I thought: “To use my gifts in the time I’ve got left to do what I can to repair the world.” (The word I used was tikkun olam, a Jewish approach to social justice, but I think the concept is common to all faith traditions.) So far, so good. The next steps are harder, involving things like vision, core values and, above all else, planning to achieve measurable outcomes.

“A mission statement has to be operational,” as management guru Peter Drucker famously put it, “otherwise it’s just good intentions.”

As the workshop moved onto values and strategic planning for the parish, I decided to return to the personal mission exercise. It’s a perfect fit for Advent, which is a time of self-examination, hope and renewal in my Lutheran faith tradition.

As I thought about it, songs and snatches of choral music kept popping into my head. So I decided a love of music was one of the gifts I mentioned in the mission statement, and my first journal (click HERE) centered on Wachtet auf (“Wake, Awake”) a 16th-century Lutheran chorale with lyrics based on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. As I considered who, or what, I want to serve, another song came to mind. It’s a Black country blues gospel song called “I’ve Got Oil in my Vessel,” which I learned from western North Carolina dulcimer player Don Pedi, who got it from a Black old-time fiddle player named Joe Thompson. The relevant verse (as transcribed by Scott Ainslee, who covered the song) reads like this:

Well, I got oil in my vessel
Keep your lamp trimmed and burning
Got to be ready when that bride groom comes.

Like so many songs that come down in oral tradition, Thompson’s incorporates floating verses. One is “Amazing Grace,” and the other a passage from “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” a text by an 18th-century Baptist pastor set to a tune by 19th-century hymnist George Nelson Allen. According to Hymnary.org, the melody appears in no fewer than 1,273 hymnals and was adapted by Thomas A. Dorsey in 1938 for his hymn “Precious Lord, Take my Hand.”

In the Black tradition, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone” is often combined with “Amazing Grace” (as in this 1992 video at a Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, and this 45rpm record by Sam Cooke). As Joe Thompson sings it, accompanying himself on blues guitar, it goes like this:

Must Jesus bear his cross alone
While all the world goes free?
No there is a cross for everyone,
And there’s a cross for me

Maybe I’m picking it up from Thompson’s tempo (he plays a fine country blues guitar for a fiddle player), but, to me, there’s an immediacy to “Oil in my Vessel” that inspires me to do more than tap my feet when I hear the song. After all it comes from a parable about wise virgins (bridesmaids or young women in more contemporary translations) who take extra “flasks of oil with their lamps” when they go to meet the bridegroom.

But the bridegroom runs late, the foolish bridesmaids run out of oil, and they miss the wedding while the wise bridesmaids are ushered in. Says Jesus: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” Is it just me, or is there something here of what Dr. Martin Luther King once called “the fierce urgency of now?” I hear it in Joe Thompson’s guitar licks, and I sense it in the Black church.

How does this fit with my personal mission statement? Well, I do what I can.

The adult faith formation study group I co-facilitate for our parish has read Isabell Wilkerson’s Caste and the Rev. Jemar Tisby’s Color of Compromise. And as a Dominican associate, a lay person who commits to live by the Dominican Sisters’ charism “to live and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a church and world suffering from the sin of racism,” I meet with an Associate Antiracism Committee affiliated with SDART (the Springfield Dominican Anti-Racism Team).

So far, keeping my lamp trimmed and burning seems to involve a lot of listening. Never a bad idea if you’re dealing with racism and cultural pluralism!

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve been convinced that ever if we are to live up to our promise as Americans, we will owe it to the transformative witness of the Black church. I think we tend to forget Doctor King did as much to offer a hope of redemption to white Americans as he did to free Black Americans. His work remains unfinished; in fact, in the last two or three years we have backslid in the wrong direction.

“For centuries, Black institutions—colleges, nonprofits, churches, and more—have been a bulwark against racism and centers of agency and organizing,” Jemar Tisby says on Substack. “They have carried whole movements toward freedom—not just for Black people, but for everyone who values justice and democracy.

“Now, as authoritarianism tightens its grip, those same institutions are under assault.”

But I can’t allow myself to give up hope. […]

Later (Friday, Nov. 28). That’s as far as I got last night. Then President Trump suddenly changed the subject, as he so often does. His animus toward Black and brown immigrants has long been apparent, but his reaction to the Nov. 26 murder of a National Guard soldier by an Afghani refugee injects a toxic dose of European fascist blood-and-soil racism into the discussion with a social media post threatening “REVERSE MIGRATION” in order to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States,” or is somehow “non-compatible with Western Civilization.” I still believe the Black church and the civil rights movement of the 1960s offer the best model moving forward. But I’m forcefully reminded Jim Crow is part of a wider evil, and we need their moral clarity now more than ever.

None of this changes that personal mission statement I came up with at the parish workshop, but Dr. King’s fierce urgency of now just got a little more urgent.

None of Trump’s latest outburst is entirely new, and he’s known for making headline-grabbing statements and walking them back later. But this latest outburst is troubling. In his Thanksgiving social media post, as quoted in Forbes, he echoes several neofascist tropes:

In a Truth Social post on Thanksgiving evening, Donald Trump wrote, “Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.” (Emphasis added.)

He added, “These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”

Trump’s language here echoes the racist “back-to-Africa movement“of 19th-century America, but also the ethnic and nationalist movements that displaced millions of Europeans before, during and just after World War II. Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, pointed out this connection on an emergency Thanksgiving Day podcast (at 10:15): “REVERSE MIGRATION […] is a fancy way of saying ‘ethnic cleansing,’ I think,” (and again at 15:50). “I don’t know how to read that as anything but saying we want this to be only for ‘heritage Americans’,” Last added, winking broadly at the camera as he repeated an increasingly common MAGA formula.

“Blood and soil,” interjected Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell.

“Which is a very European concept of nationhood,” Last continued.

That it is, indeed.

Reverse migration or remigration, according to Wikipedia, has come in the 2020s to mean “a European far-right concept of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including those born in Europe and holding European citizenship, to their place of racial ancestry.” Increasingly, the Trump regime has “mainstreamed the term in the country,” ever since he slurred Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a first-generation American, by calling for remigration of “Kamala’s illegal migrants” during the 2024 election. Adds Wikipedia:

In May 2025 the Department of State released a “reorganisation chart” that included the creation of an “Office of Remigration”. As President, Trump once again endorsed “remigration” in June 2025 as “reversing the invasion” of illegal immigrants into the United States. In July 2025 Trump claimed that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would allow for remigration to be implemented. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been described as an advocate for remigration within the Trump administration.

So far reaction has been muted. And Trump shows signs of changing the subject again, as he chases other headlines, from Ukraine and Moscow to Venezuela and his gilded ballroom project where the East Wing of the White House used to be. If America survives as a multicultural, pluralistic society, we may have Trump’s limited attention span to thank for it.

If we survive, and I still believe we will, we’ll have something else to thank for it, too. And that, I still believe, will be the redemptive witness of the Black church. Just before Thanksgiving, Bishop William Barber II, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of a multi-faith resistance effort to the Trump regimes “crackdown” on immigration:

[J]ust like what you see in Charlotte, the people that were planning there, even before we went down on Monday, they’ve been planning. They’ve been training. They’ve been getting ready. And that’s what we’re saying to cities and states and counties, in states all over the country: Get ready. Don’t wait. Get ready now. And get ready by connecting the dots. Get ready by connecting the dots.

As the show drew to a close, Barber continued:

[…] And then, lastly, Amy, this is not new.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah. Well, the bottom line is, we also said this is not new. This has a deep American history. People have had to fight it for years, and it’s our time now that we have to fight it. And we must do it together.

Is my lamp trimmed and burning?

Links and Citations

[Uplinked Dec. 1, 2025]

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Published by Pete Ellertsen

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