A Time to Sing

A Time to Sing

Text: Psalm 137

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 10-2-2016)

           Sitting on the banks of a Babylonian river, some six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a despondent refugee from Jerusalem opined, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?”

I have never lived as a hostage in an alien land, but I have felt like one. A few weeks ago, I spoke about living just across the Potomac on 9/11. The days following 9/11 made the ancient words of the Psalmist feel current. There was an eerie silence in the skies. Our house was on the flight pattern of Washington National, but no planes were flying. I stepped into a D.C. restaurant and got far better service than any tip the waiter might reasonably expect, because D.C. was largely a ghost town.        

          Those were some of the obvious changes in my known world. The most powerful changes in this new, alien land were not nearly so visible. Each day brought an awareness of losses within me. I missed feeling immune from the rest of the world’s madness. I missed my relative sense of calm and hated that I would jump every time I heard a loud thud. I grew tired of having sadness stalk me like an unavoidable shadow.

 I wanted to board a plane again and not look around at other passengers in my own private version of racial profiling. I wanted the desire for vengeance to be someone else’s spiritual disease. As a person of faith, I missed the admittedly misguided and unexamined notion that God watches specially over America and would never allow terrorism, at least, large scale terrorism, to happen here. As the national economy crumbled, I counseled with employers forced to lay off valued employees and skilled workers who could not find work. I was frustrated that our congregation’s substantial emergency assistance fund could not begin to meet the new demands upon it. Amid the rumblings of war and the rhetoric of vengeance, I wondered whatever happened to the God who promises peace that passes all understanding.

          Always a keen observer of life, the British classicist and theologian, C.S. Lewis observed his own travels through grief. After he lost his late-in-life bride, Lewis wrote down his daily thoughts in his book, A Grief Observed. He asks, “Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms [of grief]. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing God, so happy that you are tempted to feel God’s claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to God with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. 

          “But go to God when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. . . Why is God so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?” (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, pp. 4-5; inclusive language my own).

           

          Did you notice what was missing as we just sang the haunting Latvian hymn, By the Babylonian Rivers? The hymn captures a longing for home, nostalgia for a treasured past, weariness with life lived in an alien land, but it stops before the Psalmist does. It leaves the last verses on the cutting room floor.

The last verses of Psalm 137 are an uncensored cry for the most brutal revenge, “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” 

          For years, preachers, church musicians, and lectionaries have carefully excised these last treacherous verses of the Psalm. It is a natural mistake, but ultimately, a misguided one. I am not commending the Psalmist for wishing the death of his most vulnerable foes and in the most horrendous of ways. I am not excusing his rage as justified.

What I am commending is the wisdom of the Hebrew and then Christian communities that insisted that this Psalm, in its entirety, needs to be a part of our Scripture, because it reflects an essential part of who we are. When hurt, we want others to hurt. When maligned, we want to malign in return. When devastated, we will not rest until others are devastated as well.

         

This Psalm knows what church censors are too embarrassed to admit. It knows that sometimes we godly folk think ungodly thoughts and say ungodly things, that the hearts of righteous people can dry up like a prune in the face of evil and that if God will not get even, we will. 

“How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” I heard that question asked a thousand different ways in the aftermath of 9/11. How can we open our lungs wide and sing when grief has taken our breath away? What words of praise do we have to sing to God when God has been so conspicuously absent, noticeably silent, despite our most fervent pleas? “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” The clear answer that resounded in most of us in those dark days that followed 9/11 was “We can’t.” So we sat beside the banks of the Potomac and the Hudson and we wept and we shouted our pain to the heavens.         

          Of all the things I missed most after 9/11, the greatest of them all was the urge to sing, sing aloud, to sing praise to God who reigns above, the God of all creation. I was terrified of the spreading cancer of hatred that threatened to consume me and our country. I had absolutely no desire to sing.

Sitting on the same banks of that Babylonian river, another hostage refused to “hang up his lyre.” Recognizing that his view of God had been too provincial before the destruction of Jerusalem, too small, too nation-centered, and trusting that God wills people and nations from grief into joy, from despair into hope, the prophet Isaiah wrote: “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them. Sing to the LORD a new song; sing the LORD’s praise from the end of the earth! Let the sea roar and all that fills it, the coastlands and their inhabitants. Let the desert and its towns lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar inhabits; let the inhabitants of Sela sing for joy, let them shout from the tops of the mountains.”

          After a few weeks consumed by the darkness of silence after 9/11, I could sit at the river’s edge no longer. I had to sing again. I had wept enough tears. I had to sing again. I had been choked with anger long enough. I had to sing again. I had questioned the presence and purpose of God long enough. I had to sing again. I tried, but my voice was too frail, too broken, and my faith too fragile. I needed the faith of other believers to sing and they needed mine.

          So, after living through this national nightmare for almost a month, I said to all who were ready to move beyond the river’s edge and to re-string damaged instruments, “Let us sing.” Let us sing praise to God who raises heroines and heroes among ordinary folk, who prompts poets to write and musicians to compose, artists to paint and architects to re-build. Let us sing praise to God who prods us to ask ourselves what is really important about life, to stop chasing that which intoxicates us, only to leave us empty and shallow. Let us sing praise to God who reaches down within us and plants seeds of peace where hatred festers, a passion for justice where vengeance lingers, a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation where retaliation burns, a new song where old words simply no longer make sense.

Easter morning did not erase the haunting laments of Maundy Thursday or the horror of Good Friday; it only made the Easter song that much sweeter and lyrical and lovely. Easter morning taught Christians to sing even in the dark, even at the river’s edge.

So, as we come to the table today with Christians across the world, many who are now living an alien existence, as we pray our multi-language prayer to the God who reigns over God’s beloved world, I say, “Sing.” Sing until we drown out the despair that seeds its cancer within us. Sing until we blanket the earth with a chorus of contagious compassion. Sing until we defy anyone to sow terror in the fields of God’s peacemaking people. Sing until we refuse to raise the offspring of violence. Sing until the sour lyrics of greed are translated into the sweet poetry of grace and gratitude.

          The old preacher in Ecclesiastes was absolutely right, “There is a time to mourn.” There is a time to hang up our lyres and weep. But the old preacher did not stop there. He also said, “There is a time to sing.” Yes, there is a time to mourn and some must do so even today, but for all who are able and who have a voice to lift up someone who simply cannot, it is time to sing. Lord God Almighty, it is time to sing.

          [choir sings the 16^th Lutheran Chorale, “Shall I praise my God not singing?” set to music by Alice Parker]