How Shall We Sing?

How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song?
A sermon by Brent J Eelman
June 28, 2020
Eagles Mere Presbyterian Church

Psalm 137:1-6
By the rivers of Babylon—
    there we sat down and there we wept
    when we remembered Zion.
² On the willows^[a] there
    we hung up our harps.
³ For there our captors
    asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How could we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand wither!
⁶ Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
    above my highest joy.

Acts 16:22-28

²² The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. ²³ After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. ²⁴ Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
²⁵ About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. ²⁶ Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. ²⁷ When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. ²⁸ But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”


When Paul and Silas were thrown into prison on trumped up charges, how did they respond? 
They sang!  I find it to be one of the most inspiring stories in the New Testament.  They could have responded in any number of ways.  They could have allowed their anger to fester and screamed and yelled about how “unfair” things were.  They could have whined and cried about their situation.  They could have planned an escape. 

Think about it.  They were chained in their cells.  There movement was limited.  The odor of human waste, illness, and rot permeated the air.  This was not a picnic.  How did they respond?  They sang!  And we complain about social distancing and masks these days in the name of freedom?  Paul and Silas were chained in a smelly cell, but I maintain their souls were freer than the whiners and complainers we hear protesting the impingement of their “rights and freedoms” by a mask or standing 6ft from each other.  Paul and Silas sang the Lord’s song weighed down by chains!

The psalm this morning is a lament that comes from the time when the Hebrew people were taken into captivity by the Babylonians.  In 587 BCE, the Babylonians over ran the small kingdom of Judah.  To ensure that there would be no uprising, they removed anyone who might lead a rebellion and carried them off as captives to Babylon.  This included those who were educated, the Temple priests, the scribes, the political leaders and the like.  The captives were literally aliens in a strange land, deprived of their culture, their temple, and their government.  Life as they knew it was upset and destroyed. 

There, in Babylon, deprived of everything that gave them meaning and purpose, they were taunted by their captors, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”  That was an existential struggle for them.  How could they sing the Lord’s Song apart from the Promised Land, the the temple, the law, and their language and culture.  This was their struggle and yet they were able to sing.  They dug deep into their collective soul and discovered again, the ancient song of hope and promise.  It was song of hope that gave meaning to their captivity (which would last for two generations!).  I maintain that the time of the Babylonian Captivity was one of the most creative moments in Hebrew history and we can learn from it.  They rediscovered their voice and sang the Lord’s song.  

This morning I want to  1. examine our context in terms of the Babylonian captivity.  2. Then ask, “what is the essential message or song that we are called to sing and embody?  And 3.  Suggest how might we begin to respond to this new world that the Covid 19 pandemic has wrought.

                                                      I
Our context:  One of the expressions that I regularly hear goes like this:  “When we return to normal….”  Most of us don’t like change and we especially don’t like change that is foisted upon us.  The expression “return to normal” betrays a belief that this pandemic is a blip, a road bump in history and that soon things will return to what they were.  We hoped that “things were under control”.  We hoped that it would “suddenly disappear with warmer weather.”   I believe that it is dawning on us that things will never return to the way they were. 

We are not captives in chains like Paul and Silas.  We are not captives, carried off to a strange land and deprived of the culture and symbols that provided meaning and purpose.  But we are in many ways captive to an invisible entity, a virus, that is wreaking death and destruction throughout the inhabited world.

For people like you and me, who hold our faith and religious practices near and dear, we find ourselves wrestling with the same question that the captives in Babylon struggled:  How shall we sing the Lord’s song?  How shall live out discipleship to Jesus Christ in this new and radically different context?  I read recently that the most dangerous places to be are indoor gatherings with lots of people. The three examples they offered were a religious service, choir practice, or birthday party.  Friends, two out of three of those were important to our common life as people of faith! 

Coming together to sing hymns, pray and worship together was vital to my life.  Most of us have been “zoomed” to tears and would welcome an actual committee meeting!  One of the things that churches are doing is working at how to approximate what we once did.  YouTube worship services.  Facebook Sunday school classes.  Zoom committee meetings and the like.  We need to do these things because they bring some measure of comfort to our shaken spirits. 

But I also believe that this is a moment when God is calling us to also be a bit more creative in our response.  Psalm 96 implores us to “sing a new song to the Lord.”  It is time for the church and the disciples of Jesus Christ to look into our collective souls and discover the “new song” that we are to sing…. 

One of the things that the Hebrew people had to come to grips with in the captivity was their own failure to keep the covenant.  They had to acknowledge that they did not live up to the justice demands of God.  They had to struggle with the biting words of the prophets who challenged their complacency in regards to the poor, the outcast and the downtrodden.  This pandemic should lead us to do the same. In short, do we want to return to what we were, or is God calling us to embody a more faithful life and ethic?  Is God calling us to renewal in the midst of this pandemic?

Remember our churches were shrinking.  Our children (mine own included!) Saw the breach between what we proclaim and how we live.  We chose silence, safety, and survival over a bold faith that speaks the truth to the world.  Is this what we wish to return to?   No!

                                            II
Our message:  We are good news people.  We are Easter people.  We are the inheritors of the ministry of Paul and Silas who sang with joy, while in the chains of confinement.  Steve Charleston, a retired Episcopal Bishop and Native American has captured this moment. 

“Now is the time for which our faith has prepared us. Now is the moment when all that we believe can be put to work. Now we can turn to the inner resources we have been developing over these many years to face the challenge of a world in desperate need. We are not afraid of this crisis for we have been made ready for it. We have devoted our lives to the belief that something greater than fear or disease guides human history. We have studied, prayed and grown in the Spirit. Now we come to the call to use what we believe. Our people need hope, confidence, courage and compassion: the very things for which we have been trained. We are the calm in the midst of a storm. Stand your ground and let your light so shine that others may see it and find their faith as well. “

“Let your light so shine that others may see it.”  With Paul and Silas, with the Hebrews held captive in Babylon, we are called to sing a new song… indeed to sing “the Lord’s song” in this world changed by this pandemic.   We are called to be bold.  Not stupid and foolhardy, but intelligent, creative, imaginative, loving, and bold. 

                                                 III
Our response:  God is calling us to contemplation and then to action.  Let me suggest some areas where the church and Christ’s disciples may begin to hear and sing the Lord’s song. 

a. Issues of Justice.  We are seeing marching and protesting that is related to the administration of justice be our police forces.  I find myself in sympathy with many of the concerns that are being raised, but I also fear that we might lose sight of the soil that breeds the violence and inhumane treatment we have witnessed. 

Justice ends in our judicial system, but it begins in our treatment of each other.  Can the church of Jesus Christ begin to lead a conversation about the systemic injustice of poverty and lack of opportunity that run rampant throughout the world and yes, even our land?  Can we address the structures that sideline and alienate groups of people?  When we read the prophets, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and others, this is what they addressed.  (I went to church and Sunday school, every week of my life.  I never heard about the prophetic call for justice, until I went to seminary.  It wasn’t preached or taught in church.) When we read the words of Jesus, we realize that he identified his ministry in terms of this prophetic message.  Remember the words to his first sermon:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free…”

b. Care of the Earth.   The Psalmist proclaims, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”  Recall the words of the first hymn we sang, “Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of al nature.”  How we treat nature and creation is not merely a political and economic issue. It is an issue of faith and how we regard God’s creation. One of the interesting consequences of this time of lockdown is how the rest of creation is responding to it.  The skies are clearing.  China, for example has 25% less CO2 emissions.  Animals are roaming a bit more freely, without the fear of being run down by some type of vehicle.  Can this time of pandemic be a moment when the church and disciples of Jesus Christ begin to examine our treatment of creation.  Is it time for us to sing, not only with our voices but with our lives and actions:
“For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies. 
Can we sing those words with the conviction of the action they demand? 

c. Racism.  The last time I was with you was the week following the events in Charlottesville, VA.  I attempted to address the truth of the continuing sin of racism in our world.  We need to recognize that we are not in a post-racial era.  The sins of the past continue to haunt us. 

The congregation where my wife and I worship has encouraged us to spend 21 days examining the racial issues in our society, our contribution to them, and how we might begin to address them from a perspective of faith.  It has been a hard struggle for us.  We come from different backgrounds yet we both realized that we were shielded from the reality of the omnipresence of racial injustice.  We are both educated well beyond college, but there is a history of oppression that we did not know.  The challenge for the church is to move from study, and self examination, to confession, and then to genuine action.   It will require creativity and moral courage. 

There are other challenges that we have and the temptation is to become so overwhelmed that we do nothing…. Perhaps that is the normal we wish to return to.. (Deer in the headlights?) but it is not what God is calling us to.

I believe that we were created for this moment. This is the time for which we have been prepared.  How shall we sing the Lord’s song?  How will you?  How will I. 
May God grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour… for the facing of this hour.  Amen.