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What Song Do you Hear? Dr. D. William McIvor February 26, 2006 — Ministry of Music Sunday Presbyterian Church in Sudbury
Introduction to the Morning Lesson In thinking about what to preach on this Ministry of Music Sunday my mind went immediately to Psalm 137, the psalm of the Babylonian captivity. In many ways Psalm 137 is a very strange song. Its opening verses contain some of the most sublimely beautiful and poignant poetry in the Bible. Yet it ends expressing feelings of murderous violence and revenge. How could the same poet who wept as the psalm begins cry out in vengeful rage as it ends? A very strange song. Remember that in 587 bc the Babylonian empire destroyed Israel and crushed all opposition. Mt. Zion, Jerusalem, and the temple were decimated. The people were deported and scattered into the strange environment of a foreign land. Then one day sitting by the streaming rivers and canals of Babylon — modern day Iraq — and shaded by the weeping willows, the Hebrew captives wept, refusing to play and sing as their oppressors taunted them to do, and they looked back to remember the way they were.
Psalm 137.1-9 (NRSV)
ONE: What song do we hear? I want to ask what song do we hear this morning? Is the primary melody of our living the song of captivity, a wistful longing for what was but is no more? We all have our captivities, which is not to diminish the historical horror of the Babylonian captivity. We cannot even imagine losing everything like that. Yet we know what it is like to be trapped by circumstances we can’t control. Or we wince a little when no one is looking and we think back to what might have been if only we had taken a different path, or if this or that had not happened. Even when we have accomplished a great deal, the thoughts that tend to dominate the lying-awake-kinds of nights are not what we have achieved but the well-laid plans that didn’t work out. Or perhaps we are captive to skeletons in our closets. Everyone has things they don’t want anyone else to know. They may be things that aren’t even that important to anyone else but still they rattle around in us and require emotional and physical energy to keep checking the closet doors to make sure they’re locked. Or maybe we are captive because life seems to have passed us by. The accomplishments were yesterday and now there is nothing much to challenge us and we can’t seem to get by without reminding everyone of how good we were back when. It’s easy look back, to long for what once was or what never was. The danger of this song is that in looking back we begin to “live back.” In singing the song of what was, we begin to live what was and remain forever captive to yesterday. God calls us to sing a better song.
What song do we hear? Do we mainly hear the melodies of duty and discipline? The psalmist spoke of such. Better to lose the hand that strums the harp than to play holy songs for unholy purposes. Better to lose the sweet singer’s voice than lift it in song at the tyrant’s bidding instead of praising God. That is the duty of which the psalmist sings and there is no question that such courage and conviction are to be admired. We need duty and discipline and very few of us have enough of either. Still there is also a danger in this song. For most of us find it all too easy to fall over on the side not of discipline but of simply being hidebound. Duty and hideboundedness can look very much alike but they are strikingly different. Duty will fight for a cause. Being stubborn is just as likely to cause a fight. Do we have a cause or just a fight? The psalmist had a cause. But do we hear that song and simply march forth anxious to fight for the way things always have been? Do we hear the song of discipline only to fight about the way things used to be? Or the way we want them to be? In other words, do we end up captive again to what was rather than what can and should be? God calls us to sing a better song.
What song do we hear? Perhaps our song is the battle cry of revenge. Of course, we are more genteel than the psalmist. We are not so blunt as to openly wish that our enemy’s babies would be bashed against the rocks. But we still want revenge. What flashes first through our minds when someone does us in? I don’t know about you, but I think of getting back. I would never think of fighting. That’s too crass. Besides it plays to my weakness. No, my planned revenge is almost always verbal. I think of the rancorous retort and the perfect putdown. Even if I never actually say it — and I usually don’t — there is a certain revenge just in thinking it. We have little difficulty in understanding the psalmist’s desire for revenge. In fact, we would be surprised by the lack of such a response. It’s quite natural to want to even the score when we’ve been injured or harmed. But the song of revenge is really a song of the past, not a golden oldie but a fool’s gold baddie and God calls us to sing a better song.
TWO: God’s better song We can think about God’s better song by realizing that the meaning for us today is not so much in what Psalm 137 says. The meaning is that it came to be in the Bible. No one sanitized it. No one added a footnote that said, “This psalm is too difficult and contradictory and bitter.” The priests who assembled the psalter didn’t throw it away. And that’s the point. Nothing is wasted. God doesn’t throw out parts of our lives, even the painful parts. He seeks to weave into them a new melody, wanting to shape in our living a holy song of praise. God calls us to sing a better song. One of my favorite pieces of music is a work by Leonard Bernstein called “Chichester Psalms.” He wrote it in 1965 for the annual music festival at Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England and he used as his text portions of several different psalms. The whole piece is only 18 minutes but in that short time Bernstein captured well the sound of the psalms and the how the psalms reflect all the sounds of life. I hope you read regularly in the psalms because within them are some of the most beautiful songs ever to spring from the human soul. Think of such blessed words as these:
Of course, the psalms also express deep and anguished cries of pain, rage, and hopelessness.
And, of course, from today’s text:
These are the sounds of life, really, in all its bewildering complexity and the ancient people of God put these sounds into their hymnbook which we call the Psalms. Bernstein captured in his music a sense of that vast, conflicting tumult. The second movement in this short work begins with a boy alto singing solo, accompanied only by a harp, calling to mind the shepherd boy David. The boy is singing the 23rd Psalm in Hebrew. It is lyrical, tender music — hauntingly beautiful. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth my soul.” And the boy soloist is soon joined by the choir and they continue marvelously to the end: “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” But before that sweet song’s final chord, without any warning, the music changes. Voices cry out, “Why do the nations rage?” The orchestra and percussion become violent. The music hammers at us, angry in its cacophony, and it drives away the boy’s voice. Beauty is overwhelmed by pain and anguish and they continue all the more loudly and incessantly, pounding, pounding, pounding … Then you hear it, faintly at first, then rising above the rage: the boy’s voice and his tender lullaby of hope are heard again. Gentleness and God’s peace are pitched against violence and vanity. Back and forth the music battles, uncertain about the outcome. Finally the boy’s song stills the menace. Hope and peace endure beyond wrath and hurt. Bernstein’s music got the psalms right. The Psalms know and the Bible knows that life is not easy. Pain and suffering are real. But the boy’s song is the sweeter for having overcome the violence. For we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever but it is not an easy path. God uses the materials at hand in our lives to compose a holy song. Nothing is wasted. When our lives are filled with dissonant pain and hurt, God uses even those notes just as much as he uses the deeply resonant chords of joy and hope.
Conclusion What song do we hear? Can we hear the song behind the song, the song that makes the psalmist sing in the first place? That’s what is truly amazing about Psalm 137. Not its beautiful poetry. Not its refusal to obey the tormentor’s taunts. Not its desire for revenge. Not even the combination of these. No, what makes Psalm 137 amazing is just that it exists. The singers refused to sing. They hung up their harps. Yet when all was said and done they told their story in a song. Psalm 137 exists because the psalmist is really singing the song behind the song, a song for today and tomorrow and not just yesterday. Whether overcome with a longing for Zion or swept up in feelings of bitter revenge the psalmist really ends up singing because he hears the melody that cannot be silenced: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his steadfast love endures forever.” We all go through seasons of despair and suffering and anger. Sometimes the valley of the shadow seems to be the only reality there is. But God has not left us and even the doomful notes of our darkest days are graced by the lyric hope of the holy song in us. God is composing in every life a new and better and holy song. The question is, are we a willing instrument? Will we trust God? Will we let our voice sing God’s praise? Are you in the valley of the shadow? Be still, my friend. The Lord has not left you. And if your faith is such that it is hard to see the Lord’s presence now, rely on those of us around you to walk along with you. Are you in the bright light of God’s blessing. Be still, my friend. Rejoice. And wear your rejoicing a little lightly because the persons around you right now may not need a victory song but someone to walk quietly with them through the valley. And wherever you are, let come forth from your soul a holy song of praise, God’s better song. For the Lord is weaving in you harmonies beyond imagining. What song do we hear? According to the song that we hear, so shall we sing. And let us sing. Amen.
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