Psalm 98
November 14, 2010
“O sing a new song to Yahweh, who has done marvelous things.”
This is not just instruction for us to sing; it is a claim about what happens when we see the goodness, the beauty, the bounty of creation. We become caught up in song –the song of creation, and we become a part of the larger song. Broadly defined, that means the movement, rhythms and melodies of our lives. It means the dances we do in our relationships with friends, family partners, spouses to music that can only be called love. It means the stunning music made by people who have a “gift”. It means the joyful lilt in someone’s voice when they share good news. This Psalm reminds us – because sometimes we need reminding – we are in a beautiful song called life and we can join the chorus. Psalms in general remind us that from the beginning of time, hymns have been sung in response to all of life.
The countless hymns of praise, from the song of Miriam and Moses at the Exodus to the hallelujah chorus at the end of the Book of Revelation, arise out of the structure of faith in the dialogue with God. Wherever the movement of God is discerned in the accomplishment of some palpable grace- whether the birth of a child, the restoration of a broken relationship, or the realization of peace in the midst of hostility-human beings respond. They respond in a mode of speech: the hymn of praise and thanksgiving.
I want to share a prayer with you written by Walter Brueggemann. He captures the reality of many of our lives – an often song-less, mostly one-dimensional life that is dominated by monotonous, monotone tasks. He knows we do, much of the time, have to live in the tasks. But the Psalms must be allowed through on a regular basis – new songs, new energy, new dimensions to life and faith. And as Brueggemann points out, in our tradition, we find those songs in the scriptures – in the poetry, in the parables, & the music whispering through the words of the Psalmists. We find them in our hymnals and choral pieces. We find song in the organ and piano and chants and familiar refrains. Part of our ritual of church, part of the reason we worship is to be immersed in song – singing, playing, listening, melodic praying. And in that immersion we are taken from the secular and profane to the sacred and transcendent.
Brueggemann writes,
Here we are, practitioners of memos:
We send e-mail and we receive it,
We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it.
We write to move the data, and
organize the program,
and keep people informed –
and know and control and manage.
We write and receive one-dimensional memos,
that are clear and unambiguous.
And then – in breathtaking ways – you summon us to song.
You, by your very presence, call us to lyrical voice;
You, by your book, give us cadences of praise
that we sing and say, “allelu, allelu.”
You, by your hymnal, give us many voices
toward thanks and gratitude and amazement.
You, by your betraying absence,
call us to lament and protest and complaint.
All our songs are toward you
in praise, in thanks and in need.
We sing figure and image and parallel and metaphor.
We sing thickness according to our coded community.
We sing and draw close to each other, and to you.
We sing. Things become fresh. But then the moment breaks
and we sink back into memo.
We are hopelessly memo kinds of people.
So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
give us some song-infused days,
deliver us from memo-dominated nights.
Give us a different rhythm,
of dismay and promise,
of candor and hope,
of trusting and obeying.
Give us the courage to withstand the world of memo
and to draw near to your craft of life
given in the wind.
God’s presence, God’s book, God’s hymnal, even God’s absence evoke song if we immerse ourselves in all of these things. We sing and things become fresh, new, hopeful. In the face of an insistent pattern in life that always leads us to work to accomplish things, to achieve goals, to live useful lives, and to carry on an unceasing array of programs to justify our existence, the sound of sacred song frees us to do nothing but give thanks to God.
Many of us have a love/hate relationship with the Psalms. Familiar verses strike a chord in us: I lift up my eyes to the hills; you have searched me and know me; yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. These verses accompany us through the ups and downs of life, providing comfort and assurance of God’s presence with us. But we also read the Psalms and at times cringe. The authors celebrate a vindictive God, believe God deserts and betrays, and they ask God to smite enemies.
But even in those cringing moments, maybe we can see that the message is that all of life can be sung – because song is built into everything. The people are “singing” all of their life…even their theology. Now we might disagree with some of their theology, but what if we agreed that all of life is suitable to be sung. What would that means for us. How can we sing our theology? We obviously do this with our hymns. But we also do this when our lives move in harmony with what we believe. We do this in our silence, listening for what creation has to sing to us, or just because a measure of rest is exactly what the song needs at times. We sing our theology when we joyfully live for others and when we have relationships of poetry.
Making music is essential. Experiencing music is essential. And not just any music…there is a lot of music out there that’s great to listen to. And a lot of music can lift our spirits and make us happy or allow us to feel our melancholy and grief. But not all music draws us out of secular space into sacred, transcendent space. The music and song the psalmist is talking about is extremely specific: It is song that praises God – that gives testament to who God is and our gratitude for who God is. It’s sacred music: that isn’t confined to “church” music – and some church music fails to be sacred, but sacred because it points us and others to God.
Studies show that one big reason people come to church is because they get to sing with a group. That may seem trivial or shallow and I may wish it was to hear the sermon, but think about it: While some people have opportunities to make music outside of church, most of us do not. And if we don’t have opportunities to connect with sacred song, our lives risk becoming flat and one dimensional. The “noise”, rather than the song of life will fill our ears. We will hear the whirl of cars engines rather than the roar of the sea; we will hear the impatience in people’s voices rather than the percussion of a rain storm; we will hear the anxious musings in our head instead of the prayers of the wind. For most, each week this is when we can break loose in song; this is where we can clear our ears of noise and fill them with Psalms. And the compelling thing is that it is not about professional music where I need to be good at singing or worried about who will hear me and how I will be judged. It is sacred music where I am a part of lots of voices and instruments that are merely participating in the larger song of creation.
The fact that singing draws so many of us to church tells me that the importance of that cannot be overstated. It’s visceral – it’s how we’re built…to make song, to love song. Just like the seas were created to roar and the hills are made to clap their hands.
I remember when I was on parental leave after adopting Lydia; I was with my parents up in Cedar Falls and I went to church with them. It was 2007, years into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I had just finished writing curriculum on faith and torture. For years I had struggled with the silence of the church on these issues, as if our faith had nothing to say.
I honestly don’t remember what was said that day in the sermon – please don’t tell the minister…I’m sure it was because I was distracted by my new baby. But I can remember that we sang, “The Church’s One Foundation.” Now, in general, when I just read the words of this hymn, some of it is hard for me theologically, and it doesn’t really make sense anymore in our current context. But it is, of course, a very familiar tune to this life-time church-goer. For this reason I imagine as we sang it was connecting me to something deep before I really noticed what was happening.
But, when we got to the third verse, I was swept away in the song – becoming fully aware and transformed by both the music and the words:
“Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed, yet saints their watch are keeping; their cry goes up ‘how long?’”
With the cry of the saints, “how long?” the tears welled up in my eyes. I’m not sure I really understood why. This was about churches splitting over doctrine in the 1860s. That doesn’t really capture me now. But like I said I had been thinking about the failure of church and the persistence of war and torture. The hymn was breaking free of its historical box and becoming a new song in that moment; asking a question deeply planted in my soul. And then the hymn went on:
“Mid toil and tribulation, and tumult of her war, she waits the consummation of peace forevermore;”
And now the tears were streaming down my face. The truth is, my life had become very small when I adopted Lydia. It was about bottles and vomit and doctor appointments and lack of sleep. This was my version of memos and emails. But God’s song broke in and took me to a different place. The song was old, but it was my new song in that place. I had no connection to the historical setting that gave rise to the hymn, just as I really lack connection to the historical setting of the Psalms. But it was sacred song.
And I wasn’t just crying because I thought it was all hopeless. There is lament in this hymn: The cry goes up “how long?” But there is hope and trust in God in the very next phrase: “And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song.” The morn of song. It will be a new song to God! The tears came both from sadness and from a hope that God would answer, “not much longer…in the meantime, keep singing, keep acting, keep seeking .” I felt hope because singing that song in the church, where we claim a different foundation than politics, nationalism, ethnic identity or power, it gives me hope…it calls me back to the world and to what I can do to respond. It is in church that I find my foundation – Christ – to keep me trying to be faithful even in the face of intractable problems. “Soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song.”
Sacred song celebrates human impossibilities that become God's possibilities. One of the most frequent themes of the psalms of praise is the celebration of God's reversal of the way things are: lifting up the lowly and putting down the mighty, feeding the hungry and giving sight to the blind. All human definitions of the way things have to be in this world are challenged and overturned. The melody of creation is always singing of possibility, and when we sing, when we write Psalms and make music, we too proclaim the impossible to be possible.
The beauty of Psalms is that we simultaneously sing them, and they grab us and pull us into sacred space. Even though we often feel stuck in a world without music, God will, in Brueggemann’s words, summon us to song in breathtaking ways. Hymns in church, wind in corn fields, clapping in thunder, Psalms in scripture. Breathtaking. Every week, this is a summons to song –worship is a call to give thanks for God’s goodness and bounty. The music is our lament, our gratitude, our hope, our joy, our declaration of faith, and our commitment to live as faithful people. So, sing a new song to Yahweh: Because God has done marvelous, marvelous things! Amen.
