Singing God’s Song in a Foreign Land

Psalm 137; Matthew 5:13-16

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

January 30, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“You are the salt of the earth…” Matthew 5:13a

Today we continue on the theme “Holding Faith in a Foreign Land.” Last week we suggested that any place without God is foreign and any place with God is home. But we also suggested that grief is a sign that all is not well. Because we are human, grief is a factor in human life. But grief also is the beginning of new perspective and so, ironically, grief can be the mechanism to move us home to God as we move through life on earth. In other words, grief, by itself, is not a sign of estrangement from God, but it is a sign that all is not well and that a new connection to God is needed through new perspective to heal that condition. Crying is natural and difficult. We all do it. But it can always be a prelude to something new and good.

Today we move from crying to singing. We move from crying to singing, but to get there we have to stop off at a place called “angry.” How can we sing when we are not in the right place, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically? We are introduced to this theme through Psalm 137. We are familiar with the beauty of the beginning lines – “by the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” The image of the rivers of Babylon is a reference to the Exile of the people of Judah in 587 BCE. Zion is a reference to Jerusalem. Babylon was foreign territory. Jerusalem was where they belonged. This all seems quite serene, sad and poignant. It’s that way through verse 6. But we must read the entire piece, which is almost never done in Christian worship. We must read it because the final verses reveal the actual rage underneath the entire piece. The last verse, “happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” is meant to let us know just how angry the writer of this piece was. He or she might have said, “How can I say something that will let people know how angry I am to be here in this foreign place?” The image of violence to little children succeeds, I think, in letting us know just how much anger is contained in these verses. In other words, the exiles weren’t just sad—they were very, very angry and they were angry because their government had failed them and in failing them become vulnerable to the imperial forces of Nebachadnezzar’s Babylon. If we don’t read these final verses, we can keep their pain at arm’s length and misunderstand the intent of the psalm. But if we do read them, we can conclude truthfully, that anger is also an important sign that all is not well.

Anger is also an opportunity to take a different course toward healing and hope. Not only that, if we don’t take anger as an opportunity to take a different course toward healing and hope, it can eat at us until we are destroyed. Anger is both wonderful in its potential for healing, and, at the same time, it has the potential to destroy us if we don’t make use of the opportunity.

If you can stop to think about all the things that make you angry and about the way you feel when that happens and about how you handle it—does it become an opportunity or does it drag you down?—you know how hard this is. We all like to avoid conflict. We all would rather just cruise—at least most of the time. What would turn that around? How could we deal appropriately with the things that make us angry and then sing in tough times?

In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount, we hear that we are salt and light. What is Jesus saying? Salt is something that keeps other things from spoiling. At least that was the way in Jesus’ day. And, if it can’t do that anymore, it is no good. Perhaps Jesus was saying that we are the agents of keeping things on track, from drifting. He confirms that by saying we must allow our lights to shine. This is how we are salt.

The history of people is the story of trial and error. We succeed. We fail. We want to say yes to God, to help with moral issues. We want to work for human and civil rights for everyone, for a clean environment for an end to war, for a positive future. But we are human and although we do try we do not always succeed.

One of the things that makes saying yes to God so difficult is that God’s purposes are often profoundly countercultural. So saying yes because it goes against the cultural tide can require incredible courage. For example, how often in the history of the Christian church has the church challenged the status quo. While there have been a few times—we think of Martin Luther King’s ministry for example, by and large the church has been a supporter of the status quo. David McCracken, in his book The Scandal of the Gospels suggests that the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, would have said that Christendom has rejected Christianity. Two thousand years of Church History contains precious little advancing of the gospel. The substance of the gospel has to do with love and with what love causes us to do—to cooperate, to have compassion, to be reconciled to our enemies, to forgive them and to do justice. While this may seem an outrageous statement, I believe firmly that it is true. We Christians have yet to claim our moral authority. Amos Wilder who taught at Harvard Divinity School suggested that the Sermon on the Mount from which today’s gospel reading is taken, says “there has been a tendency to water down or domesticate the Sermon on the Mount, or, on the other hand, to count it irrelevant or impracticable. So being salt is very difficult.

What this is all leading to is the fact that wherever salt is needed, wherever someone or something is needed to keep things on track, that is a foreign land. But we tend toward complacency and need, always, something to get our attention, something like crying or anger.

That’s why I like the words to Huddy Leadbetter’s song, “The Midnight Special.” “Well you wake up in the morning, you hear the ding-dong ring. You go marchin’ to the table, you see the same dang thing. You go marchin’ to the table, knife, a fork and a pan. And if you say anything about it, you’re in trouble with the man. This is a blues song and the amazing thing is that someone is singing it. If ever there was a song that indicated that all is not well, it is a blues song and yet people are able to sing. My take on this is that without despair there would be no subject for this song, but without hope we couldn’t sing it. Another way to say this is that it is faith, the belief that God intends healing for all of creation and that in our saying yes to God we can help with that.

It is hard to sing when we are angry. We have many reasons to be angry, just as we have many reasons to cry. But these things can lead us to a new place when we realize that God intends us to keep things on track in creation. The sense that this is possible is one of the causes of faith and faith gives us hope and hope makes us sing. Next week we will focus on faith. In the meantime, it is my privilege to share with you a prayer that was written last week during the sermon by Mr. Tim Johnson. I was very moved by it. Let us pray: “We are together today to seek out the Lord, to say yes to love and forgiveness, to want to know who our neighbors are, and know where Jesus is, to stand up to woe and grief. We encourage each other to go and find what you want us to find. But we must remember that God is always with us. Amen.”