“By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Ye –ah we wept when we remembered Zion
When the wicked carried us away, in captivity
Required from us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? It’s a great question really, with a few secondary questions for us today – this first Sunday of the New Year 2010:
What is the Lord’s song?
Do we know how to sing it?
Are we in a strange land?
If so then how shall we sing this “Lord’s song in a strange land?
Over Christmas, like I’m sure many of you, my family gathered together and as often happens the stories of Christmas’ past surfaced. One of our favorites is the year my mom decided to buy us (my brother and I) a “pop” music album (yes, still in the days of the album); she went into the music store and asked what was all the rage right then. The young clerk, apparently, was showing her a few albums when she declared, “No, I think they would really like that new one by the group Boney T.” The clerk, looked puzzled and to his credit apparently did not laugh, and then his face lit up and he said, “Do you mean Boney M?” Need-less-to-say, it is a standing joke, “Boney M, Boney T, T-Bone – what are we having for supper?”
“Rivers of Babylon" is a song written and recorded by Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton of The Melodians in 1972, and popularized by the 1978 Boney M. cover version.
Jeremiah is writing at the time of the Israelite Exile, many, some believe millions of Israelites had been captured and deported by the Babylonians. Most of us in the Western world of today cannot even imagine the trauma, either of being exiled or of watching family/friends being deported, taken away to live elsewhere. Much of the book of Jeremiah is filled with doom and judgment, blame and punishment for the acts of the people for they had expected God to do something! But the expectation was not really a hope grounded in who God was, but a selfish, nearly magical, belief that God existed to serve them. They thought that the covenant relationship with God was a unilateral one in which God was obligated to take care of them no matter what they did. Too late they realized that they were wrong and that left them no hope.
It is into that context that the passage today comes. The word from God is that even though the people had abandoned God, God has not abandoned them. This is a joyful passage, with an explosion of imagery capturing hope for the future in an incarnate God who calls the people into a covenant relationship of mutuality. The experience of the listener is not just an intellectual pondering of hope but an actual incarnation of hope.
How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Jeremiah says, “This is how!”
“They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord…their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry.”
“Dancing is taken in the Bible as one of the surest expressions of joy and well-being. (Like exercise, dancing is the natural enemy of depression.) (P. 99 “Preaching the New Common Lectionary”.)
How many of you made New Year’s resolutions? How many of you have made them in the past and stuck to them? In thinking about the problem of failed resolutions I wonder if it is not so much a problem of the resolution as it is a problem of the life orientation or some might say “life-style”. We’ve heard it often around weight, dieting is not the answer but rather life-style change. I think it is also the root of the 12 step programs, without a transformation, a complete reorientation, a new and different path to walk on, the slope is slippery, old patterns, bad habits, injustice, destructive thoughts and behaviour will quickly return.
It is also the core of our gospel, we heard it today, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
It is a statement of incarnation, a place of beginning, light and new life from which we all have our being and from which we are called into being over and over through out our life. Life, death and new life – a return to the source of our incarnation in and with God.
A colleague related this experience one Sunday as a guest preacher. It was Communion Sunday and one of the servers, a woman in her mid-fifties caught his eye as she came forward to receive the elements. She was well dressed and very stately in her manner, maybe even reserved. She carried the elements with care to her station and served each person as they came forward, rather uneventful until a group of young people came in from the back and began to make their way to her station. With each young person her appearance began to change / transform, she softened and slowly tears began to fall, soon she was openly crying.
Following the service the guest minister found he could not stop himself, he found the woman and inquired, “I couldn’t help but notice this profound change or moment that you experienced with the young people in communion, what was happening?”
She told of her personal faith journey and this call that had developed in her to work with the young people of the church but how she did not feel she was gifted or called to be a youth leader. She wanted to support and encourage the work and so brought about a group of people that met every month to find ways to support the intergenerational work of the church: fund raising, advertising, resources and prayer. The group had asked at the beginning of the year that each of the young people give a picture of themselves with some things they would like prayed for written on the back.
The woman said that she had held each of these young people in prayer, in thought and in care for nearly a year and as they came forward and communed together she understood the call to be the church, in relationship together: a place of hope, peace and justice for all people.
What is the Lord’s song? – This is it, a covenant relationship, a relationship not built on fairy tale expectations but on the reality of being human and sharing the incarnational presence of God known to us through the miracle of Jesus life, death and resurrection.
Do we know how to sing this “Lord’s Song”? Yes, yes, we do. Jeremiah tells us how with the “formula” with which this entire section is introduced.
Are we in a strange land? Yes, yes very often we do find ourselves in a “strange land” a land of failed resolutions, failed beginnings, broken relationships, sweeping injustices?
Perhaps even as you launch into this New Year there are many unknowns, worries, painful places that lie ahead, unresolved. As an individual, a family, a faith community.
How shall we sing this “Lord’s song? In a strange land?
Let’s try a little exercise: close your eyes and think of home. What do you see? What do you feel? My guess is that the feelings are not neutral nor are they likely uncomplicated.
Last week I heard an interview with a photographer who had captured some very interesting images of home. Rather than go to different places and take pictures, he gathered people and asked them to close their eyes and think of home. He said their faces, every one of them, changed in some way from when they were asked to just sit and close their eyes. When each person talked about where their thoughts had taken them as they thought of “home” – the answers were varied and not all of them were positive and yet all of them somehow filled with this longing for what the word “home” seems to instinctively pull up in us – hope for a place of peace, love, joy. The photographer concluded that the faces finally had led him to believe that home is something that is somehow always within us.
We shall sing this “Lord’s Song” in a strange land because as Christians when we close our eyes and think of home we know it is here (Communion Table) in the body, in the bread of life and the cup of the new covenant we share with God, incarnate, present with and within us. When we close our eyes and think of home we are filled with the explosion of imagery: of dancing, rejoicing, crops, oil, of the bread and the cup, this community that both embodies a song of hope and calls us into the New Year to live and create the Lord’s song of hope.
Rev. Lesley Harrison
Guest Minister
Windsor Park United Church
