Singing God’s Song in a Foreign Land

Scriptures: Psalm 137, II Timothy 1:3-7, 13-14

“By the Waters of Babylon” is a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet that I had to read in high school.  Maybe it was assigned reading for some of you, as well.  The title is obviously taken from this 137^th Psalm that we read this morning.  Benet’s story takes place in a post-apocalypse period – although we don’t realize that until well into the story.  John, the young protagonist, is on a journey to find what he believes to be the Place of the Gods.  Instead he finds a destroyed New York City with the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge falling into the waters.  Wikipedia notes that Benét wrote the story in response to the April 25, 1937, bombing of Guernica, in which Fascist military forces destroyed the majority of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.  Of course, Picasso made this event famous with his painting of Guernica, which even today has the power to terrify when viewed.

That period of the late 1930s, leading up to the start of World War II, was a time of ever increasing hostilities and fears among the nations.  But then again, you might say, isn’t it ever thus?  Speaking of the end times in Matthew, chapter 24, Jesus says to his disciples, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars… For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom…..”  No wonder some messianic prophets like to cry, “The end is near!” – what Jesus is describing has been happening in almost every period of human history.  But Jesus also says in this same context:  “see that you are not alarmed.”

Benet took his title from this Psalm because it reflects the Israelites’ sense of horror at being displaced into a whole different culture and community, along with their lament over the destruction of their own city of Jerusalem.  The people of Babylon mock them:  “Oh, c’mon, sing us one of your quaint songs so we can laugh at you some more.”  And the people despair:  “How…how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”  How indeed?  And such despair leads to these horrific images and hateful desires:  “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”  Ugh.  I don’t even want to picture that.  As Kate Huey notes, “We often read edited versions that leave those verses out, which is one way to approach the text.”  However, she then goes on to say, “But could there be another way to read it, and to hear it, and even to pray it?  After all, the psalms are prayers that come from deep within the very human hearts of a people who knew what it was to suffer and to question, to believe and then to doubt, to feel loss and devastation, rage and a desire for revenge.  Aren’t those all just as much at the heart of the human experience as feelings of joy, gratitude, and praise?  And isn’t prayer the place and the way we can take those feelings, for better or worse, to the God who knows our inner hearts better than we do ourselves?”

Moreover, the feelings being expressed in this verse are suggestive of what many of us felt about Muslims following 9/11.  When we feel such a sense of displacement, as the Israelites did in Babylon, as so many of us did as we watching those towers burning and collapsing, the human impulse is to lash out and to find someone – or someones – to lash out against – even if these might be “little ones” whom we want to dash against the rocks.

The foreigner.  And the fear of the foreigner.  It’s even an ugly-sounding word, isn’t it?  We are oh, so suspicious of those who come across as “foreign” to us – of people, as in the song lyric from “South Pacific”, “whose eyes are ugly made, and people whose skin is a different shade.”  It always amazes me (and somewhat depresses me) when budget discussions are held in Congress that some of the fiercest debates are over foreign aid – even though it is such a minuscule part of the federal budget.  But let us not forget that you and I are foreigners to the vast majority of the world’s peoples.  And sometimes we don’t come across so well when we are there in those foreign lands – there was even a book written about this several years back called The Ugly American.

In the midst of all this enmity between peoples and nations the church is foolish enough to believe that we can celebrate our oneness across the face of all the earth on this one Sunday through the simple act of eating bread and drinking wine.  Beginning at the International Date Line and for a continuous 24-hour period, Christians will fly in the face of all that separates us as foreigners to one another and say by this act of communion with God and with one another that we refuse to be foreigners.  We will find a way to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.

The question, as always, is how?  And for the beginning of an answer to that we turn to this disciple of Paul writing from prison to his young friend in the faith, Timothy.  The disciple starts out by calling up the faith of forebearers – Timothy’s grandmother, Lois, and his mother, Eunice.  This is a helpful way of reminding us to venerate our ancestors – nearly all of whom were at one time foreigners to this land (unless your ancestry happens to be Native American).  In this way we begin to experience and appropriate for ourselves what the disciple of Paul calls “the gift of God that is within you.”  That gift includes the power to see the one we might initially have called the foreigner with new and accepting eyes.  It is a gift that calls forth the song that is inside us when fear of the foreign threatens to overwhelm us.

In the first letter that this disciple of Paul had written to Timothy, which we used as the basis for our sermon last week, he writes in the fourth chapter, “Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given you through prophecy with the laying on of hands…..” (4:14)  Just like each one of us who received such a gift through our baptism, Timothy now has a spirit-empowering gift.  The disciple reminds him of this in our text when he says, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands…..”  And he concludes with the key text for us:  “…for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” (1:7)

Do you think of yourself as a coward?  No, didn’t think so.  Here’s one place where I believe the New Revised Standard Version missed out in changing a word that was translated in the Revised Standard Version as “timidity”.  Now, that we can identify with a bit more.  Think of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz — wringing his tail — whimpering — jumping in fear at his own weak attempts at a roar – who nevertheless discovers that he does have a power within him when put to the test.

There are times when we don’t want to put ourselves out there, especially when someone is railing against “those foreigners” and reeling off what we know in our heart-of-hearts to be half-truths or downright distortions (something akin to all these political ads we’re seeing as we get within six weeks of the election).  But the disciple of Paul here calls us, as he does Timothy, not to give in to that spirit of timidity.  Instead, we are to reach back into ourselves, just like the Cowardly Lion, and experience “a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

The Greek word translated here as “power” is dunamis, from which we get the word “dynamite”.  When we know the power of the spirit it blasts through all of the bondages that hold us back in timidity.  We experience the power to choose what is right and to refuse what is wrong.

The essence of love is to genuinely care for those around us.  This disciple of Paul, even though he was writing from a prison cell, does not bemoan his own fate but shows his concern for Timothy that he might, as the last verse of our text urges, “Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.” (1:14)

Self-discipline is, in its essence, sound judgment.  Have you ever gotten one of those e-mails about someone who has died in Africa and the executor of this incredibly large estate worth millions is just looking for some reliable person here in the US to channel all that money through in a way that promises you’ll end up with all kinds of cash?  I’ll bet everyone here who has e-mail has gotten one of those at one time or another.  The first time I got one, some years ago, I was tempted to respond, until wiser heads prevailed and showed me what a scam it was.  Ever since, of course, I’ve just automatically deleted them.  That’s how we come to having sound judgment, to having self-discipline – feeling the temptation but then realizing how wrong-headed it really would be to follow through with that attractive possibility.  Power is the ability of God’s Spirit flowing through us.  Love is the motivation.  Discipline is the self-control to restrain ourselves until we’re sure that we’ve heard from God.  Together they keep us from falling back on a spirit of cowardice or timidity.

I want to share a story with you that relates to singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.  In the summer of 1961, following my first year in seminary, I was in France and got involved in an adventure of bring Angolan students out of Portugal and into France.  This was shortly after the start of the war of revolution in Angola, and these students were the future leadership of their country.  They were afraid that they would be sent back to Angola to fight against their own countrymen.  As I and my American compatriots drove them across the north of Spain toward a welcoming France, their fear was palpable – exacerbated by the difficulty of communication, since my French was weak and their English nearly non-existent.  Indeed, they had cause to be afraid, for we wound up in jail in San Sebastian, Spain, and it looked for awhile that they would all be sent back to Portugal to stand trial.  But thanks to some governmental interventions all went well, and we were finally across the border and sitting down to lunch in a dining room in a small hotel in the quaint little French town of Bidart.  For the first time they realized that they were truly free, and spontaneously they began to sing for us, the Americans, the Angolan freedom songs that are so similar to the ones we have all heard from South Africa.  They had found their way to move past the bondage that is the Psalmist’s lament and truly to sing songs of freedom – which is the Lord’s song – in a foreign land.  It was one of the most incredible emotional experiences I have ever known.

As we come together around the Lord’s Table to experience communion with our fellow Christians from around the world, may we hear all of their songs and send out our own to them.  And in the glory of that singing may the word “foreign” finally be expunged from our vocabulary.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

Singing God’s Song in a Foreign Land (Psalm 137:1-9, 2 Timothy 1:3-7, 2 Timothy 1:13-14)

Psalm 137

137:1 By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
3 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

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

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock! (ESV)

2 Timothy 1:3-7

3 I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. 4 As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy. 5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. 6 For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, 7 for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. (ESV)

2 Timothy 1:13-14

13 Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 14 By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. (ESV)

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