May 17, 2009 Des Moines

TEXT: Psalm 98

In the Face Of It All, a Song

There are those times so bleak and discouraged – so cotton-mouthed dry – that no matter how wide or well intentioned one opens the mouth, no sound escapes. It is a kind of verbal strangulation born of spiritual desolation. Deep and airlessly still. Nothing moves in the soul except an occasional tumbleweed of despair rolled by the occasional gust of disbelieving anger.

“What happened?”

“How could it have happened when so many were supposed to be watching?”

“How will we survive?”

“Is everything lost, or is there still some way to recover?”

“I just don’t understand.”

“How can we sing any song at all – let alone the Lord’s song – in this desolate and
very strange land?”

We open our lips, but nothing happens – certainly nothing even remotely like music. We take a deep breath, but deep down it’s shallow. For reasons we so little understand ourselves that we could hardly explain them to others, the investment portfolio remains on our internet homepage – presumably to notice even miniscule improvement – but day after day the ticker reports news steadfastly bad as the memory of better times recedes. It is an addictive sort of self-imposed torture from which we don’t seem capable of tearing ourselves away.

For others it’s a death watch they can no longer afford. Their jobs have been eliminated or their businesses have closed altogether and there are few if any prospects of another. Résumés swarm out of our mailboxes like bats from a dusky cave, but the phone never seems to ring. Savings have been devoured and the house is next to go; dreams of an easier life, just around the corner of time, now trouble our nights and weight our days and shame us with the recognition of how quickly it can all go away.

“Sing?” we retort to the Psalmist. “Why, we can hardly breathe.”

Looking back, I suppose it’s easy to recognize the signs. We got over confident. We got seduced with seemingly constant appreciation. We got a taste of having a little extra – and liked it; we watched in giddy amazement as our little fortunes steadily grew and became all too easily addicted. We wanted more, and we wanted it faster, we wanted it easier, and without inhibiting restraint. We took bigger risks. We both made and took out foolish loans that in saner times no one would have considered. We convinced ourselves that we were “bulletproof” and never considered the consequences. Like those draconian warnings detailing possible side effects of the medicines we take that we routinely ignore stuffed inside the packages because we want them to relieve our aches, we want them to restore our arteries and reduce our blood pressure and loosen our joints and surely those miseries couldn’t possibly happen to me, we turned blind eyes to the havoc we were blithely welcoming into our lives.

Some, of course, did not. Some continued on their prudent path, paying their way, doing their fair share – if not more – and feeding only modest appetites. But ours, for better and for worse, is a web of circumstance, not a landscape of autonomous and independent silos. What we do – and the choices we make – sooner or later affects each other. And if a rising tide in brighter seasons floats all boats higher, the waters that have been draining rapidly around us have run us all aground.

“Sing?” you ask, and the joke of it almost offends us with its cruelty. “Why, we have lost all sense of taste and smell and sound. What do we have left that gives us any reason to sing?”

The answer is that we have our memory, as it turns out, and our faith. We are not the first, after all, to find ourselves in hard times, and our very existence gives witness to the capacity to survive. In our own collective memory are stories of desperation far deeper than the disruptions just now choking in our throat – stories of dust and despair, to be sure, but of resilience and ingenuity no less. We are immigrants and the children of immigrants and slaves and detainees and ones who risked and sacrificed everything they had for the hope of something better for themselves and their progeny. We are not the first to struggle and be stretched by circumstances beating down upon us. Our genes are full of the inheritance of those whose own struggles eventually gave us life, and we will no doubt have lessons and strengths to pass on to those who come behind us. There is strength to gain from the stories of recent memory.

But it isn’t finally our own resilience and character resources that give us courage to hope. It has been, after all, our own foibles – our grandparents would say, “our sins” – that first inflated and then pricked this bubble that is now hemorrhaging so seemingly out of control. To be sure, we have the capacity for great imagination and ingenuity and strength to clear some fresh pathway through the pain, but we just as surely have the capacity to dig another and still deeper hole.

In the same way it was not just “bad luck,” according to the Hebrew prophets, that time and time again brought the people of God into misfortune. It was, they argued, their same capacity for arrogance and greed and self-reliance and indignity that in this later time gets us into trouble that routinely cursed and crippled them; and it was the same God who called them to repentance. It was their same convenient ability to forget the Spirit which led them out of Egyptian slavery that ultimately led to their return to slavery at the hands of the Babylonians. It was their same indifference to the ways of the Lord that brought about their detour into the ways of their conquerors. As we are prone to do, they could lament and whine and place the blame for their plight “out there” – on market forces or the faceless economy or the aggression of their neighbors – but the prophets relentlessly suggested that a more honest search could locate the source of their discomfort much closer to home.

Enter the Psalmist who confidently, valiantly urges the people to “sing a new song to the Lord.” It wasn’t for a paean to the people’s capacity for good that the psalmist was calling, but a song of trustful thanksgiving to the God who eternally keeps faith. It wasn’t for an anthem to hard work and positive thinking that the psalmist was seeking a choir, but for a hymn of praise to the God who forgives and restores and never lets go, even when it feels like all has been abandoned. If the people, like us, were having difficulty making any sound whatsoever, and any music at all forthcoming droned dirge-like in a sad and somber key, the psalmist resolutely beckoned the witness of memory – of all that God had repeatedly done and would surely do again – and urged the people to change their tune:

O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things.

His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.

He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.

All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;

break forth into joyous song and sing praises.

Praise, in other words, isn’t confined to moments looking out on blessing, but remembering blessings already witnessed we can sing our praise looking forward to it, as well. The past can inform and transform the present as we find our strength less in our own hands that failed us and more in the hands of God that save us.

That too, after all, is what the psalmist implies. The Hebrew word “Yeshuah,” which here is translated “victory,” is similarly translated “rescue” or even “salvation.” In power the creative God is victor over chaos. In power the compassionate God rescues the people from depravity and oblivion. And, as we are still in the season of celebrating, in power God saves the people from the death of estrangement – “Jesus” being a name drawn from this same word.

Our spirit, counsels the psalmist, is not dependent on our circumstance. Our mood does not have to be driven, like a slave, by events which are mercurial by nature. If the state of affairs encircling and ensnaring us leadens and poisons us with despair, the witness of God’s mighty acts before us and around us inspire us to change our tune. We are held by the God triumphant who will neither discard nor forget us. We are claimed by the God of mercy who forgives and restores and comforts and saves. Neither abandoned nor condemned, and remembering and trusting, we can “sing a new song” in the face of it all; we can shout and burst forth in glad song and hymn. And when our voices get hoarse and start to lose the beat:

the sea will roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it. the rivers will clap their hands and the mountains will join the chorus. For the Lord has come, and will surely come again...

...in power, in mercy, in saving and renewing grace.

Sing, then, a new song – not because you are blind to the woes of the world, but because you are wise to the ways of God. Sing to the Lord of all.