God's Song in a Strange Land (A Sermon from First Church in Cambridge)

First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
3 October 2004

Daniel Smith

God's Song in a Strange Land

Those of you who were here for either or both of the last two Sundays know that we've been dealing with some hard scriptural texts. The lectionary readings for the past two weeks have been two of Jesus' most confounding parables. They have invited us to stretch and exercise our minds and hearts, and to wrestle with questions of whether God has mercy for the rich or for the dishonest among us. We had to engage in a sort of mental and spiritual gymnastics just to find the good news in those parables. While that kind of exercise may well leave us with a more muscular faith, I for one am delighted to say that the texts we have before us today offer at least a little respite. Today, rather than cryptic stories which invite any number of interpretations, we hear instead the beginning of a song, and the beginning of a letter. The first: Psalm137. The latter: Paul's Second Letter to Timothy.

The first was written as a lamentation, a song that cries out to God from a place of captivity and a place of grief. The Psalmist captures the tears of a community in exile, one that was looking back across the rivers that separated them from the Promised Land of Zion. Psalm 137 is a song that bears the memory of a once familiar place, and a once familiar freedom. But the harps are now hung on the willows trees. Their captors torment them. Promised Land, you say? Freedom, you say? Show us. Better yet, sing it—we could use a good chuckle watching these homeless souls singing their little ditties about their spiritual and geographic home. Though the Psalm itself has been sung in worship ever since, the question nonetheless resonates in plain speech: How do we sing the God's song in a strange land? It resonates for all who feel they live their lives and their faith in a sort of exile. The song may even resonate for us when we realize that we live in a land that is far from that Promised Land. We can come to this sanctuary week after week, and sing God's songs here, and even sing them beautifully. But, how many of us know how to sing these songs and share their meaning, without shame or reservation, beyond the walls of the church and in a secular world that may sometimes mock our faith and our hope in God's promises to us?

If the lament of Psalm 137 gives us a question—"how do we sing God's song in a strange land?"—I believe that Paul, who is writing from a strange and estranged place of prison, gives us an answer, in the form of a letter. Paul knew how to sing God's song in a strange land, and we can learn from his example. Having read and re-read the opening lines of Paul's Second Letter to Timothy this week, I am most struck by the warmth and tenderness of its tone. Paul is writing to someone he loves, a dear companion in some of his travels, about something that he loves. He pens these lines from prison with an awareness that he is about to die. Towards the end of this letter, Paul says: "As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come." Paul finds no cause for alarm in his impending death, or in his current state of imprisonment. His faith and courage in God's abiding and eternal love, and his profound sense of God's purpose in his life and in the world, are resolute. He knows that he and that his readers are trying to bear witness to Christ's message of inclusive love in a strange land. He writes to Timothy in order to pass on a clear expression of the Christian faith. He writes knowing that Timothy will recognize this faith by remembering the faith that lived in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. He writes with a reminder to Timothy to rekindle the gift of God that is within him. He writes to offer Timothy courage as he proclaims the sound teaching that he has heard through the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Both of these texts invite us to consider the spiritual practice of proclamation, or testimony. How do we express our faith in the world? How do we proclaim the gospel here at church and outside these doors? How do we testify to God's activity in our lives to those both within and outside of this community? We do so in church, by reading and proclaiming the gospel as it is written in the bible, as well as through our liturgy, song and prayer. Some of may do so through various ministries of teaching, healing or service here at the church and in the wider world. We are quick to think about putting our faith into action, but proclamation calls us not only to action but to speech. Many of us in the liberal church clam up when asked to talk about our faith in public. Again I ask, how do we testify? How do we bear witness to Christ's gospel through words? I fear our silence on these matters is precisely what is allowing our brothers and sisters of the religious right to build and maintain such a grasp on the religious, and even political imagination, of our country. How do we proclaim our faith?

The church has historically answered these questions, at least in part, through the proclamation of creeds—the Nicene Creed, the Apostle's Creed, or the Heidelberg Catechism. No doubt many of you have at some point been asked to recite one these creeds when joining a church as a means of proclaiming your Christian belief, identity, and membership in the church. Some would say that a part of the reason why conservative churches are booming is precisely because they have a higher bar for membership. They may use some updated creeds, no matter how bad the theology may be. While our beloved United Church of Christ affirms many of the historic creeds of the church, we are a non-creedal church. We consider such creeds as testimonies of faith as opposed to tests of whether one is a Christian or not.

Diana Eck, in her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras offers an even fresher perspective on creeds, worth quoting as some length. She writes: "Credo is the word with which the great creeds of early Christendom begin. 'I believe . . .' we say. [Yet] the Latin credo means literally [get this] 'I give my heart'." She continues:¹

The word believe is a problematic one today, in part because it has gradually changed its meaning from being the language of certainty so deep that I could give my heart to it, to the language of uncertainty so shallow that only the 'credulous' would rely on it. Faith, as we have seen, is not about propositions, but about commitment. It does not mean that I intellectually subscribe to the following lists of statements, but that I give my heart to this reality. To say "I believe in Jesus Christ" is not to subscribe to an uncertain proposition. It is a confession of commitment, of love. How is it that the vibrance of love language and heart language became starched and stiffened over time into the language of dogma?

I think Eck puts a finger on precisely why we may find it hard to sing God's song and to proclaim our faith outside of church? If we start talking about our faith in conversations around the water cooler, or at the soccer field, or when we are out at lunch with a few un-churched friends, we fear coming across as dogmatic or even credulous. People are likely to ask us what we believe. They may however unwittingly be testing us based on what they think it means to be a Christian. We find ourselves facing an invisible gauntlet of questions that can often distract us from the heart of the matter, namely that we have chosen to give our hearts to God. I've run the gauntlet many times, say at parties with more secular minded peers and college friends who find about what I do for a living. They have their opinions. Of course, I have mine. What is too often lost in this exchange of opinions and beliefs (and I'm only beginning to take responsibility for it) is the opportunity to say the simple words: I love God. I adore God. When we neglect that language of the heart and stay in that realm of ideas, when our conversations about faith sound more like a discourse than say, the lyrics of a song or the lines of a letter to a friend, our proclamation falls flat. God is not an idea. God is a reality that requires our love and devotion and adoration and even our proclamation to be all the more real in our lives and in our world. Like the velveteen rabbit, we are loved into reality, by God. In a similar way, we have to love God into reality, at least into the reality of our day-to-day lives and conversations.

If you feel like you might struggle to proclaim to the world your love for God, imagine it in the way that I once heard the great preacher and theologian, Krister Stendahl, put it. When we tell a partner "I love you" it does not mean we have systematically surveyed every other person in the world and that our partner is the best. The same is true of God. When we say to God, or to Jesus, "I love you" we are not saying we have an exclusive claim on the truth—that Jesus is the only way for everyone—but rather, more simply, that Jesus is the one to whom we as Christians choose to give our hearts.

To be clear, proclamation is not proselytizing or telling others what to believe. Proclamation is not even pronouncement, as in a pronouncement of our own beliefs. Proclamation, at it bests, is sharing with others our love for and our adoration of God who lives and moves and has being inside of me, and of you, and of every person in the world, and in all of creation. Seen in this light, proclamation is a tender affair of heart, and to share it may even require a tender tone, one that is softer and warmer than what may come across when we are sharing our ideas or opinions about our faith.

How do we sing God's song in our strange land? I turn once more to the proclaiming words of Paul. Hear them as if it were a dear friend whispering some of their final words to you. To my beloved Timothy:

I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on my hands, for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling."

The gift of God is within you! Rekindle its fire!

God's spirit moves through human touch, through the laying on of hands!

Do not be ashamed of the testimony about Jesus.

Join together in suffering for the gospel.

Rely on the power of God for it alone will save and transform you.

We have been given a holy calling.

Indeed we have been given a holy calling, to proclaim the good news of God's love of us and of our love of God.

Today is World Communion Sunday. Christians all over the world are remembering this day the one whose life—in every thought, in every word, in every deed—was lived as a testimony and as a proclamation to God's love. Christ proclaimed God's love for us and his love for God with every possible tenderness, even and most especially at mealtime, where he gathered among friends. Are there differences of opinion even amongst Christians about what communion means? You bet. Are their gifts of God within each and every person who comes to the table, and do we come together spirit of God's love? Yes. This table invite us to set aside our differences of belief and opinion and share in a common language of love, proclaiming together that we give our hearts and bodies to God in Christ as Christ broke his heart and body for us.

I leave you with yet one more piece of encouragement as we may go forth from this day, as followers of Jesus who proclaim and to testify and to speak out our relationship with God. It is taken from the ecumenical community at Iona in Scotland.

God to enfold us, God to surround us; God in our speaking, God in our thinking; God in our life, God on our lips; God in our souls, God in our hearts.

May God be for us not only in our thinking, but in our speaking as well. May God be for us not only in our lives, but on our lips as well. May God be not only in our souls, and our hearts but we may recognize the gift of God in every soul and in every heart.

Amen.

¹ Diana L. Eck, Encountering God, A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 95-96.