A New Song in Exile

Psalm 137: 1-6
Matthew 2:13-15


Rockville United Church
The Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

March 4, 2007

I want to begin by lifting up for all of us the word “song” so that we can celebrate the spiritual life, the spiritual place, that songs give us, and not only so-called sacred songs. Hence Coltrane and Ellington in our service this morning!

Now I think that this is probably a pretty safe and popular topic in this church—as I have gotten to know you!

But I have a less safe, a harder word, to add, to also lift up, and that is the word “exile.”

As you have seen, I’ve put these two words together in the sermon title: “A New Song in Exile.”

Our songs deepen, our singing is more crucial, when we recognize “exile” in our lives. And I believe, especially as we might come to understand together this word, “exile,” that it is a good word for a real experience in our lives. And so a difference is made in what we sing, how we sing, even that we sing.

Exile is our darkness.

Song is our light.

Exile is when you are not where you want to be, or where God originally intended you to be.

And song is our voiced-hope to return and to be where we belong, in body, mind, spirit, and together.

Now we all experience the ways that “songs” give us a place to be and to belong. Songs make a nearly indelible map in our minds, on our hearts, of the themes and feelings that ground us, that we hold dear.

As the town’s minister in Chester, Connecticut, I was asked, one spring, to attend the old Chester High School Alumni Reunion Lunch. The old school wasn’t even standing anymore. After I had blessed the lunch, everyone stood to sing the high school song. My luncheon companion, seated on my left, had Alzheimer’s and really couldn’t speak. She’d just been sitting there staring ahead. But when the piano hit the first notes of her old high school anthem, she rose and smiled and began to sing every word with everyone else!

From the exile of her mind and her isolation she sang herself home, I would say, to herself and to her classmates.

Songs bring us home.

The world takes us away.

Whether we are young and trying to find our place in the world, middle aged and trying to maintain and hang onto our place in the world, or growing old and while losing also remembering our place in the world—in all those places songs, secular and sacred, hearken us to our home place.

The human hope for a home and a homeland, our hope for a sacred place and a holy land, is always a hope in struggle against the world.

And so many of us who gather in such places as this come in feeling displaced or threatened by the world’s power to displace us.

Ugliness is at war with beauty, crime, terror, and disease at war with our bodies, ideologies at war with our values and beliefs. We come into a sanctuary, often, in various states of cultural and spiritual exile. The theological way this is put: where is Christ in our culture, and is our culture ever Christ-like?

And so for a song to give us a sacred place here is good. That this can happen is not so strange really. Sacred traditions as far back as hunters and gatherers used song for making sacred space. A people could live within the borders of their song lines. Wherever their holy song could be heard there they had a right to be. Songs as law. Imagine our realtors and lawyers doing title searches on song lines!

So it is a challenge to put the words “song” and “exile” together. A traditional shaman couldn’t sing his song in exile—outside of where his song lines had gone. I think we live outside our song lines a lot!

And so it is astonishing how this challenge of putting together “song” and “exile” is met in Psalm 137, our Hebrew Bible reading from this morning. These people of God have found themselves once again in exile. And yet we have their song, a psalm they wrote, most likely while in that exile. It was a temple song with no temple in which to sing it.

Now so far this sermon has been speaking from the kind of depressing background found in books like Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. This sermon, so far, has been rooted in the kinds of themes of alienation articulated by existentialists and downbeat poets. And so now this sermon turns to Psalm 137 for life and hope: a song and a place even in exile!

Isn’t it just like a preacher to turn to the Bible for help in hard times!

Of course, the Bible is full of hard times, usually a part of hard journeys.

The Exodus was the Hebrew people’s hard journey from Egyptian slavery, led by Moses into the wilderness and up to the borders of the holy land. Lent is the time of Jesus’ hard journey to Jerusalem, a journey celebrating the Exodus Passover, only without things passing over this time, but ending with Jesus facing the powers and princes of empire and religion even unto that ultimate experience of human exile, rejection and death.

A hard journey with, finally, an Easter ending.

Our children learned this morning in their lectionary Sunday school lesson of Abram’s covenant with God which led to his and Sarai’s hard journey to the Promised Land.

And so with Psalm 137: a song out of their hard exile into Babylon—recaptured, re-enslaved, most taken from Jerusalem where they had finally found a place to build a house for God. Now on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers they at first hang up their harps. For them this was called their Babylonian Captivity. And you don’t need to be a poet to get the irony that their Babylonian Captivity is now also ours. Of course Babylon is now named Iraq, and whether we stay in Iraq or do not stay in Iraq, Iraq will stay in us, for a long time, our Babylonian Captivity. That is the foremost spiritual question for us to face: can we confess that Iraq is now an imprint on our souls? There is nothing blue or red about that question and, like Lent, it only has a purple answer.

Now I have done some research on Psalm 137 and the Bible writings that predate it. And, while no Biblical scholar, I believe that it is in the Psalm that the verb “remember” first appears in the Bible. To use the word “remember’ as a spiritual action stands out as a great leap forward in the religious imagination of the Hebrew people.

Up until then they either had to follow God as God moved before them like a pillar of fire or smoke. Or prophets like Moses had to go to mountains, like Zion, to find God, hear God, make God appear as with the Ten Commandments—which they then boxed in an ark to carry around with them.

The ark is not in Babylon. And so it is by memory, memory expressed in a song, that these exiled slaves can have a sacred place with God again. The temple can be remembered and by their poetic imagination they can sing again “as if” in God’s presence, and God’s presence can travel over to them on these brainwaves, by these song lines.

Their song has a hard beginning. “We refuse to sing,” they say. And then their song has an ingenious maneuver: they make a song about their refusal to sing.

They transcend their pain by a new kind of song in exile born in stubbornness. They transcend their mocking captors by mocking them in their song. And out of that whole miserable situation, even some x-rated lyrics, God is praised once more! It’s an in-your-face by God’s grace new song, about a world that takes away our songs.

I think we kind of get something about this: isn’t transcending pain by song called the blues? Or gospel? Isn’t imitating your oppressors the soul of Jewish humor? (Could Psalm 137 be the inspiration for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, “here we are on the banks of the Euphrates using paradox, imagination and humor….Mesopotamia!”) (Nation: you heard it first here!)

I think we get a deep feeling of the exile situation we are in.

Most of us saw the picture of the two polar bears stranded on separate melting icebergs. I saw it in the Washington Post. That picture is an icon of exile. Being flooded in their own environment made the image of the stranded bears terribly similar to the ignored people on roof tops after Katrina hit. And with the new maps of the globally warmed planet such pictures represent our possible future. And if you looked closely at the picture of the two polar bears they seem to be extending their necks and raising their heads, and not towards each other but up towards the sky as if in some howl or song of their own.

I want to note here a song that was, for me, one that defined a new place in my heart and in the inner geography of my mind. It was from “West Side Story” and I clearly remember the evening coming out of the theater. I was 18. I had heard Tony singing to and then with Maria, “There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us, hold my hand and we’re half way there…”

Of course Nancy and I may be singing that song of hope again…somewhere a place for us…somewhere in Montgomery County perhaps! It’s possible.

I wanted to lift up that song and its place-giving for me. But more, I want to have us all lifted up by the awareness that here, in church, we have a song place that gives us all a spiritual place to be. Church worship.

I knew a grown and married man who started to go to church after years of not. It turned out that behind that noun “church worship” he had lost some mysterious longings, hopes and fears. He really didn’t know why he started to cry, and to cry a lot, during the singing of the hymns. Educated, even psychoanalyzed, why was this man crying as he sang?

Of course I now know why. He was missing God.

Once upon a time he had sung “There’s a place for us” and he had meant a home for him and his beloved.

Once he had sung “There’s a place for us” and he had meant black and white together.

But once a long time ago he had sung “There’s a place for us” and he actually must have meant a place for him and God to be, and a place for the people of God-and-him—to be together. And so it was for the living God and for a sacred place that he sang and cried.

There are many stories like this, of course, of people seeking and finding song places, where holiness can be, community can become, and God can dwell.

Abram and Sarai is one such story. The Babylonian Captivity another. The night flight of Mary and Jesus and Joseph is another. That last crèche-busting story—the holy family fleeing into exile—can show us how our song lines can take us to the edges, even into exile.

Now we will never stop singing. And if Mary on that donkey was anything like my mother I’m sure she hummed religious tunes all the way to Egypt! We won’t stop singing. The exiled Hebrews almost did. But like them, our songs will be sung in increasingly multi-cultural and counter-cultural ways, from the precarious and marginalized places—but that is where Jesus always was, all his life, anyway!

And so there is that song that Jesus began to sing from the Cross. There is no greater image of exile than Jesus on the Cross.

Near the end of what he called “his hour,” Jesus begins the liturgical song, Psalm 22. Jesus is only able to get through the first verse. But there he defines a place for us, a place for us with him at the foot of his Cross. Jesus’ song lines draw a circle—heard from his own dry lips. Those to whom that place was first given were his mother, John the beloved disciple, a few others, and now us, you and me…

The song place we are approaching begins with words of exile, Jesus crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?!”, the first lines of the long psalm, Psalm 22. Those are truly awe-full and haunting words.

Jesus did not begin to recite King David’s 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” as we might hope. He starts his last song from the exile place and with this song he makes it his own!

During Lent Christ calls us to many places—to Jerusalem, to the garden, to the temple, to the upper room.

Let us now come into that place, the Last Supper, Holy Communion, as we prepare to finish the hard journey of Lent: to be, first, with Jesus at the foot of the Cross and, then, gathered again after the empty tomb, singing the hymns of Easter.