HOW CAN WE SING?
Community Thanksgiving Service
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Psalm 137
1 Alongside Babylon’s streams,
there we sat down,
crying because we remembered Zion.
2 We hung our lyres up
in the trees there
3 because that’s where our captors asked us to sing;
our tormentors requested songs of joy:
“Sing us a song about Zion!” they said.
4 But how could we possibly sing
the Lord’s song on foreign soil?
5 Jerusalem! If I forget you,
let my strong hand wither!
6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth
if I don’t remember you,
if I don’t make Jerusalem my greatest joy.
7 Lord, remember what the Edomites did
on Jerusalem’s dark day:
“Rip it down, rip it down!
All the way to its foundations!” they yelled.
8 Daughter Babylon, you destroyer,
a blessing on the one who pays you back
the very deed you did to us!
9 A blessing on the one who seizes your children
and smashes them against the rock!
Give Thanks
I know what some of you are thinking. Here we are for an uplifting and encouraging message of Thanksgiving and this crazy Methodist preacher read the wrong Psalm. He should have been reading Psalm 136 - “Give thanks to the Lord because he is good. God’s faithful love lasts forever!”. Instead we get the next chapter, Psalm 137, where the people are so filled with anger and vengeance that they are praying for God to kill the children of their enemies by “dashing them against the rocks.”
Back up. Start over.
The truth is there are plenty of other scriptures that would seem more appropriate for Thanksgiving. Psalm 136 uses the words, “Give Thanks”, 14 times in 26 verses. And then of course there are the New Testament commands.
Philippians 4:6
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Colossians 2:7
…having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.
Colossians 3:16-17
Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
We know that gratitude should be natural for us as Christians, and even when it doesn’t feel natural, we know scripture commands us to be thankful in all circumstances. End of story.
Except when it isn’t…
It’s easy to say to someone, “Just be thankful,” but for some that may be as foolish as trying to tell a 4 year old (or most grown men) to “just read the instructions.” Easier said than done and in some cases it may be flat out impossible. Clearly at least one of these two cannot read. Likewise, there are some who at this moment in their lives are unable to muster up the strength to get out of bed, let alone be thankful in whatever circumstances they are facing.
If you are here tonight or listening on-line and you are just not feeling the whole thanksgiving spirit or holiday cheer this week, please know two things.
First, you are not alone.
Depression rates always spike around the holidays, at least in part because the expectations to be happy and grateful are so high and it is the hardest time of year to hide.
Second, know that there is nothing wrong with you.
I have heard preachers say that thankfulness is not a feeling but a matter of obedience. God commands us to be thankful in all circumstances. Therefore not being thankful makes you a sinner.
I’m not here to argue with my colleagues in ministry, but I can say that I personally believe in a God who is far more graceful and compassionate that that. I believe God weeps with us when we are grieving as Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus. I believe God’s shoulders are broad enough to handle our outbursts of anger and frustration and I believe that God truly understands and meets us wherever we are.
Thanksgiving is kind of like those commands in scripture. We sit around the table with people we sometimes see only once a year and we are expected to say what we are thankful for. Everybody mutters some nice words about being thankful for their family or friends, but mostly we are just ready to dig into the turkey and move on to the football game or an afternoon nap.
We can’t simply guilt someone into being thankful. We might force them to say the words through gritted teeth and eye rolls, but real thankfulness must flow from the heart. And if we’re honest, our hearts are just not always in it.
How do we deal with Thanksgiving, or any other time of year, when we struggle to be genuinely thankful? It’s one thing to say the obligatory words of thanks around the table, but quite another to feel them bubbling up from the depth of our hearts. If we’re honest, there are just sometimes gratitude does not come naturally. There are times when it is extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, to sing the songs of praise to our God.
Life in Exile
That is why I began tonight not with the wonderful song of praise in Psalm 136, but with the raw and agonizing cries from exile in Psalm 137. The people of God have lost everything. They have watched their home of Jerusalem and even the Temple of God burned to the ground. They have been cast out to a foreign land with foreign gods where they don’t even speak the language. And here by the rivers of Babylon they hang up their harps and their lyres because the people are mocking them and the God of their ancestors. “Where is your God now?” they laugh. “Why don’t you sing us a song about Zion, about the great promises of the one who saved you and made you a great nation?” While we may find their prayers for such violent revenge against the children of their enemies appalling, we can at least empathize with their overwhelming and uncontrollable grief, anger, and even hatred toward those who have utterly destroyed their lives and now taunt them for believing in a God who apparently allowed it all to happen.
God’s people cry out in lament, “How can we possibly sing the Lord’s song on foreign soil?” We have all found ourselves in this place at some point in life, even if we were not altogether willing to admit it. Maybe there is someone here tonight and you moved your lips to the songs of praise we sang, but nothing came out. Maybe there is someone listening who even now is choking back tears because you feel like you have lost so much or maybe even as though God has abandoned you altogether. You try to be strong. You try to put on a happy face for your family and friends, but as soon as your head hits the pillow at night the smile cracks and you feel like a broken shell. You know you are not supposed to feel this way and you believe that God is always with you, but if you’re really honest, you’re not always sure God is listening to your prayers. Maybe you’ve felt this way for so long you’ve simply stopped praying.
There are many of course who are truly grateful. You are here with a joyful heart, excited about another Thanksgiving and Christmas season. You are praising God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and you fall asleep counting the many blessings God has poured out upon you. Even if things aren’t going so great, you have found things to be thankful for in spite of the difficult circumstances.
This is a wonderful place to be and we should indeed praise God. Thanksgiving reminds us just how beautiful it is when we all come together with grateful hearts. But no matter how good you may feel, know that there is someone near you, someone at work this week, someone at your Thanksgiving table, maybe even someone in your own home, who is crying out with sighs and groans to deep for words, “How can I sing the Lord’s songs?”
Anna McDonald reminds us of just a few of the people who don’t always seem to fit into our perfect picture of Thankfulness around the table. Does our vision of Thanksgiving…
… include Pam, the mission-minded church pillar, who recently diagnosed with cancer and racked with pain can’t get out of bed, much less join the church on Sunday morning? Does it include Wade, the gentle 96-year-old whose body is willing, but whose mind can’t remember your name or the fact that he asked you the same question five times in the last eight minutes. How do we ignore Jill, the single woman who miscarried a year ago, but is too ashamed to tell anybody even though raw grief still doubles her over, isolating her. Do we conveniently neglect congregations in places like Syria, whose people and places of worship are being annihilated.
How do we sing the Lord’s Song when our world’s violence makes any thoughts of even one peaceful Sabbath a pipe dream? When you’re in such a dark place that you wish death on somebody, maybe even yourself? When our people and communities are broken, divided by illness, grief, spite or sheer vengeance? When your own church’s communion – much less the world’s – seems impossible?
How Do We Sing the Lord’s Songs?
Melody Beattie reminds us of the beauty and power of gratitude :
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. It can turn an existence into a real life, and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
There is no question that thankfulness, no matter how difficult, can truly bring about tremendous healing. A state of gratitude does fill us with hope and allow us to live the abundant life Jesus promised for us. But cultivating such a deep sustaining spirit of gratitude is not as simple as a quick prayer at the dinner table.
How do we sing the Lord’s songs?
When we think of the favorite story of David and Goliath, we realize that as Dr. Sandy Richter puts it, “for David it didn’t matter how big the giant was, it mattered how big God was.” We are often told that we have to look beyond the giants and the storms in our lives to a God who is so much bigger and stronger and then we can give thanks. This is good advice, but it may not be the end of the process.
Cultivating a spirit of gratitude isn’t always about looking beyond our problems to a God who is somewhere out there in the universe. Sometimes we have to look deeper and closer. We must cultivate a deep rooted and daily awareness of God’s all-sustaining presence. We must entirely re-frame how we view the various circumstances in our lives. We must become fully dependent on God and one another not just to fix the problems in our lives so that we can be thankful, but to walk with us through whatever circumstances we face. We must learn to see God in the little things.
Jesus doesn’t spend a lot of time in the gospels teaching about the big things God did a long time ago like showing up in the burning bush or parting the Red Sea. The people already knew these stories well, just as we know the stories of how Jesus died for us on the cross and saved us from our sins. Of course these major acts of redemption should be enough, or so we think. But Jesus knows that there are times when those stories, no matter how true, begin to feel too big and too distant from our everyday experiences. And so Jesus reminds us not just how God showed up for his people in the big events of redemptive history, but how God is ever present in the little everyday things of life. Jesus spends much more time telling stories or parables about ordinary things that we often overlook. He shows us the God who cares for the flower and the sparrow. He shows us the God of the yeast and the mustard seed who can move the mountains. He shows us the God of a little boy’s lunch that could feed 5,000 people or the God of a widow’s tiny offering. He shows us the God who offers a cup of water to a thirsty soul and risks everything to care for his enemies. He shows us how God comes through an unwed teenage mother as a baby in a feeding trough to bring the whole world back home.
Sometimes it is difficult to be thankful because we don’t see God doing big miraculous works on our behalf, but it is easy to lose sight of all these little ways God still walks by our side. Brother Lawrence wrote about the way he often experienced God in mundane tasks like washing the dishes. In his reflections on practicing the presence of God, he writes:
The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees before the Blessed Sacrament.
Singing Together
This task of cultivating a constant awareness of God’s presence is the seed of a thankful heart, but it is not a seed which can be planted alone. We need each other to point us to God in places we so easily overlook.
As a church, we sing together because so many cannot sing alone. When your faith feels too weak, the church keeps proclaiming the faith on your behalf, lifting you up in prayer and trusting God for you even when you can’t trust God for yourself. When our faith is strong, we trust in God’s grace for others. Even in the midst of violence and suffering, we must sing all the more so that those who taunt us may see a strength greater than ourselves. When we stand in the fire like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, our thankfulness opens a window through which others can see that we do not stand alone. There is someone else in the furnace with us and his name is Jesus. As the writer of Hebrews says,
Faith is the reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.
Hebrews 11:1 (CEB)
Faith is what enables us to be thankful even for that which we cannot yet see, for we know Christ has already won the victory. This is why we gather around the table as a church. When we enter into communion with one another, we enter into the darkest places of the human soul. We are reminded of the evil which humanity is capable of as we nailed the Son of God to a cross. And yet we also find that there in the place of our greatest evil and our deepest darkness, the light of Christ shines forth and puts a new song in our hearts. It is a song of forgiveness and love that echoes forth from the cross and even from the grave. It is a song of praise and glory to the Resurrection and the Life which cannot be silenced.
When we find ourselves in dark places where it seems impossible to be thankful, those are the times we need to sing the most. When we cannot find our voice, we must gather with those who can sing for us until our cracked and broken cries are strong enough to join the chorus of the saints. For it is when we sing the songs of the Lord, when we live lives overflowing with gratitude and thanksgiving, that we reflect God’s light into the darkness.
And so as Anna McDonald says, let us…
…sing into the death-ridden places, the absence of memory and identity, into broken relationships, barren towns, and bottle-strewn back alleys, under overpasses and down empty streets. Sing, despite separation, loss, violence and pain. Sing, because Christ abolished death, the darkest place of all, and promised life!
How can we sing the songs of thanksgiving and praise to our God in this foreign land of darkness and decay? We gather together and raise our voices as one. We must sing for the ones who cannot sing. We must sing until the song becomes part of our soul, for God has given us a new song and this eternal song of life and love must be heard!