A Faith With Wings

February 11, 1996

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Scripture:  “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Psalms 137:6

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Do you know this old Biblical question? Does it ring a bell?

It’s the question of a refugee, perplexed and bitter, hundreds of miles from home, eating out his heart in bewildered despair.... “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

The real theme, of course, the deeper, underlying theme is RELIGIOUS MATURITY. That’s what it’s really all about.

Do we have a faith big enough to meet changing situations? Do we have a faith with wings, as it were, a moveable faith, a portable faith, one that can adapt to the new and the unusual.

Do we have a faith we can take with us anywhere, wherever we go, or is it hopelessly anchored to a particular set of circumstances?

These old Hebrews back in Bible times had to deal with this, and so, I suspect, do some of us.

Let’s start with the background, the setting of this old Psalm. It comes out of that period of Hebrew history known as the EXILE.

The year was 586 B.C., big big year in the Bible. The word was out, across the Middle East, KEEP YOUR EYE ON NEBUCHADNEZZAR.

He was the one to watch, the boy with the future....All the smart money was moving in his direction. Even his name has a kind of pizzaz about it---NEBUCHADNEZZAR, It’s just fun to say, and it absolutely reeks with oriental splendor and viciousness. When the movie about him comes out, I think Jack Nicholson will get the casting call for the lead.

Well, he was something special. At the death of his father, he ascended the throne of Babylon, and immediately TOOK CHARGE. I mean, with a vengeance. He swept across the Fertile Crescent with fire in his eyes...through Nineveh, and Carchemish, and Aleppo...all the way to the Mediterranean, pillaging, looting, burning...cutting a swath of destruction no defensive force in sight could withstand.

AND THE CITY OF JERUSALEM MADE THE MISTAKE OF TRYING TO HOLD OUT AGAINST HIM. You can read about it in 2 Kings, and in the Book of Jeremiah.

Jerusalem itself, the Golden City, pride and promise of the Hebrew dream...the city Isaiah earlier said would never fall...Jerusalem itself crumbled before his invincible army. Even the Temple, Solomon’s Temple, in all its vaunted glory, was reduced to rubble...not one stone left standing on another.

And the people, the citizens, those who were left alive, were herded away ignominiously into exile, across the desert, to the barren banks of the Babylonian canals.

And there they are...can you picture it? A pitiful, motley, ragged little band of refugees, miles and miles from where they started, browbeaten, frustrated, homesick, miserable...completely cut off, they feel, from their land, from their groves, from Park Avenue, from their Temple...and now, even, from their God. There’s surely no greater scene of dejection in the entire Old Testament panorama.

And then to top it all off, what’s this----a Squad of Babylonian soldiers comes swaggering by, probably off duty, and probably drunk...and there’s something in them that can’t pass up the temptation to heckle an underdog....and here’s the all-time favorite underdog of the centuries. Anti-Semitism, that cruel, ugly blight on the character of humankind, has roots that go back a long way.

“Hey, come on”, one of them yells, after a few minutes of jeering and name calling, “Come over here.... Come on, sing us a song. Entertain us with a little Jewish music.

Sing us a religious song.... Tell us about your God and how powerful He must be to have gotten you into this mess.”

And on and on they go...playing, prodding, pushing, provoking, the way bullies typically do, until finally a thin wail of something resembling music is by duress forced out of their helpless captives.

Well, the Jews never forgot that experience. They never got over the humiliation of it.... The Jewish people have long memories....

It became scarred, seared in their consciousness....It became a part of their collective memory, stored away in the annals of their heritage.

AND SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, REMEMBERING, WROTE A POEM ABOUT...a Psalm, if you please, that has come down to us through the years---“They that carried us away captive, required of us a song.

They that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion’.” Then follows these sad, almost pathetic words that make up our text: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

I read this passage once in the presence of a group of Cuban exiles in Miami, and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house....When you’re a refugee, you can identify with this.......

Well, that’s the background. That’s the setting of the stage. Now let’s look at the experience itself. There are two things I want to say about this old story and about this text...two things, AND THEY SEEM TO BE CONTRADICTORY. We can look at it from two different perspectives and I think we can find something worthwhile in both.

1) In the first place, I think we have to say, quite honestly, that there is a sense in which this passage represents religious immaturity. I think you have to say that. On one level, at least from our perspective, there’s no question but that it represents naivete, even childishness. How can you escape it?

The Hebrews back then, like most people back then, had the rather primitive idea that their God was somehow attached pretty permanently to a place. It’s not a very sophisticated idea, by our standards. Great parts of the Old Testament are not very sophisticated. You have to remember that when you read it.

But this is how they understood it. They thought God was circumscribed by geography, was limited in scope and jurisdiction. Other people had their gods in other places...they thought that when you left the country, you left your god behind.

Remember the little boy whose father was President of the local Chamber of Commerce? One night they asked him to say the blessing over the meal. He bowed his head and prayed, “God is good, God is great, clean across the Sunshine State.”

Well, that’s all right. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just not big enough. It doesn’t take in enough territory. AND THAT’S PRECISELY THE TROUBLE THESE PEOPLE WERE HAVING.

Their concept of God was too limited, They didn’t have a faith with wings. They simply couldn’t conceive that Yahweh could be available anywhere beyond those familiar Palestinian hills where they were used to worshipping Him.

In their minds He was so tied to the Temple, and the ritual, and the priesthood, and the particulars of the faith, that when those went, their faith collapsed with them. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

GOD DOESN’T LIVE HERE IN THIS CRAZY, FLAT COUNTRY. If He’s living still at all, He’s back there on Mount Zion, amid the rubble and devastation of the wrath of Nebuchadnezzar.

Sure, it’s crude and primitive....Of course, it’s naïve.... We’ve come a long way from that early immaturity. BUT LET ME ASK YOU. Are we in a position to be too condescending? Think about it a minute. Let’s be careful before we smirk too freely at their lack of sophistication.

 I wonder how many of us realize just how much our concept of God is influenced by geography, how much our ideas of Him are molded and shaped by environment? I wonder how many of us have let the trappings of religion, the details, the non-essential accoutrements of the faith get in the way so that they become a substitute for the real thing? MAYBE IT HAPPENS MORE FREQUENTLY THAN WE KNOW.

Here’s a student who grows up in a small town where the population is largely homogenous, and the outlook is largely provincial....

All his life, through high school, he drinks in that culture, and just accepts its values without examination. WHAT REASON TO QUESTION IT? This is his world. He doesn’t really know there is any other.

But then, one day, he goes off to college, and finds himself immersed in the complexities of another world...new ideas sweep over him, new concepts, new insights...and his mind begins to soar.

These are things he’d never dreamed of.... How do I relate it to what I’ve always assumed?

And slowly, or maybe even cataclysmically, he begins to examine his old religious concepts, the ones he grew up with, without ever really questioning. He begins to look at them in the light of the new knowledge he has obtained.

There are some discrepancies here....How does he adjust to his new world? How does he fit these two together? Does something have to give? Can you believe and still maintain intellectual integrity? What happens to his faith while he’s working it out?

How many times do you suppose something like that has happened to a college freshman? “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Or again. Here’s a girl who grows up in a devout family where the Church plays a large part, and where regular attendance at Sunday School and worship is accepted as a matter of course....

She grows and becomes an active member of the youth group, and helps with Bible School, and sings in the choir. It all seems perfectly natural and perfectly good.

But then one day she leaves home to go to the Big City to work. How different! How radically different. Hardly anybody she meets seems interested in the United Methodist Church. They seem to have their priorities somewhere else. Saturday night seems a lot more important to them than Sunday morning.

Why not just sleep late Sunday morning, she says to herself....Who would know? Who would care? What difference does it make whether I worship this week or not? And as she stands there amid the twinkling lights and myriad opportunities of Big City life, struggling with who she is, and what she ought to do, that little hometown choir seems awfully far away.

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Or one more, another example. Here’s a woman who has lived maybe 50 years, maybe 60 in a relatively sheltered environment. She came from a good home, was raised in a good church, married a good man...her whole life has been basically serene and peaceful...you might even say uneventful.

AND SUDDENLY, WITHOUT WARNING, DISASTER STRIKES...a tragedy enters the picture.... Maybe an illness, a death, an accident, a financial setback...maybe a combination of these. And almost in the twinkling of an eye, everything is changed.

Oh, the house may still be there, and the street, and the trees...outwardly you can’t see any difference, but she’s living in a different world, just as surely as if she’d been transferred to another planet. Now SHE has to make all the decisions...BY HERSELF.

She’s alone, for the first time in her life, new responsibilities, new adjustments, new everything...insurance papers, health care...everything. AND WHAT HAPPENS TO HER FAITH IN A SITUATION LIKE THAT? Where does she turn?

How does she cope? How easy it would be to become cynical or disillusioned under those circumstances. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Well, one more “for instance”, maybe even closer home for some. Here’s a couple moved down to Florida to retire after a career of hard labor up North. For 40 years, the Biblical “40 years”, they battled snow, and traffic, and mortgage payments.... They raised their children, served in the PTA, did all you have to do, and now they’ve earned their day in the sun. They’re entitled to it. And they move down with all the expectation of living it up for a change.

Yet after a few months, they find it isn’t quite as idyllic as they thought it would be. You can’t play golf every day....not even--- well....You can’t fish incessantly...sometimes it rains, sometimes nothin’s bitin’...and the BUGS.

Furthermore, the kids are so far off, If only we could see them more often. If only we could see the leaves change color in the fall. And don’t Southern people talk funny...and EAT funny. Who ever heard of putting salt and butter on grits? Who ever heard of GRITS? Even the Church...oh, it’s nice, all right. And the people are friendly enough, I guess. But it’s just not like old Bethel, or Mount Zion, or Wesley Memorial, where we grew up, and knew everybody’s name....

Do you think we’ll ever feel at home here? “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Now, please...please. These are not true stories, at least they’re not literally true. I made them up. They’re not about specific people, they’re about what can happen, and what sometimes does happen when our faith is too narrowly localized, when our religion leans too heavily on the crutches of home, or environment, or early training.... WHEN OUR GOD ISN’T BIG ENOUGH TO MEET THE DEMANDS OF CHANGING SITUATIONS.

It happened to the Hebrews in Babylon, and because they didn’t have a faith with wings, a faith they could take with them, the Lord’s song was muted at the very time they needed it most.

2) Ah, but look! Turn it around now. Let’s turn it over to the other side. Let’s come at it from the opposite direction.

Part Two, and this won’t take as long, I promise.

If there is a sense in which this passage expresses religious immaturity, isn’t there also a sense in which it expresses an insight of the highest and profoundest order?

FOR ISN’T THERE A SENSE IN WHICH GOD’S PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LIVING IN A STRANGE LAND? When has it ever been otherwise? When has there ever been a really perfect environment for the cultivation of the faith?

Has any generation of Christians in the long sweep of history known such a luxury?

The first Christians, the first generation lived in a strange land...you better believe they did... plopped down in a sea of paganism, trying to survive in a flood of hostility...sometimes they were almost overwhelmed.

THAT WAS ALIEN COUNTRY, almost completely inhospitable to the singing of the Lord’s song.

So was 18th Century England, when John Wesley lived. One of his biographers reports that the taverns of London in that day used to display signs advertising, “Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for tuppence”.

THAT WAS THE CLIMATE, the environment out of which the Wesleyan Revival emerged. The Revival Wesley wrought didn’t come because of the land, it came in spite of it.

You see, it’s always been this way. The “strange land” phenomenon is no new experience for people of faith. It’s been part of the given, as it were, for faith people through the ages.

And maybe this is worth pondering when you begin to get overly depressed about deteriorating conditions around you----I’m not plugging deteriorating conditions, now...don’t hear me wrong, but I believe this is important to remember: THE CHRISTIAN FAITH HISTORICALLY HAS NEVER BEEN MORE EFFECTIVE AS A CONSTRUCTIVE FORCE FOR CHANGE THAN PRECISELY WHEN IT WAS LEAST POPULAR AND MOST IN THE MINORITY.

God’s people, in one important sense, are always in a strange land, and maybe, come to think of it, this is really what it means to be a Christian.

It means to have an allegiance that transcends what is finite and transitory....

It means to belong to something bigger than mere party, or organization, or club.

It means to love something more than country, or region, or even home.

It means to believe in something beyond the horizon, even if it doesn’t exist to serve you.

It means to be a pilgrim, a sojourner, an itinerant, to use a good Methodist word...to be a person saturated in your culture, but not dependent on it, involved in your environment, but not a slave to it, IN your world, but not OF it....

It means to be a human, dependent, yet somehow free, conserving, yet somehow prodigal, committed, yet somehow detached, willing to give, and spend, and bleed, and suffer...yet at the end, finally, able to walk away from it all.

It means, I suppose, even without totally understanding it, being pulled on by the lure of that THORN-CROWNED MAN, until we are no longer our own.

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” WHERE ELSE, INDEED, CAN IT BE SUNG? Where else does it need to be sung? Right here. That’s the answer. RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE...in your neighborhood, in your town, in your community...in your organization, in your church, maybe, even, in your family.

This for you is your place of witness, your “land”...the place where your song must be sung if it is to be sung at all.

Maybe it isn’t perfect. Maybe it isn’t ideal....SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

Its indifference represents your challenge; its lack of hospitality your summons to care.

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”...the plaintive cry of a refugee, an exile, a pilgrim, come down to us through the centuries.

IT’S OUR CALLING NOW, IN OUR SETTING, TO LEARN HOW TO DO THAT...ON KEY.