"A New Song"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE PSALMS 40 Click here to watch the sermon "A New Song"

I know that the month of January is already halfway over (how did that happen?) so you may have already broken whatever New Year’s resolutions you made a couple of weeks ago. Don’t feel bad. Those can be hard to keep. Maybe instead you could make a week to week resolution to be in worship with your church community. And if you can’t be here in person, you can always tune into the livestream, or playback on YouTube. I once knew a pastor who encouraged his folks who traveled often for business, or to see family to look for someplace to worship on Sundays when they were out of town. It can be illuminating to experience the nuance of worship in an unfamiliar place. I’ve been known to do this from time to time.  

The Sunday before I started my call in Iowa, I crossed the Missouri river to worship with the folks in South Sioux City, Nebraska. Another Sunday when I was on vacation, I decided to visit a popular church in town that fell into what used to be called the Willow Creek model, named after a church that pioneered contemporary worship styles in suburban Chicago. I wanted to experience it for myself. Around here it might be like Sagebrush, or Citizen Church; very different from the reformed liturgy that I’ve known most of my life, but helpful in understanding the draw. Our daughters were still pretty young and they came with me. One of them observed on the way out, “that was more like a rock concert than church.”  

None of which is meant to dismiss or diminish these more contemporary forms of Christian worship. Plenty of churches are reaching out and thriving by offering a kind of worship that feels more like a concert. In fact one of the most powerful experiences of worship I ever had came at an actual rock concert where church broke out. It was back in the 80s when the Irish rock band U2 was touring in support of the newest album, The Joshua Tree. I wasn’t really a fan of the band at the time and really only knew their music that had been on the radio, or MTV, back when they actually played music videos. Yes, I am that old. But I was invited to one of their two sold-out shows in Denver. Their show at Red Rocks Amphitheater was legendary and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Inside the arena people had hung banners and the excitement was palpable. Even though I didn’t know their music very well, I was mesmerized by what I heard and saw. For the final encore they ended the night with what for years had been their signature sign-off, the song “40” from the album War. It’s a song that was written in 10 minutes as the final track of the album, with lyrics lifted directly from our Psalm this morning, with the chorus: I will sing, sing a new song/ I will sing, sing a new song. The chorus then gives was to the repeated refrain asking: How long to sing this song? At the concert that night, the lead singer, Bono, led that capacity crowd in the refrain before leaving the stage. The audience, however, kept singing as the rest of the band played. One by one each of them left the stage; the lead guitarist The Edge, then bassist Adam Clayton, until finally all that was left was the steady drumming of Larry Mullin Jr. When he stood up from his stool and waved his drumsticks in the air, the crowd kept singing, “How long to sing this song? How long to sing this song? How long, how long, how long, to sing this song?” The lights of the arena flickered on to bread the darkness, but as people made their way out into the night, over the ringing in our ears you could hear the murmurs of that refrain continuing to float in the air as it was carried into the world. Out in the parking lot you could hear voices still singing, lifted up to God in worship (whether they knew it, or not.) 

At their heart, this is what the psalms are for. They are songs of worship, prayers to God. But the theme of them is hardly uniform. Some are psalms of praise, psalms of thanksgiving, psalms for deliverance, psalms of confession and even lament. Actually, the majority are songs of lament. The voice of the psalmist sings of unabated songs of joy and unflinching songs of anger and despair. The variety is the point. There is no single right way to worship God, no one style that is better than another. The psalms speak to the breadth of our faith; they delight in God’s goodness and weep when God feels glaringly absent. They voice glad cries of rescue and deep groans begging for God’s help. To take a tour of the psalms is like walking around the human condition as it seeks, exults, confesses, and relies upon God in every facet of our life. The more time we spend meditating on the psalmists words, the more sanitized most expressions of modern worship appear- from the lowest of happy clappy revivals to the highest of staid and solemn liturgies. And nowhere is the complexity of the psalms more in evidence than here in number 40; a psalm that proclaims the promise of God’s deliverance as it laments God’s delay. 

The song begins, as so much of faith does, in the past; remembering a time of deliverance. It is what happens at a Passover Seder, when the narrative is retold, “We were once slaves in Egypt.” It’s what we do at the font, or the table. We remember how God ordered of the waters of chaos, rescued Noah from the flood, led Moses and the Hebrew slaves to freedom through the Sea of Reeds and forty years later through the Jordan into the land promised to Abraham. We hear the words Jesus spoke on the night before he gave his life, “Take, eat; do this in remembrance of me.” I waited patiently for God, sings the psalmist, and was not disappointed. He heard my cries just as he heard the cries of the his people under the yoke of Pharaoh. He lifted me out of the pit, the mire and clay, just as he did for the slaves who labored in mud pits making bricks for Egyptian monuments. He placed me on solid ground, where my footing was finally secure and my legs strong. And my cries were replaced with songs of praise for people to hear; that they might marvel at what God had done and trust for themselves. But as this testimony goes on, an edge creeps into the psalmist’s voice. Behind the blessing for those who put their trust in the Holy One you begin to hear a plea. The testimony for others turns into an entreaty directed at God, that God would remember the singer’s own faithfulness, how she delighted to do God’s will and spoke the good news with an unrestrained voice. The tone of the psalm shifts as it becomes apparent that the steadfast love and faithfulness of God in the past has been obscured by the evils that surround the singer in the present. The new song sung in thanks for God’s mighty acts of rescue has been drowned out by the terrible reality of present suffering that leads to the cry of, “How Long?” 

Honestly, that is where we seem to finds ourselves these days, living between the goodness of God that we know and have known and the very real pain of a world held captive to sins beyond number that leave us so overwhelmed that we have a hard time making out any semblance of God’s goodness. To come and wave our hands and sing about the awesomeness of God while our neighbors are abducted without due process for the color of their skin or failing to speak English, while criminal fraud and assault and drug trafficking, and even murder in the streets are excused at the highest level of government, while people made in the image of God around the world die by the minute from hunger or disease that could have been prevented with the international aid that has been eliminated and violence begotten of ideological hatred and narrow bigotry holds sway- to sing our songs of Zion in this hostile and suddenly foreign land, to sing our songs of praise while we are struggling with the pain of abandonment, betrayal and loss upon loss would be to engage in a kind of forgetfulness that seems nothing short of sinful. But too often we employ this kind of willful denial because the problems are so large, or far away. The issues are so complex that they leave us feeling helpless. Instead of keeping our distance, or trying to wish such things away in a haze of blissful amnesia, this psalm reminds us that we who have seen and heard and known the goodness of God are called to cry out at the injustice that we see, because we know that God will turn and hear those cries too. We must raise our voices and cry out precisely because we would be utterly overwhelmed and helpless with the One who has been and will continue to be our help and deliverer. 

As I said earlier, the song “40” is the final track of an album called War. The album opens with the martial rhythms of one of the bands better known songs, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” That song recounts an infamous event in the struggles of Northern Ireland when, on January 30, 1972, thirteen unarmed protestors were shot and killed by British paratroopers. It too pleads the question, “how long, how long must we sing this song?” But by the end of the album when that same refrain resurfaces, the tune has changed. The new song of deliverance had already made a difference in the way we continue to cry out. Despair at what surrounds us is transformed by the hope we have in what God has already begun to set right in Jesus, and what God will yet do in making all things new.  

We cannot close our eyes and make what is wrong in the world go away. What we can do is stand with our feet firmly on the solid ground of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness as we recount God’s goodness with new songs of praise even as we continue to ask, “how long?” We offer up the fullness of who we are and the world we long to see to God in worship, as we ourselves are transformed by the songs we sing.