Sermon 05.26.2024: Singing with Our Ancestors
There is an old Italian saying: "Traduttore, traditore." It is a remark that assumes that the task of translation is hopeless, that you can't ever properly transmit a work from one culture to another. But what if the translator is God? This Pentecost, wear red and experience how God is translating love, peace, and unity for us in this world.
Scripture
Psalm 1 - The Two Ways
The truly happy person
doesn’t follow wicked advice,
doesn’t stand on the road of sinners,
and doesn’t sit with the disrespectful.
Instead of doing those things,
these persons love the Lord’s Instruction,
and they recite God’s Instruction day and night!
They are like a tree replanted by streams of water,
which bears fruit at just the right time
and whose leaves don’t fade.
Whatever they do succeeds.
That’s not true for the wicked!
They are like dust that the wind blows away.
And that’s why the wicked will have no standing in the court of justice—
neither will sinners
in the assembly of the righteous.
The Lord is intimately acquainted
with the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked is destroyed.
Sermon Text
Singing With Our (Abrahamic) Ancestors
Let’s start with Psalm, a very good place to start. Here we encounter one of the oldest symbol in our faith: trees, rooted in the earth but reaching up to heaven. The cross is often called The Tree, the intersection of heaven and earth. The Early Church depicted heaven as a paradise with shade trees and flowing streams. Psalm 1 calls us to be transplanted from wherever we are—into God’s presence in this world, right now to stand as a tree beside the life-giving stream.
The Psalms occupy a space in the middle of our Bibles and at the heart of Christianity and the Abrahamic tradition. The Psalms are ancient Jewish poetry, nearly half of them composed by King David. But did you know that the Psalms are also venerated in Islam? Muslims regard the Psalms[1] as gifts of God transmitted to humanity through King David. Muslim tradition says David commanded the Psalms be recited as his riding animals were being saddled before riding into battle. When we engage the Psalms join with all the generations of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.
Happiness & The Good Life
The opening word of the Psalm is translated as happy—or blessed in older translations. The Hebrew word ashri (ַא ְשׁ ֵרי) is about living a good life alongside other people. It’s not about comfort or shallow happiness. It’s about never giving up, the importance of ritual and the practice of worshiping God. Some of us got out of the habit during the pandemic. Y’all need to come back! One of the reasons your anxious is that you lost your spiritual grounding, your practice. It’s only together practice that we work through our less-than-godly nature and learn our utter dependence on God’s grace. Together is how we tear down the walls that divide—and that brings happiness, blessedness, the good life.
Yearning for Home
I want to talk about home. Home is where the heart is. It’s hard to let your heart be anywhere it does not feel safe. This past year, Faith in Action Bay Area’s guiding statement has been “Home is Sacred.” California is in a race to build more homes so that people can replant themselves from their cars and tents into a secure home.
Think of your childhood home or your current home. It’s more than your address. Perhaps there are other soulful places that allow you to breathe and grow. Where do you feel planted? Are you happy there (blessed, safe)? How deep are your roots? Are you flourishing there?
Twenty-four years ago, I moved across the country from Georgia to California. Even though I left my old home quite willingly, I still experience the feeling of homesickness. I’m homesick for something intangible. The homesickness I feel isn’t about “a fuzzy overnight-camp feeling”[2] but a yearning for the place deep inside where a still, small voice[3] lives, shielded and unscathed. I yearn for unity, reconciliation with my past and, deep down, with God.
Union with God is a meta-theme of scripture: to return to the bliss of the Garden and walk with God in the cool of the day. It’s equal parts sorrow, joy and beauty. Before you tell me to see a therapist, hear me out. It’s neither an obsession nor an ideation. Brene Brown describes it as:
a predictable and always reoccurring desperation to find a sense of sacredness within me, not outside of me: my soul, my home, God in me. It [is] homesickness for a place that exists only inside me.
The first Psalm is about longing for God. Joy Harjo writes:
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark—
What shall I do with all this heartache?
The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways…To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
The Home Within
I was a high school senior auditioning for music school. My parents had provided me with everything—most of all their faith—but when it came time for college, they wished me luck paying for it.
Back when I was 13, I had heard a woman named Helen Ramsaur play the piano, and her playing spoke to me. At 13! She exuded music. I asked her to take me as a student. I felt so grown up going to my lessons in her studio at a local college. Her fee was sliding scale, sometimes no charge at all. She believed in me. My mother drove me to my weekly lessons. She felt out of place waiting around in the student lounge, so she opted to wait in the car, listening to the radio, reading tabloid magazines. I can still see her Ford LTD parked under a giant magnolia tree in the late afternoon sun, her head resting on the open window, waiting for her son. The selfless love of the women who raised me prepared the soil for me to grow. You have someone like that in your life, someone who believed in you. Thank God for them right now. Call them today.
After obsessing over every drop of ink in that Chopin Nocturne, audition day finally came. I played my heart out. Of course it wasn’t perfect. Perfect isn’t the point. But it felt like music. The final chords fade away, and I begin to wonder. Where am I, and how did I get here? Where will I be when I look up from this piano? The flow of that moment had carried me to the inner life-giving stream. In that moment, I had purpose. I was prepared. I was invested. And it took all of me, body and soul, and transported me.
Practice the Good Life
If studying Chopin can do that, think what studying God can do! Verse 2 says that we must meditate on God’s teachings day and night. Murmur to yourself about God, study the words of Jesus until they take root. Know your faith. Articulate what you believe.
There’s an old music joke that goes, “Pardon me, could you tell me how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer, “Practice, practice. practice. The same goes for God. How do you make it to that inner stream of Spirit flow? Practice, practice, practice. The lines between this world and the next can become blurred, and you find your internal thin place. Sometimes I can almost recall a before time when whatever makes me me wasn’t here yet.
It’s not depression. And it’s not exhaustion.[4] There is simply a discomfort in this world that can only be relieved within. It’s up to every individual. Our pew Bible translates the opening phrase of Psalm 1 as “happy are those”. A more accurate translation would be “happy is the individual.” You can face anything if you ground yourself in the love that made you.
Our pew Bibles also miss the mark in talking about the wicked, which should be plural.[5] The good individual must be prepared to go against the wicked crowd. Have you ever tried to walk against the crowd exiting a concert or sports event? It’s not easy. And the crowd doesn’t much care for it either. I once lost Lou in a peace parade down Market Street. I had to walk against the crowd, and I found him holding his cane high over his head. Because we live in the best city anywhere, people helped me locate him. “Have you seen a blind guy?” “Yeah. Maybe a few blocks back. He looked kinda I don’t know, you better hurry.”
True happiness depends on personal choices. Walk against the crowd. You are not responsible for anyone else’s feelings or their actions. You are responsible for how you choose to react. How shall we respond with faith to the brokenness of this world? Practice. Practice. Practice. How do we address that feeling of quiet desperation? Practice. Practice. Practice. How do we stand tall by that life-giving stream? Practice. Practice. Practice.
Memorial Day: At the River
Memorial Day is more than a mattress sale or the beginning of summer. The roots of Memorial Day go back to the Civil War, when 750,000 soldiers and civilians[6] of all races and religions were cut down, American against American. 9-11 was not the most violent day in our history. It was when we turned on one another. Today, there are those who want to repeat that past.
Our closing hymn uses the image of God’s river. I imagine trees walking home to stand there—tall and honorable. On this Memorial Day weekend, let’s remember all the faithful who have sacrificed for freedom, equality and other people. We used to call that democracy in action. If these ideals are outdated, let this hymn be a lament. But if these ideals, which I find rooted in the gospel, are still worth striving for, let’s sing this most American of American hymns as a reclamation of our hope and determination. Just as David had Psalms recited before riding off into trouble, may this hymn prompt us to uproot ourselves from the narrow places, to be replanted by God’s hand by the ever-flowing stream of righteousness.[7]
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
[1] https://poets.org/poem/speaking-treeand Zabur
[2] Richard Rohr
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1 Kings 19:11-13&version=NKJV
[4] Brené Brown
[5] rshoim ְר ָשׁ ִעים See < https://context.reverso.net/translation/hebrew-english/הרשעים>
[6] https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths#
[7] Amos 5:24
