Easter 7C
O God, the King of
glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph
to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your
Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our
Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
On this Mother’s Day, we celebrate with
cards and roses the special bond between mother and child. Our scripture wants
to hold out to us today another bond, however. It is another bond of love that
is desperately needed in this world: the bond created by God’s love to us in
Jesus Christ. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is praying for us—praying with the
fervent love that I pour into the prayers for my children, whenever distance
tugs painfully at the maternal bonds. “Protect them, O God.” “Watch over them
in this dangerous world.” “Show them happiness in their lives.” “Help them to
know that I love them always.” At his last supper with his disciples before his
death on the Cross, Jesus blesses them, and us, with the prayerful promise that
our unbreakable bond with God will always be reflected in the love that we
share with one another.
Now, this is all pretty abstract
theology. All of this talk of being “in” God can make our eyes glaze over
pretty quickly on a Sunday morning, especially right after Derby. Children, I’ll
bet that you already stopped listening to me a few minutes ago. So let me try
to illustrate what Jesus is talking about by going back to the exciting story
from Acts that we heard as our first reading.
In this story, I have no trouble
imagining the predicament that Paul gets his friend Silas and himself involved
in. Just imagine that there’s a mysterious psychic down at Churchill Downs this
weekend who can actually tell you which horses are going to win. A victim of
human trafficking, she’s owned, let’s say, by a couple of guys who charge
thousands of dollars for each secret racing tip. Imagine the money that they
would be making on the races! And imagine how angry they would be when some strange
Christian missionary comes down there and frees her! That missionary would be
in as much trouble as a foreign-looking protestor at certain recent political
rallies …. Looking at the news these days, I can definitely see how Paul and
Silas end up beaten and chained in prison.
In sharp contrast to the violence,
suspicion, and exploitation going on in the world, we then have the image of
Paul and Silas singing their hearts out in their prison cell. This is the image
that I’m interested in today. Here they are, in the stocks, lifting their
voices in joyful praise to God, as if they had just won the roses! Isn’t that a
strange reaction? Their singing gets the attention of the whole prison. The
other prisoners listen to their song, and I imagine that some of them join in,
as well. All of that mighty singing then ends up in an earthquake—an earthquake
that throws the prison doors wide open, like an opera singer shattering a glass
with her powerful voice! Paul and Silas sing their way to a freedom that breaks
down prison walls. They sing their way to a freedom that is so powerful that
they don’t even need to leave the prison in order to experience it. Their
freedom songs bring even the Roman jailor to their cause, freeing him, too,
from his burdensome role as their oppressor.
What is it about singing, I wonder?
Scientific studies have shown that singing together as a choir syncs our breath
and our hearts.[1]
Not only do we breathe together, our hearts start beating together—fast or slow,
depending on the music! Our voices, which can be kind of puny on their own,
gain strength from the voices of others. The vibrations of other voices fill
our entire bodies.
Near where I used to live in France, there’s
an old walled city with a stone tower where they used to imprison Protestant women
and children. In the 18th century, it was against the law not to
follow the Roman Catholicism of the King. People who were caught in secret
worship services or caught with a bible in their homes were thrown into prison
until they signed a document saying that they would give up their religious
beliefs. Can you imagine spending your life in a stone tower in the middle of a
swamp, away from your family, with a bunch of strangers? With no TV, no
computer. Just a pile of straw to sleep on. Guess what those women did in order
to keep from going crazy? In order to stay strong in their faith? Yes, they
sang together. Without any musical accompaniment, they sang the Psalms,
blending the rich harmonies of their different voices. Like Paul and Silas,
they sang songs of prayer and praise to God day after day, hour after hour. Memorizing
the words together. Internalizing the prayers. And it was their singing that
sustained them.
More recently, adults might remember the
role that singing together played in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.
Protestors would sing “freedom songs” in their meetings, on the streets, and in
jail cells. Once during the Mississippi Freedom Rides, imprisoned activists in
Parchman Penitentiary sang together like Paul and Silas. Annoyed, the guards threatened
to take away their mattresses if they didn’t shut up. So the protestors changed
the words to their well-known hymns and started singing: "You can take my
mattress, you can take my mattress, oh yeah, you can take my mattress you can
take my mattress, I'll keep my freedom, oh yeah..."[2] The guards’ threats
immediately lost their power.
Listen
to the words of Bernice Reagon as she explains what happened when the freedom
riders sang together:
There
were always songs that celebrated those times when we came together even in the
midst of danger … we were bonded to each other, not because we went to school
together, or were in the same social club. Not because we worked on the same
job, but because we had decided that we would put everything on the line to
fight racism in our community. Every participant in a local campaign had to
decide to take that risk. We had to decide to leave the safety of being
obedient to segregation to go to a place where we might lose everything we had.
[In singing] we found in this new place a fellowship that we could not have
imagined before we decided to stand.”[3]
Very
different individuals came together and became One in song, One in the love of
God, One for sharing the love of God.
Children, I watched with joy some of your
faces last week when you sang, “Shall We Gather at the River” with the adult
choir. I saw your expressions change as you felt the beauty of the grown-up
voices joining with yours. Recently, I went down to Sewanee for a University
Choir reunion. There were over 200 singers there in the school chapel that Sunday
morning. Now you all know that my own singing voice is pretty weak and trembly.
But when I joined my little voice with the voices of those alums of all ages, with
people who came together for that one service from all across the country, it
was like a miracle. My tiny voice, my feeble faith, came out of my private soul
and blended somewhere in the air above me with the voices and the faith and the
strength of others, and it came back to my ears with the power of an
earthquake. The other singers were somehow in me, and I was in them, and we
were all One in God.
We live in a fragmented, divisive world. A
world that holds in suspicion those who are different, bullies them in schools
and beats them in crowds. And like a longing mother, Jesus weeps at the walls
we build around ourselves. He is still praying, as he did at the Last Supper,
that we will let him free us, that we will let him enter into our hearts, lift
out the goodness in our souls, and swirl it together over our heads in a healing
song of salvation. He prays that we will hear his love song in our own voice
and in the person singing next to us.
Do you want to live the words of Jesus in
today’s Gospel? Then parents, sing together with your children. Young people,
sing together with your friends. Come to church and sing. Go outside and sing. Learn
the words of songs that speak your faith, and sing together to God. The kind of
music doesn’t matter. It just matters that you sing. After all, you know the
hymn:
" My life flows on in endless song, above earth's lamentation.
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I'm clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?"
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