Singing the Lord's Song

Last week, pop star Beyoncé Knowles gave what looked like a stirring performance of America’s National Anthem, The Star Spangled Banner at President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony.

This emotive song was written in 1814 to celebrate the courage of US troops in resisting a British naval bombardment. It celebrates American identity, ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, a ‘Heav’n rescued land.’ It evinces confidence that ‘conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”’

This of course begs many questions about how you discern the justice or otherwise of a cause and shape an appropriate response.

It’s easy to sing a patriotic song at great national events. But a Psalm from the Bible reminds us that in some situations we just don’t feel like singing. 500 years before Christ the Jewish people had been driven out of Jerusalem and forced into exile in Babylon. Their captors asked them for a song, but they retorted ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’

‘Singing the Lord’s song’ is a good symbol for the approach to life we are challenged to embrace as Christians. Many of us find it liberating to praise God in singing and worship. But our whole lives – thoughts, words, actions, prayers, choices – can be an expression of God’s values, a reflection in the everyday of an everlasting Song.

We rejoice in our nationality – be it Scottish, British or American. But, first and foremost we are citizens of God’s kingdom, a great international community of people in this world and in the dimension beyond who have responded to God’s love, and embody the great Song. And where there are conflicts between the song our nation calls us to sing, and the Song of God’s kingdom, there is no doubt where our loyalty lies.

The Song is eloquent and powerful when we sing it well. It’s a song of justice and truth, of freedom and hope. A song of a goodness and grace flowing from the heart of God.

We don’t sing the Song to escape from brokenness, in the way a big emotional anthem can be used to engineer the appearance of unity in a deeply-divided nation. Instead we sing because we believe that there is no brokenness which God who reaches out through song cannot heal and transform.

The ancient Jewish people, embittered in exile couldn’t find it in them to sing the Lord’s song, but instead gave vent to terrible words of vengeance. And there are times when through despair or carelessness we lose sight of the Song and sing instead the old familiar songs we hear around us – songs of selfishness, materialism, despair. More likely, snatches of the great Song mingle in our lives with lines from these other songs in a discordant, joyless chaos.

It was revealed following the Inaugural that Beyoncé had been lip-synching her performance – pretending to sing, while a pre-recorded track was played, not producing the music live, with her whole body and soul, but relying on what she had done in the past.

There are times when we may feel we’re simply going through the motions of singing the Song. Once we sang it so powerfully. Now though, it feels we are simply lip-synching. Our heart and lungs and soul are just not in it.

The Jewish people had to learn that God was not a territorial God. God had not been left behind when they were driven from Jerusalem. God was with them. And no matter how hard and incomprehensible parts of our journey may be, no matter how exiled we may feel, we will never leave God behind, for God is with us, and dwells in us.

Singing the Lord’s song becomes that much easier when we realise that living for God is not so much a struggle to sing the Song. It’s more allowing the Song to sing us, to let the God in us perform God’s music through our lives. And God never lip-synchs.  Where God’s song is truly sung, God is present and active.

Across our nation, God is prompting people to sing the Lord’s Song, to say ‘In God is our trust.’  But we look forward, as the Jews looked forward to a return to Jerusalem, to a time when God’s kingdom will be fully revealed on earth, when the Song will sing each molecule of creation, when we will live ‘Heav’n rescued’ lives in a ‘Heav’n rescued land’, ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’

And the symbol of this is not a star-spangled banner, not even a blood-stained cross and an empty grave, but a living symbol, the risen, Jesus vibrantly alive, the Singer himself.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 31st January 2013)