Let There Be Music
This Sunday we pray: Have compassion on our weakness, and
mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for
our blindness we cannot ask.
I don’t know about anybody else, as the Time of Coronavirus
wears on, I’m feeling not so much ‘weakness’ as a sense of weariness – weary of
all the measures we take day in and day out to be safe wherever we are; weary
of witnessing those who refuse to take a simple measure like wearing a mask;
weary of treating a Public Health Crisis, a worldwide Pandemic, as some sort of
political football; weary that there just may be no football, baseball or
basketball at all despite heroic and not so heroic efforts to resume play,
“Safely,” whatever that may look like. And of course, I am aware that those who
are on the frontline fighting the Coronavirus, and those in “essential jobs,”
are infinitely wearier than I will ever be, or most of us will ever be.
That’s why I am feeling the compassion and mercy in our
wisdom literature for today, because Jacob (Genesis 28:10-19a), the Poet of the
Psalms(139), and Jesus in Matthew (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43) are all offering us
words of hope delivered in the midst of weariness!
Jacob is weary – and running for his life. Having stolen is
older brother Esau’s birthright, his mother, Rebecca has urged him to run away
and hide, for Esau the hunter is after him. He is alone, isolated, and weary,
trickster though he is. With nothing but a stone for a pillow, he lies down to
sleep his weariness off. Suddenly he sees a ladder reaching up to heaven with
angels ascending and descending. And then! The Lord God standing beside him to
announce that all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall
be well: he shall inherit the land upon which he sleeps as promised to his
grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac; his offspring will be like the dust
of the earth stretching out to the north, the south, the east and the west; you
and your offspring shall be a blessing to all the peoples of the Earth; “Know
that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.” Jacob awakes, weary no
more, and exclaims, “How awesome is this place!” He takes his stone pillow and
erects it as a pillar, anoints it with oil and proclaims the names the place
Bethel – Beth-El, the House of God, the House of Elohim!
Psalm 139, a song, a poem, may as well been written by Jacob
as it proclaims that there is nowhere we can go or hide that God is not with
us! Whether we climb Jacob’s ladder up to heaven, lie in our grave, dive into
the depths of the sea, “your hand will lead me, your right hand hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to
night, darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness
and light to you are both alike.’” The light shines in the darkness, the light
shines on our weariness, the light surrounds us in our weakness and holds us
fast, and leads us always closer to the light, sings the Psalmist!
After yet another enigmatic agricultural metaphor and
parable that acknowledges that there is evil planted amidst the good, do not
worry! After the harvest, the Lord will bundle up the evil and burn it. It will
be taken care of. Meanwhile, says Jesus, “The righteous will shine like the
Sun! The one who has ears should hear!”
At the words, “shine like the sun,” I recall sitting in an
empty theatre somewhere near Pughkeepsie, NY, listening to John Hall and
Orleans rehearsing, “When the world was in trouble/And it looked like there was
hell to pay/ Fire, Fire everywhere!/And the news got worse each day/Well,
people really wondered/Just how long they could hold out/God looked down from
heaven above/And He began to shout: Let there be music! Let is shine like the
Sun! Let there be music! Everybody’s got to have some fun!” A lyric that surely
has resonance in our time of weariness: weariness with a pandemic, weariness
with racial and economic injustice, weariness with uncertainty about what to do
next, all kinds of weariness.
Our texts invite us to remember. Remember: Singing is what
has sustained God’s people for millennia! Telling odd stories has sustained
God’s people for millennia! Visions of ladders and angels and the Lord God
standing right by our side has sustained God’s people for millennia! Day or
night, in heaven, in the depths of the sea, or on terra firma, there is
no escaping: God is with us: Emmanuel. Evil will pass, righteousness shall
shine like the Sun. Let there be music! Let it shine like the Son! We have
ears! Do we hear? The Lord God stands beside us in the present weariness, and
with mercy and compassion invites us to sing and to shine like the Sun! And
urges us to remember that all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of
thing shall be well! Everybody’s got to have some fun!
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