A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — May 3, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text: Psalm 33   —   Choir Recognition Sunday

Sing to [The Lord] a new song; play skillfully on

of the steadfast love of the Lord. — Psalm 33:3-5

Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you. — Psalm 33:22

Today is choir recognition Sunday, and in worship and in the potluck after worship we are celebrating the many gifts given and talents shared by the members in all of our choirs—all those wonderful people who lead us in making a joyful noise to the Lord.  We are thankful for their skill and dedication, for their commitment to excellence, and for all the time they devote week after week to making music together.  I think sometimes we take our choirs for granted, but I hear regularly from visitors who comment on how extraordinary the music is in this church, how it goes beyond any notion of performance to be truly praise directed to God.  Thank you—to all the choirs.

I recalled this week how thankful I am—in a far broader sense—to choirs in general and to one particular Minnesota choir member named Arthur Fry.  Do you know about Arthur Fry?  He sang in his church choir, and he used slips of paper to mark the pages of his hymnal. When the book was opened, however, the makeshift bookmarks often moved around or fell out altogether.  Now, Arthur Fry worked for 3M Corporation.  And in 1974 he got the idea of taking a low-tack adhesive developed by accident by a 3M colleague—it worked so poorly it was seen as a failure—and use it to make a better bookmark.  Several trials later—some of which resulted in Fry gluing the pages of his hymnal together—the Post-It^® was born.  The rest is history.  Post-Its^® are used everywhere.  But I’m thankful to Arthur Fry and his choir and his hymnal, because the Post-It® note is a vital cog in the system I use more and more at the age of 60 to back-up my memory.  (You, too?)

Choirs, choir members, and hymnbooks—these are all vital parts of worship.  And I love the fact that the Bible includes a hymnbook.  The Psalms were the hymns of the Hebrew people—150 songs the people sang as public and private prayers to God.  We no longer have the tunes, but the power of the songs is undeniable—songs of hope…and of despair; songs of rejoicing… and of mourning; songs filled with all kinds of questions…and also with some of the deepest and most profound answers.  Sometimes these are all mixed up together in the same psalm.  The Psalms are human songs, human words we sing to God.  Yet somehow by the power of the Holy Spirit we find in them God’s word to us.  Singing the Psalms has sustained people for millennia.  And the music reverberates between God and us, echoing back and forth with love and joy.

There is a long tradition of seeing music as somehow fundamental to creation as a whole.  Some 400 years ago Shakespeare coined the familiar phrase, “the music of the spheres.”  A thousand years earlier, Spanish bishop and saint Isadore of Seville declared, “Nothing exists without music, for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of that harmony.”  Another thousand years before that, an ancient poet envisioned the Lord God appearing to Job and asking him, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth… when the morning stars sang together?” [Job 38:4, 7]  In Psalm 98 the hills sing for joy while the floods clap along.

The singer in Psalm 33 calls for the people to rejoice in the Lord by singing and making melody.  They are to do so with skill and enthusiasm as a fitting response to the goodness of God’s creation.  “For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.  [God] loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”  [Psalm 33:4-5]

At first glance, we might think that the singer is naive.  How can he or she see the earth as “full of the steadfast love of the Lord” when the earth is so obviously full of war and violence, fear and hatred—in the singer’s day every bit as much as in our own?  Oh, the singer knows this.  He knows about nations and kings and military power.  The warhorse and chariot were the ultimate, shock-and-awe weapons system of his day.  But there’s something about the power of God—God the Creator who spoke the very earth into being, who breathed out the heavens, who can bottle up the sea itself—that has convinced the singer that all forms of earthly power, the plans of peoples, the counsel of nations, the might of armies and empires cannot ultimately frustrate the steadfast love of the Lord that fills the earth.  It is this love, God’s love, that saves… saves with righteousness and justice, with joy and singing.

The presence of hatred, violence, and evil in our world is not an argument against the existence of a loving God.  It is an argument for how much we need the steadfast love of God.  We catch glimpses of God’s love in moments of goodness and beauty—times when desperate people have their needs met (think Neighborhood Services or Huckleberry House), times when people stand for justice, equity, and harmony not just for themselves but for others as well (think tomorrow’s B.R.E.A.D. Action Meeting).  It matters how and where we look for love—that we look at the world carefully, literally “full of care.”  St. Augustine once wrote, “Love has hands to help others.  It has feet to hasten to the poor and needy.  It has eyes to see misery and want.  It has ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of others.  That’s what love looks like.”

The singer of Psalm 33 summons us to rejoice and praise God by “singing a new song.”  This call for a new song is echoed throughout the Psalms. “O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.”  So begins Psalm 96.  Struggling to respond to the experience of being rescued by God, the singer of Psalm 40 sings, “The Lord put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.”  In many of the Psalms, various musical instruments are to accompany the new song, and Psalm 149 adds dancing.  Remember as well that our new song is always in response to the Lord.  As Psalm 98 puts it, “O sing to the Lord a new song, for the Lord has done marvelous things.”  And nothing is more marvelous than filling the whole earth with the steadfast love of the Lord.

So sing a new song.  But not one of power and might.  Don’t go singing fight songs or victory songs or songs proclaiming how “We’re number one.”  These are old songs.  Rather sing new songs of peace and justice, equality and freedom, new songs of faith and hope and love between brothers and sisters all over the earth.  Sing the songs of poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning, who wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.”  Not the jingles of advertisers trying to get us to “buy this, and buy that.” Those are songs of conspicuous consumption and waste.  Sing songs instead that honor and celebrate the wonder and beauty of creation.  And sing songs of praise to the Creator: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host by the breath of [God’s] mouth…  [The Lord] spoke, and [everything] came to be; [the Lord] commanded, and it stood firm… The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.” 

This is all part of our call as Christians, as God’s covenant people—to seek carefully with eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to find, and hands to help, and then to sing for all we’re worth so everyone will know the steadfast love of the Lord.  I close in prayer with the closing line of Psalm 33:  “O Lord, let your steadfast love be upon us, even as we hope in you.”  Amen and amen.