SING THE LORD'S SONG IN THIS STRANGE LAND

by John S. Spong, Bishop of Newark

"How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" That question was raised by the psalmist some 2600 years ago at a time of acute crisis. The nation of Judah had been overrun by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Jerusalem's walls were breached. Solomon's temple was reduced to rubble. The core values of Jewish life were destroyed. It was a moment of absolute despair.

In a strange way the only consolation they experienced was that they knew who had robbed them of their past and killed their future. The Babylonians were objective and real. They even taunted their victims to sing to them one of the Songs of Zion. It was to that taunt that these defeated people responded, "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

That ancient moment has always intrigued me because I see so many similarities between the despair of the Jews when their world collapsed, and the despair present in the post-Christian western world at what surely seems to be the close of our age. In our generation many see the value system of our world similarly collapsing, taking with it the ordered life of the society. The traditional religious structures which suggested that a supernatural deity ruled the world by rewarding virtue and punishing immorality has faded away. A common definition of what constitutes good and evil has disappeared.

In our time, as the values of yesterday weaken, a war between the needs of the individual and the needs of the corporate world begins to be fought out politically. Like the people of Judah 2600 years ago, we too have been ripped from our past and we do not yet comprehend what the future holds for us.

There is, however, one great difference between the Jews on the eve of their exile and this generation facing the close of an age. We do not know who to blame for our increasing dis-ease. No Babylonians are on our horizon.

Perhaps the reason we cannot identify the enemy who has torn us from our comfortable and well-defined world is that this separation has come gradually over the past 500-600 years. Most of us are not aware of exactly when it happened. We only know that we have awakened in a void in which we no longer know who we are, who God is, and what values, if any, are eternal.

Perhaps we can date the beginning of the demise of western security with the work of Galileo in the 16th century. The intimate God, once pictured as reigning just beyond the sky watching over human life in a parental and caring way, began at that moment to disappear from our consciousness. Human beings are not sure today that the power which rules the universe is benign, benevolent, or hostile. Ancient explanations that natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, or human disasters like wars or the Oklahoma and the World Trade Center bombings were expressions of the divine purpose do not suffice today.

Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century built upon the work of Galileo and, as a direct result, greatly enhanced human insecurity. Newton discovered that the rules of causality were not capricious or capable of being manipulated, and he called the world to accept a mechanistic view of the universe that was morally neutral and significantly impersonal. About the only place left for the God to whom centuries of people had given their loyalty was the position of being the "First cause in the chain of causality." The slide into meaninglessness was speeding up.

We had hardly adjusted to the revolution of Galileo and Newton before Charles Darwin arrived to shake another large segment of yesterday's security system. We had convinced ourselves that human beings were the crown and purpose of God's creation, made "a little lower than the angels." Darwin said nay, rather we are in reality but "a little higher than the apes."

When Sigmund Freud arrived on the scene, the God in whose image we maintained that we were made began to be called a human creation. God, said Freud, was but an extension of parental authority into the heavens, a sign of the chronic infantilism of human beings.

Albert Einstein then took from us the stability of such essential concepts as time and space. At that moment, the human enterprise began to swim in a sea of radical relativity in which all values were subject to questioning.

As this erosion process occurred, once dominant groups discovered that they could no longer define oppressed groups in the name of God. So slavery and serfdom ended. Heretofore docile workers formed unions and demanded a greater share of the profits from the owners of industry. Racial minorities refused to be segregated any longer. Women demanded equality in the bedroom and in the board room. Homosexual people refused to stay hidden and to act as if they were ashamed to be gay.

In this revolution many of the verities of the past lost their power. One of those verities was the Bible. The Bible was quoted to condemn Galileo, but Galileo prevailed and not the Bible. The Bible was quoted by slaveholders to support slavery, by owners to oppose unions, by politicians to uphold segregation, by males to keep women in second class citizenship, by heterosexual people to justify the rejection and persecution of gay and lesbian people. In each of these social struggles the literal answers of the Bible lost their defining power. So the biblical tradition itself was destabilized and insecurity became rampant.

We tried to hide from our fears. We searched first for security in the world of material plenty. The "me" generation of rampant greed developed. We also tried drugs, alcohol and sexual promiscuity in our search for meaning, but nothing worked. The emptiness would not go away. The last gasp of hopelessness is the anger that grips the western world today. We have tried to blame the communists, the labor unions, the racial agitators, the radical feminists, the gay lobby, the secular humanists and even the liberals. Such tactics will not work, but we will not know that until we try and fail. We are discovering that we do not know how to sing the Lord's song in this strange land. The ancient fate of the Jews has become our fate as the traditions of yesterday die and the hopes of tomorrow have not yet been born.

Whenever an old order dies, anger is always loosed upon the whole society. That is the meaning of the national mood today. We wonder if God has died. Certainly the God defined by yesterday's world has lost power, but does yesterday's definition exhaust the reality of God? In such a critical time, we must learn that God is never bound by human definitions of God, nor is God ever limited by those who claim to speak for God. To identify God with one's understanding of God is sheer idolatry. That idolatry is present today, and it is that idolatrous God who is dying. The anger surrounding that death now infects both church and state alike.

It is against this analysis of contemporary religious and political anger that I feel compelled to bear my witness. I am a Christian. This means that I believe I have met the essence of the Holy God in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It was, I believe, by the spirit of this God that Jesus was born. That is what the story of the virgin birth is all about. I believe that the God who was and is present in this living Christ will intimately break every barrier that binds our humanity including the barrier of finitude and death. That is the inner truth proclaimed by the resurrection narratives. This God, found in Jesus, also opens for me every prejudiced human stereotype. Was he not seen embracing the lepers, loving the Samaritans and talking with women as his equals? Did he not send his disciples into all the world to bring light and love to those his own people pejoratively called gentiles? The God that I meet in this Jesus lived totally, loved completely and had the courage to express the fullness of his being. That is why I as a Christian believe that discipleship calls me to live and to love completely and to dare to be myself. But Christianity can never be just a "me" religion. It also compels those who seek to be disciples to build a world where all people will have equal access to life, where no one will be forced to live in the absence of love, and where the fullness of life for any child of God will not be impeded by human prejudice, human oppression or the improper use of human power.

So in the contemporary search for meaning as the God of yesterday dies, I will call my faith community to be what it was meant to be, the body of Christ. I will not rest until this body of Christ has built a world in which all others might also live, and love and be. I will never surrender to the fear that my God is dying, but I will be ever aware that my humanity always sees God through a glass dimly and so my view of God, and even the church’s view of God, will always be inadequate, incomplete and subject to constant growth.

Because of this faith commitment, I will not be afraid to agitate until Jesus is acknowledged as the Lord of the church and the savior of the world. The church of Jesus Christ as it now exists may well pass away. Yet the Lordship of this Christ will be acknowledged, and his saving presence will be recognized when all people become aware of their call into the fullness of humanity, whether they know the name of Christ or not, whether they be male or female, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor.

To cleanse the church of its idolatry, to free the church of its prejudice, to call the church to be Christlike, that is my vocation as a Christian and as a bishop. That is also the singular calling to the church in our time. When we share in that vocation then, like the Jews of old, we can once again learn to sing the Lord's song in our strange land. The tune may be different, the words may be changed, but the harmony it expresses will make us know that it is nothing but the old song sung from a new perspective.

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