A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

September 16, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

On Singing the Lord’s Song in a Foreign Land

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 137:1–6

Dear God, our losses this week are larger than we have words with which to describe them, and our feelings—our grief and anger and compassion and love—are larger than we can say. But you know us, O Lord; you know our hearts. And so we come before you in gratitude. Speak the word that you have for us today, and as we stumble under the load, strengthen us with your love in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept.. . .
How can we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?

That is how it has been since shortly after 8:45 Tuesday morning.

I used to love the sight—approaching LaGuardia, descending across New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan, and those two gleaming white towers. They represented our contribution to the skyline, the nation’s front door; they represented our optimism, our confidence. We visited for the breathtaking view and ate dinner looking out through what we came to know as Windows on the World. For as long as we live, we will not forget the sight of them, and we will not forget the literally unbelievable sight of their destruction. And then, the Pentagon, symbol of our might and invincibility. And the plane, headed towards Washington, down in the Pennsylvania hills.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept.. . .
How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

It is a different land this Sunday than it was last week. Our first response was disbelief. As I watched, I struggled with my innate unwillingness to accept what I was seeing. Perhaps it was a small plane, off course. The damage can be repaired. We can make this right—we’re Americans. Even after a second hit—we can shrug this off, patch it up, and go on.

Then they came down, and disbelief became anger for this personal, obscene assault. Our impulse was to strike out, to punish someone, anyone. And among the most important contributions people of faith can make to the national conversation going on at so many levels is to resist that human impulse and to model something of the centuries of wisdom that is our religious tradition. Revenge and retaliation to make a point may be very popular and tempting politically, but they do not work: they do not accomplish their intended objectives. And they are wrong. Muslim people in this nation and throughout the world have already begun to feel the pain of suspicion and hostility. This was not an Islamic gesture. Our duty as Christians is to acknowledge that, say it, and reach out to Muslim individuals and communities. To demand revenge, mindless retaliation, is to give a great victory to those who have done this thing, and that might be the greatest tragedy of all. Of course we must discover who did this. Of course we must do what is necessary to assure the safety and security of people who live in a free society. But we must not abandon, in the process, our most precious ideals and purposes: freedom, justice for all, and the rule of law.

Whoever did this assumed, perhaps, that when we experienced this violence, this demonstration of the vulnerability of a free society, we would be humiliated, discouraged. In fact, what has resulted is a renewed sense of our unity as a nation and our unity with the community of nations. People didn’t cower in fear; they volunteered to help, gave blood, sent money, called loved ones and friends, lit candles and stood vigil along darkened streets, and went to church.

We received hundreds of messages from members and friends of Fourth Presbyterian Church simply wanting to connect, to affirm a sense of belonging and being together.

We received messages from around the world, reminders that we are part of a global community.

From Mitri Raheb, Palestinian pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, who wanted Americans to know that pictures of Palestinians celebrating and dancing in the streets, shown on American television, were an aberration and in no way representative of the Palestinian people, who were shocked and saddened.

From the Bishop of the Reformed Church in Croatia, conveying deepest sympathy and prayers.

From the Presbytery of Havana.

From the American Muslim Council, condemning vicious acts of terrorism and expressing deep sorrow at the loss of American lives.

And who will ever forget the Royal Military Band playing our national anthem at Buckingham Palace or our Canadian neighbors in worship?

These days have reminded us of our humanness, our belonging to the human family. They have reminded us of the precious gift of community, of nation. The events last Tuesday have reminded us that no nation is entirely autonomous any longer and that, whether we want to be or not, we are part of the family of nations, and races, and religions. We need neighbors now. The fight against terrorism cannot be conducted unilaterally. We can no longer act internationally on the basis of self-interest. We can no longer afford to walk away from international treaties and conferences and negotiations.

And the tragedy has raised the deepest most profound questions of all: Why has this happened? Clergy were asked that a lot last week, frequently by young reporters looking for a story, looking, I assume, for someone who would say that God had a hand in it; that we suffer as punishment for our wrongdoing; or that God arranged this to teach us something; or that God allowed it—which is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, with appalling insensitivity and a gross misrepresentation of the Christian faith, said last week. God did not do this. God did not intend this. This tragedy, as is the case with all tragedy and human loss, happens in a world God loves so much that God created it in freedom. God doesn’t cause human suffering; God participates in it, experiences it with us. God had a son whose life was cut off prematurely, violently, cruelly. Basic Christian belief—that in Jesus Christ God lived our life, shared our humanity, and died our death—rests on the firm foundation of the Hebrew conviction so eloquently expressed by the psalmist:

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
Even though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff—
They comfort me.

That is the promise and the foundation of our faith.

Part of the experience of all of us this week is dislocation. We have a sense that we live in a different country this morning, and we’re feeling sad and lost, homesick for the one we used to live in.

We know personally the psalmist’s lament:

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept.. . .
How can we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?

Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophy at Yale, lost a son in a mountain climbing accident and wrote a beautiful book about his resulting experience, Lament for a Son.

“My attachment is loosened,” he observed. “I’ve become alien in the world. I don’t belong any more” (p. 51).

That is the experience of Israel, our ancestors in the faith. Violently and cruelly deported from their homes and resettled in Babylon, in exile, they longed to go home. That is the situation that prompted the writing of the 137th psalm, which we read this morning. Homesickness.

It is an elegant poem. It touches me every time I read it. It makes me think of home—the home I left, the home we all left once upon a time. It reminds me of the occasions of my own homesickness. It makes me think of what home means now and how precious that is. Among the emails I received last week was one from a friend stranded in Brussels. “I feel like I’m in exile,” she wrote. “I’m frightened and I want to come home.”

But there’s a big problem with that psalm. When we read it in worship, we always stop at verse 6, because what comes next is chilling:

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back. . . .
. . . who take your little ones
and dash them against the rocks!

It’s not one of the more noble moments in the Bible. But before we dismiss it as an unfaithful and sinful outburst, consider its passion, its honesty, its relevance to what we have felt this week, its authenticity.

We know the process of grief: how loss, any loss, leads to numbness, then to an awareness of the enormous reality of the loss, and then to anger. We know that anger is both inevitable and necessary as we come to terms with and work our way through grief. When we lose a loved one, we want to blame someone, get angry with someone: the doctors, the doctors didn’t diagnose properly or treat thoroughly; or the nurses weren’t paying attention; or the minister didn’t call enough; or I should have done more, should have seen the signs earlier; or God, God did this or allowed this. It is part of the experience of loss, so transparently part of the psalm writer’s experience as well as our own. And it’s in the Bible, but not as a strategy—there is no indication that the psalmist put his words into action or suggested that anyone else do it. What he did was offer his grief and his terrible anger to God. What he did was come to God in utter honesty, in a moment of terrible loss and profound grief. It is an invitation for us today to do the same: to offer up to God all the trauma and tears, the grief, the rage, we have experienced this week.

Part of the resource of our faith as Christians is the promise of homecoming when we are lost, or separated, or exiled. And insofar as the violent and tragic events of last Tuesday have put all of us in a new and different place, that promise is God’s good and healing word for us this day.

I went back this week, partly to find comfort for my own soul, to one of my favorite authors, Frederich Buechner. When Buechner was a little boy, his world changed utterly and dramatically and traumatically one Saturday morning when his father committed suicide. With grace and courage, Buechner has written eloquently about that trauma and how it forever changed his world, how it brought to an end what he knew as home and forced him to a lifetime of thinking about that in the context of his Christian faith.

In a recent book, Eyes of the Heart, he tells about sitting in church on Easter and hearing the minister ask from the pulpit “if there were any of us there who weren’t ashamed of our lives, and I wanted to hurl him bodily out of his pulpit.” “The Church,” Buechner says with angry impatience, “only remembers the story of sin and shame and the religious life as a story of guilt and sacrifice and forgiveness.” There is another biblical story that isn’t heard much, Buechner says. It’s the story of exile. “Why not ask us,” he asks, “if there are any of us who do not feel the sadness and loneliness and lostness of being separated from where we know in our hearts we truly belong, even if we’re not sure where it is to be found or how to get there, if there are any of us who do not yearn, more than for anything else, to go home” (p. 75-76).

Jesus told three remarkable little stories once about coming home, about reunion, about being found by God. Religious people, Pharisees and scribes, had been complaining about the way Jesus welcomed sinners and unclean people, people of the wrong religion or no religion, marginalized, outcast people, as friends; how he ate with them, seemed actually to like them, seemed actually to prefer their company to the company of the proper, orthodox, morally pure religious zealots.

So Jesus told stories about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one sheep who has wandered away and is lost and who, when he finds it, lifts it to his strong shoulders and carries it home and invites the neighbors in to celebrate. And he told about a woman who loses one coin and lights her lamps and turns her house inside out and won’t stop searching until she finds that coin, and when she does, she invites her friends to join her in celebration.

The third story is about a son who leaves home, wastes his money, returns home in great trepidation, and is welcomed by a father who runs down the road to meet him and throws open his arms and won’t even let him apologize.

Stunning pictures of God: not a stern judge, counting sins, meting out punishment for wrongdoing, wrong believing, but a shepherd finding a lost sheep and a woman searching until she finds one coin, a father running down the road to welcome home a lost child.

And it is a stunning picture of religion, not a relentless striving for theological correctness or moral purity, but a homecoming, a being found and claimed and embraced by God’s amazing love.

And it is a good and powerful word for us this morning trying to think and pray our way through this tragedy, this loss, this sense that we may have lost our home.

In God’s love we are home.

Good friend and eloquent poet Barrie Shepherd wrote

Love is the way, the only way to life
and the longer I neglect it,
the longer I will weep
for a land that is my home even
though I never knew it.
This is the longing that yearns within the heart
of all your people, Lord, the longing for love.
The promise up ahead of a land and of a time
when your children will breath free,
will eat well,
will grow strong, will know love. (Praying the Psalms, p. 121)

We live in a new place this morning. But our true home, our final home is in the love of God.

May we commend to God’s love all that has happened this week:

those who have perished
those whose grief is profound
those who work to relieve suffering and minister to the suffering and dying
those who must lead us into the future

May we today commend to the love of God our own lives and our dear country, commend it all to the God who is our home.

Amen.