Redemption Songs

This sermon was preached at a Roots Revival Wednesday evening service at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on January 16, 2013. Roots Revival is a worship service grounded in Americana/roots-based music featuring Martha Bassett and friends. We used Over the Rhine‘s “New Redemption Song” as a focus for the service alongside Psalm 137, following it up with Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

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By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

— Psalm 137

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The free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wings in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

(Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird” from Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? © 1983)

I’m sure we’ve all had moments of blind rage where we have uttered curses that surprise even ourselves. I’ve done so simply by stubbing my toe. Countless doorframes and uneven sidewalks have been damned to the eternal fires of hell and worse by yours truly.

But it’s hard to think of a situation in which we might utter words like those at the end of Psalm 137. Dashing little ones against the rock? Seriously?

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that praying the psalms is an important part of Christian spirituality (Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible). Part of this is because Jesus prayed and still prays the psalms with us. But that brings us to this very serious question Bonhoeffer asks: “Can [these] psalms be understood as the Word of God for us and as the prayer of Jesus Christ? Can we pray these psalms as Christians?”

Let’s remember who is praying this psalm, and where. In 587 BCE, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. The Israelites were made captives in Babylon. God’s chosen people were cut off from their history, from their collective memory, and their captors mocked them. They responded in desperation, in anger. But at the same time, they gave that anger over to God—they asked God to take vengeance—and therefore they freed themselves from the need to seek revenge.

The caged bird sings with fearful trill
of the things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

From the 15^th to the 19^th century, another people were forced into captivity. The Swahili term to this time is maafa, or “The Great Disaster.” I am talking, of course, about the Atlantic slave trade. I doubt that we sitting here can fully imagine the calamity that was and is human slavery.

Even still, somehow, out of the atrocities of African slavery in North America came the spirituals. Some of them were expressions of faith in the midst of suffering; some were socio-political protests; and some may have given instruction as to how to escape slavery.

Comedian Eddie Izzard has this to say about the spirituals as contrasted with Anglo Christian singing. He says, “The only singing that’s good in the Christian religion is that gospel singing, which is born out of kidnapping, murder, slavery, oppression, hellish inhuman existence, crimes against humanity, and they’re singing joyous and wild—and Caucasian people, with all the power and money in the world, enough to make Solomon revolve in his grave: [drearily] O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come…” (Glorious, 1997)

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

Can we really sing of freedom if we’ve never been without it? When we talk about freedom in America today, we are usually talking about self-expression or owning a semiautomatic weapon. Once, freedom was life itself. Which song is really worth singing?

In the 20^th century, the slaves’ spirituals were adapted for the Civil Rights movement. Next Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The Civil Rights movement was not just a spontaneous uprising. There was profound intentionality. Martin Luther King and others who were part of nonviolent protests went through rigorous training on nonviolence. The freedom songs weren’t just catchy; they were part of keeping your eyes on the goal, on freedom.

Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah.

When reading a passage like Psalm 137, many have suggested asking a simple question: am I the oppressed or the oppressor? Am I an Israelite or a Babylonian? Am I the slave or the master? Or…am I both?

A few years ago, I attended a workshop led by Brown University professor Tricia Rose and Yale Divinity graduate Rahiel Tesfamariam. The title of the workshop: Christian Lessons and Strategies for Hip Hop. Rose and Tesfamariam say that commercial hip hop is in crisis (see Rose’s book The Hip Hop Wars). An art form born out of a concern for raising socio-political issues and rehabilitating community, commercial hip hop—what you hear on the radio—in recent years has become dominated by gangsta rap that glorifies drugs, violence, money and misogyny.

For some people, that image of living large looks like freedom. However, Rose and Tesfamariam compare the journey of hip hop culture to that of the Israelites in the wilderness—and although the gangsta rappers think they have found the promised land, in truth they are enslaving themselves all over again to a destructive lifestyle. Unfortunately that has become representative of black culture for many people.

But those socially conscious artists are out there. Those hip hop artists who dare to dig into real issues of classism, racism, drugs and violence with a critical eye—they are like the spies who were sent ahead of the wilderness wanderers and are coming back with news of the promised land. One of these artists is Lupe Fiasco. He’s had his hits, sure, and not every track is a socio-political statement, but his lyrics lament gun violence and misogyny and ask hard questions about how justice is served in our country. His 2007 album The Cool starts with this short spoken word piece:

They thought it was cool to burn crosses in your front lawn
 As they hung you from trees in your backyard
They thought it was cool to leave you thirsty and stranded, Katrina
He thought it was cool to carry a gun in his classroom
And open fire, Virginia Tech, Columbine, stop the violence

They thought it was cool to tear down the projects
And put up million dollar condos, gentrification
They think it’s cool to stand on the block
Hiding products in their socks making quick dime bag dollars

They think it’s cool to ride down on you
In blue and white unmarked cars bustin’ you upside your head
Freeze—‘cause the problem is we think it’s cool too
Check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool

The true low point in an exile is not the lament. The true low point is when exile becomes accepted and even embraced as the norm. That is why the psalmist is so intent on remembering: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!”

When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, they complained. They begged Moses to take them back to Egypt. But here in the exile, the psalmist says no—no, I will not forget where I have come from and what I have been through. My song is a song of freedom, not of exile. Even if the psalmist hung up her harp, the songs of freedom could not be kept quiet for long.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

In the musical composition discipline known as counterpoint, the cantus firmus is the melody, the main musical part that drives the entire piece. Other voices and harmonies are built around the cantus firmus. Without the cantus firmus, the other parts simply wouldn’t make sense or have any direction; but with it, they are free to explore new harmonies, to improvise. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that this is a metaphor for our life with God (Letters and Papers from Prison). God’s love is the cantus firmus that both grounds us and sets us free to play and explore in the musical landscape of love.

The song of freedom is not meant to be sung alone. The redemption song is a chorus of voices that sounds sometimes in dissonance and sometimes in harmony. There is an awful lot of improvisation. But all the wrong notes and missed chords are slowly but surely grinding along toward a beautiful resolution, a cadence sustained and resolved in the cantus firmus of God’s love.

In the book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller says this: “The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom.”

The caged bird sings with fearful trill
of the things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

I know why the caged bird sings. Because Jesus doesn’t just pray the psalms with us—he sings them. All we have to do is sing along with the cantus firmus of God’s love. Whatever it is that holds us, whatever anger or disappointment or loss or division or history that binds us, in the redemption song, God can receive it, God can hold it, God can redeem it. Help us, Lord, to sing along a new redemption song.