Psalms: Salvation History

Psalm 105

            This lent we will be focusing on the psalms and what they have to say to us, what they have to teach us, their piece in our faith lives.  As part of that, today I want to give a brief overview and then we will focus on psalms of history, psalm 105 being one of those. 
            The psalms are a collection of prayers, poems and songs that express to God and to God’s people a wide spectrum of human experience and emotion.  As such they express praise, thanksgiving, wonder, doubt, faith, lament, grief, trust, hope, joy, sorrow.  The psalms reflect all of these feelings, as well as all sorts of human experiences, and they do so as a way of connecting with, honoring and reaching out to the Holy Spirit.  As theologian Eugene Peterson says it, “When we pray the psalms, we enter into the centuries-long experience of being a people of God.”  Many of the psalms are attributed to King David, but not all of them.  Scholars have identified different types of psalms, and while many of the psalms fit into more than one category, generally, for our understanding and study, they are divided into the following different types:
Hymns of praise,
Enthronement hymns which recognize God as King over all the world,
Songs of Zion which recognize and lift up Jerusalem as God’s holy city,
Songs of lament,
Songs of trust,
Sacred History psalms which look at the history of God’s people,
Royal psalms which focus on ways in which God is actively involved in the politics, battles and national work of Israel,
Songs of thanksgiving,
Wisdom psalms which contain short memorable wise sayings,
And liturgies that were used in festivals and other worship experiences in the temple.
          If any of you would like a list of these different kinds of psalms with the psalm numbers that tell you which psalm fits into which category, I would be happy to provide those for you.
          As I said before, the psalms are prayers, they are hymns, they are poetry.  As hymns, they were sung, many as part of worship services.  As poetry, they tap deep into human experience, touching mind, soul, heart, and spirit.  No matter what you are feeling or thinking, a psalm can be found that mirrors where you are, that speaks for you, reassures you that you are not alone in that experience, and in those feelings as they connect to the Divine One.  The psalms call you into a deeper connection with yourself as well as with God.  In this way, psalms are very personal, and invite us into the second half of the second commandment to love neighbor AS self (or, in this case, to love yourself even as you love your neighbor!).  The psalms invite us to take the time to focus on our own spiritual journeys and to offer up prayers, thoughts, and songs as a way of caring for ourselves, since a deeper connection to God IS a way to care for yourself as well.  As prayers, they give us words when our own words do not feel complete or do not feel enough.  They give us words that have been said over the centuries, and prayers that therefore connect us not only to our own experiences but to our tradition and to those throughout the centuries who have prayed these same words before us.
         The psalms are also teachers, not only of how to pray, but of who God is, and of who we are as God’s people.  The psalms of history contribute in a special way to teaching and connecting us.  Today’s psalm is one of the psalms that recounts the history of the Jewish people and casts that history in a light that gives special focus to God’s role in that history.  In telling history through the psalm, we express care for our faith community and for ourselves as individuals.  We know ourselves and are known by others according to the stories we hear, remember, and retell about who we are.  We are shaped by the traditions with which we identify and we reshape those same traditions as we pass them onto others.  There is, therefore, great purpose and great meaning in retelling the stories, in inviting them to remind us who we are, WHOSE we are and why we are. 
        I read a recent study on the well-being of children.  And one of the strongest and most surprising finds was that when children know their history, and by that I mean their extended history, the history of their parents and grandparents, they fare much better, make better choices, tend to be more successful as adults, are happier, healthier, feel more grounded, more connected, and more confident in life than when they don’t.  Think about the truth of this: no matter what kind of support and grounding we give to kids who are adopted, I’ve supported many of these kids as young adults who often have felt a sense of being lost, a strong desire to connect to their biological history, and a stronger sense of connection and continuance when they do know BOTH their biological family’s history as well as the history of the family into which they’ve been adopted.  When we know where we are from, when we have a connection to the past as well as to the present and the future, we feel grounded.  We know ourselves better.  We see the long arc of history that can allow us to remember that whatever we are experiencing in this moment is tiny in the scope of time.  We have a stronger sense of long-term connection to everything when we know where we are from and what has created us in this time and in this place to be exactly who we are today. 
         These history psalms invite us into that time of remembrance, of re-centering in the story, or recommitting to being the people of God with a history, with a faith tradition and faith community, with a purpose and a meaning.  They invite us to step back and to see the bigger picture of God’s movement through time.  No matter what is going on today or how we are feeling in the moment, when we look at history, when we reflect on not only our own personal lives and history, but on the history of all of God’s people, we see God active and present, interacting with us, never leaving us alone, calling us ever deeper into our faith and into relationship with God. 
        Bernard Anderson describes the psalms as “the songs that accompany the people of God on their journey through history.”  When we engage the psalms, and today as we engage the sacred history psalms, we invite the story to be our guide as we continue on our journeys with God.
             Even when the psalms of history reflect on hard times, on tragic times, naming those times and singing them reminds us that we walk even the hard times together – together with one another and together with God as God’s people.  Psalm 137, which also tells part of the story of God’s people, reflects this. “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 mount, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”   This psalm reflects the time when in 586 B.C. Jerusalem was captured and burned, the Temple destroyed by the king of Babylon, and thousands of people from Judah were taken into exile in Babylon.  This psalm recalls the pain and anguish of a displaced people in grief for their capital, for their temple, for their home for God.  I would like us to take a moment to sing this psalm together. And as we do, I invite you to feel the pain of the exiled Israelites, but also to see if singing their pain allows you to express grief, too, for things that you have lost as well – for those times when there is nothing to do except sit down and weep for what has passed…. #784
            What was that like for you to sing this psalm?
            In contrast to the reflection of history that shows pain and grief, today’s scripture reading was psalm 105 and after the sermon we will sing another history psalm, psalm 136.  Both of these reflect the beauty of God’s saving action through history.   Psalm 136 interjects the phrase, “God’s love endures forever” after every line.  We will sing, “for your love is never ending” as the alternate line each time reminding us that God does act, is acting, continues to act with love every day and in every place, even when we sit by the waters of Babylon and weep.
            Whether we are telling a story of sorrow or telling a story of God’s acts of salvation, it is the telling of those stories that grounds us, gives us continuity in our own stories, helps us understand who we are, and helps us to see God in history.
            I think about the movie, “Secondhand Lions”.  For those who have not seen it, a neglected boy is left with great uncles whom he has never even met for a summer by a mother who is more interested in meeting men than in caring for her boy.  Walter quickly engages his uncles in telling him stories of their adventures in Africa.  Until the very end of the movie, we don’t know if these stories are true or not.  But what becomes very apparent throughout the movie is that the telling of these stories, these histories, is life-giving to Walter, regardless of the veracity of the stories themselves.  The stories teach him what it is to be brave, what it is to be a man, what it is to be loving and faithful and strong and courageous.  They ground him and connect him to a sense of family that is more than just the here and now.  They transform him from being a boy who feels nothing but rejection, who is scared of his own shadow, who cannot stand up for himself into a boy who does stand up for himself and for those he loves, who claims his own rights and claims his own life.  The stories gave him the strength to be a person with hopes, dreams and a future. 
          Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote many wonderful Christian children’s stories, including A Wrinkle in Time, says that stories are incredibly important because they tell us who we are, and who God is in relation to us.  She says they do this more deeply than almost anything else because the stories get into our psyches, and transform us into God’s people.  The sacred history psalms are an important part of that story telling, combining the poetry that speaks to our hearts with the stories that speak to our imaginations about who we are.
            Psalm 78, another history psalm, begins with details about the way in which we are to hear the stories of God’s amazing work in history.  You can read the psalm yourself, but it is very long, so I will just sum up the call for us.  We are expected:
1.      To listen to the teachings.
2.     To tell others what God has done
3.     To teach our children
4.     To set our hope in God
5.     To not forget the works of God
6.     To keep God’s commandments
7.     And finally, to NOT be like our ancestors – in other words, to learn from history, and to choose a different path forward. 
           Each sacred history psalm, even when it tells stories of sorrow, also presents the same vision of God – the one who has done wondrous deeds, who has acted with justice, who brings salvation, who loves, forgives and rescues.  That is the story we are called to tell again and again with these psalms, with our songs, with our prayers, and with our readings. 
         I want to finish today by having us pray together a piece of Psalm 77.  Please join me in prayer:
           I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord;
           I will remember your wonders of old.
           I will meditate on all your work,
           And muse on your mighty deeds.
          Your way, O God, is holy.
            What god is so great as our God?
          You are the God who works wonders;
            You have displayed your might among the people.
         With your strong arm you redeemed your people,
            The descendants of Jacob and Joseph.  Amen.

Honoring those who went before: grandparent's day

Exodus 20:12
2 Timothy 1:3-13

A little boy was in church next his parents and grandparents.  During prayer time, he said a small prayer, "Dear God, please bless Mommy and Daddy and all the family to be healthy and happy."
Suddenly he looked up and shouted, "And please don't forget to ask grandpa to give me a bicycle for my birthday!!"
"There is no need to shout like that," said his father. "God isn't hard of hearing."
"No," said the little boy, "but Grandpa is."
--
Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
It's amazing how grandparents seem so young once you become one.
If your baby is "beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time," you're the grandma.
An hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again. Anything longer than that, and you start to age quickly.
--
A teacher asked her young pupils how they spent their vacation. One child wrote the following:
"We always used to spend the holidays with Grandma and Grandpa. They used to live here in a big brick house, but Grandpa got retarded and they moved to Florida and now they live in a place with a lot of other retarded people.
"They live in a tin box and have rocks painted green to look like grass. They ride around on big tricycles and wear nametags because they don't know who they are anymore. They go to a building called a wrecked center, but they must have got it fixed, because it is all right now.
"They play games and do exercises there, but they don't do them very well. There is a swimming pool, too, but they all jump up and down in it with their hats on. I guess they don't know how to swim.
"At their gate, there is a dollhouse with a little old man sitting in it. He watches all day so nobody can escape. Sometimes they sneak out. Then they go cruising in their golf carts.
"My Grandma used to bake cookies and stuff, but I guess she forgot how. Nobody there cooks, they just eat out. And they eat the same thing every night: Early Birds. Some of the people can't get past the man in the dollhouse to go out. So the ones who do get out bring food back to the wrecked center and call it potluck.
"My Grandma says Grandpa worked all his life to earn his retardment and says I should work hard so I can be retarded some day, too. When I earn my retardment I want to be the man in the doll house. Then I will let people out so they can visit their grandchildren."
--
As I prepared for today’s sermon, I found myself reflecting on how we honor our ancestors, how we honor those who went before, or even those who are still with us but are of different generations.  How do we show that their lives mean something to us?  That the way they did things, though different, is still a valuable part of our heritage, of who we are?
I enjoy going to museums and seeing how my ancestors did things, how the people who went before me lived and worked and played and survived.  I am a 5th generation Californian, my kids are 6th generation Californians, and I take pride in that history.  I enjoy learning about my ancestors travelling to come here to work on the railroad, about their purchasing the land that still remains in our family.  I enjoy learning how gender roles were divided, what women did for the ranch lands and what men did, how they built things, how they washed and cooked and cleaned and made their livings.  It is fascinating to me, and, I feel an important part of my history.
But with every generation there are changes, and those changes seem to be coming at a faster and faster pace.  We don’t just change how we do things, what work looks like, what clothes we wear, what foods we eat, we also change how we practice faith, IF we practice faith.  We change how we do relationships.  Many of those changes we embrace, but I think every change also brings challenges, perhaps especially for those who have gone before.  And I think one of the reasons is that we can see these changes as either judgments on how we did things, or we can feel that it makes our lives irrelevant.
I remember reading in Mitch Albom’s book, Have a Little Faith,
 “I remember as a kid, the (Rabbi) admonishing the congregation – gently, and sometimes not so gently – for letting rituals lapse or disappear, for eschewing traditional acts like lighting candles or saying blessings, even neglecting the Kaddish prayer for loved ones who had died.
But even as he pleaded for a tighter grip, year after year, his members opened their fingers and let a little more go.  They skipped a prayer here.  They skipped a holiday there.  They intermarried (-as I did).
I wondered, now that his days were dwindling, how important ritual still was.
‘Vital’, he said.
But why?  Deep inside, you know your convictions.
‘Mitch,’ he said, ‘faith is about doing.  You are how you act, not just how you believe.’ (p.44)…”My grandparents did these things.  My parents, too.  If I take the pattern and throw it out, what does that say about their lives?  Or mine?  From generation to generation, these rituals are how we remain…connected.”
As I read that I found myself wondering, do we feel personally insulted when our kids don’t do what we did?  And how about the next generation, when our grandkids’ lives are so VERY different?  I know I struggle at times with the choices that my kids make that seem like they will be different from the choices that I have made.  There is a part of me that feels like that choice to do something different IS somehow a judgment on what I chose, on what I did.  It’s not, but it feels that way.  We can see this when we look back… we know it isn’t a judgment on women’s worth as homemakers that women now work outside of the home.  It isn’t a judgment on those who walked everywhere that we now drive places.  It isn’t a judgment on those who hand washed dishes and clothes and scrubbed the floors on their hands and knees that we now use machines to do the hard work for us.  It isn’t a judgment on our ancestors and foreparents who were farmers and ranchers when we work in the city at computers.  But it can feel that way.  It can feel like those are statements that say our way of life, our way of living is quickly forgotten.  What mattered to us no longer seems to matter, what made our lives worth while seems no longer relevant.  What about when they no longer go to church?  Does that feel like they don’t value the things we valued?  And are we okay with that?
          I don’t think that updating things or doing things differently means that we no longer honor the past.  And I think it can be seriously problematic to believe that in order to be loyal to what was, you have to reject what is.  The Amish community for a long time has been a separatist community of faith because they did not want change of any kind.  And while that has served them for a time, the Amish are now finally having to make some adjustments.  In Ohio where I lived there was a very large Amish population whose farms were becoming unsustainable because of the cost to run them without electric equipment.  They have finally conceded that they have to change.  As hard as that is, they, too have had to change to survive in this world.  That is not a judgement on the past.  It is not a statement that says all that they did is no longer meaningful or relevant.
So how do we honor those who have gone before?  If not by doing it the way they did, how do we honor them?
Remembering.
Telling stories. Reading and hearing their stories.
        Caring about history and trying to learn from it.
Spending time with those who are older than us.
Listening to the things they value and trying to understand why they value them.
Avoiding ageism (there is a great deal of ageism in our culture.  We equate elderly with less intelligent and less productive rather than seeing the wisdom and maturity and honoring that.  We need to be better about this.).

And if we are those who would like to be honored, how do we move forward?
Telling stories,
Writing down our stories,
Sharing the histories of our grandparents and our parents so that they, too, will be remembered.
 Sharing the mistakes we've made, how we worked through them and how we moved forwards afterwards.
Choosing to spend time with those younger than us and being open to learning from them.
Sharing our values with our kids and why we hold them: not in a way that shames them if they come out in a different place, but in a way that is simply explanatory: this is why I feel the way I do.

Does that mean we have to stop the world from spinning around and stop the changes that our younger people are making?  I don’t think we could if we wanted to, but more importantly, I think the attempts end up only hurting ourselves as we can end up isolated from those we love.  The world is changing, everything about it is changing.  When I think about the fact that when my kids were born, people did not have cell phones and that it wasn’t until graduate school for me that people had personal computers.  When I think that in my parent’s life time TV was invented and that in my grandparent’s life time cars were made… Church has changed radically too.  Calvin allowed no instruments, and especially not organs in his worship.  And as we know, young folk simply aren’t going to church much anymore.  We can’t stop the world from spinning.  But we can teach our young folk about what matters to us and why.
I shared this with you last year, but I love it.  It’s from Kahlil Gibran’s “the prophet”.  ON children:
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
They have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Finally, we honor those who went before and we honor those who are to come by practicing love.  By being the people we hope to be: by living lives that are loving and giving and that bring joy, grace, and light to the world.  In our baptism promises, we promise to care for one another, to love each other and to raise each other in God’s grace.  As a result, all of us, whether we have blood relations in this place or not, are our family.
As one commentary I read this week said, “Some of the people we call grandparents are such because they are our parents' parents — they are blood relations. And some of the people we call grandparents — or "elders" in some cultures — are such because of a quality of compassion, concern, wisdom, and generosity that they demonstrate toward us. The Search Institute has identified that children who have at least five caring adults in their lives, in addition to their parents, are more likely to thrive and less likely to become "at risk." Every congregation is blessed with "grandmas" and "grandpas" who love and share their faith in ways that form us as an extended family, a tribe, a clan of people embraced by the love of God.”  So we honor one another especially by loving one another.

Sunday's Sermon - Tradition and Change

2 Kings 2:1-14

Luke 9: 51-56

One day as I sat in my lectionary group in Cleveland, we noticed one of the members of our group frowning and staring hard at the clock hanging on the wall.  “What are you looking at?” Pastor Leroy asked her.  

“Well, I’ve just noticed that that clock on the wall is running backwards!” 

“Yes, I know” Leroy told us.  “Apparently it would only take reversing a tiny little piece inside the clock to fix it, but when I mentioned this to our church trustees I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not to fix that clock! ‘You see,’ the head of trustees told me, ‘That clock was a memorial gift!’” 

Today I want to talk about Tradition and Change.  Both of these are important parts of our faith, but we hold them in great tension in the church.  How do we hold on to our traditions but still be a church that is relevant in current society?  How do we enter the world without giving up things that are important and sacred to our church and indeed to our very faith?  How do we support those who find their deepest meaning in the old ways, while still inviting and welcoming those who do not value the old ways and instead, thrive on the new?

There is a tension here, a deep tension here.  We know that change is hard, that change is uncomfortable.  We also know that there is real value in rituals and tradition.  At the same time, in order to stay alive and relevant, the church must find ways of being in the world that are meaningful to the younger generations and especially to the unchurched.  The goal, then, and the challenge, is to find ways to walk in the tension of these values while keeping integrity with our faith.

How many of you have seen the movie Groundhog Day?  The premise of the movie is that the main character, played by Bill Murray, is stuck in repeating the same day, groundhog day, again and again.  He wakes up on the same day each morning, in the same hotel room, in the same town.  He can change his actions each day, but the structure, the people around him, the town, are all the same, every single day.  At one point he is sitting in a bar with a couple other guys and complaining about this.  He says to them, “What would you do?  If you were stuck in one place.  And every day was exactly the same. And nothing that you did mattered?”  To which the two men in the bar respond, “well that about sums it up for me.”  We may not repeat the same day over and over, and yet we can get stuck too.

When we get “stuck” in a rut, we can yearn for some kind of change.  And even though we know that, to use an anonymous quote, "To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did".  Even though we know this, it can be hard to move out of our ruts.  

Other times, we choose to stay the same.  Change IS hard.

Sometimes we resist change not because we are stuck, but because we are comfortable.  Still, all stasis is an illusion.  We know that all things in life are temporary.  And that if things are going well, we need to enjoy them because that will not last.  And if things are going wrong, we can look forward because that won’t last either.

Sometimes, in the midst of the fast-paced changes of society, the rituals and traditions bring a comfort, a stability that would not otherwise be found.  Mitch Albom in his book, Have a Little Faith (Hyperion, New York, 2009) shared the story of Rabbi Lewis who lost his young daughter through a very severe asthma attack.  Albom wrote, “The very rituals of mourning that he cursed having to do – the prayers, the torn clothing, not shaving, covering the mirror – had helped him keep a grip on who he was, when he might have otherwise washed away.  He told how the words of the Kaddish made him think, ‘I am part of something here; one day my children will say this very prayer for me just as I am saying it for my daughter.’  His faith soothed him, and while it could not save (his daughter) from death, it could make her death more bearable, by reminding him that we are all frail parts of something powerful.” (p. 182)

Albom continued, “..ritual was a major part of the (Rabbi)’s life.  Morning prayers.  Evening prayers.  Eating certain foods.  Denying himself others.  On Sabbath, he walked to synagogue, rain or shine, not operating a car, as per Jewish law.  On holidays and festivals, he took part in traditional practices, hosting a Seder meal on Passover, or casting bread into a stream on Rosh Hashanah, symbolic of casting away your sins. 

            "Like Catholicism, with its vespers, sacraments, and communions – or Islam, with its five-times-daily salah, clean clothes, and prayer mats – Judaism had enough rituals to keep you busy all day, all week, and all year.

            "I remember as a kid, the (Rabbi) admonishing the congregation – gently, and sometimes not so gently – for letting rituals lapse or disappear, for eschewing traditional acts like lighting candles or saying blessings, even neglecting the Kaddish prayer for loved ones who had died.

            "But even as he pleaded for a tighter grip, year after year, his members opened their fingers and let a little more go.  They skipped a prayer here.  They skipped a holiday there.  They intermarried (-as I did).

            "I wondered, now that his days were dwindling, how important ritual still was.

            "‘Vital’, he said.

            "But why?  Deep inside, you know your convictions.

            "‘Mitch,’ he said, ‘faith is about doing.  You are how you act, not just how you believe.’ (p.44)…'My grandparents did these things.  My parents, too.  If I take the pattern and throw it out, what does that say about their lives?  Or mine?  From generation to generation, these rituals are how we remain…connected.'”

Still, despite the wisdom of these words, and the comforts we find in rituals and traditions, I question the belief that somehow updating things means that we no longer honor the past.  And I think it can be seriously problematic to believe that in order to be loyal to what was, you have to reject what is.  The Amish community for a long time has been a separatist community of faith because they did not want change of any kind.  And while that has served them for a time, the Amish are now finally having to make some adjustments.  In Ohio where I lived there was a very large Amish population whose farms were becoming unsustainable because of the cost to run them without electric equipment.  They have finally conceded that they have to change.  As hard as that is, they, too have had to change to survive in this world.

But it isn’t easy.  When I was a young adult, the associate pastor and young adult leader at the church I actively attended moved to Africa to do mission work.  She was replaced by an interim associate.  I found that I could not be kind to this new associate.  I could not be nice or accepting of her because it felt somehow disloyal to the previous associate.  I felt that if I loved this new minister, I would be betraying the one who had left.  In the process I caused hurt to the new associate.  Just as those who are attached to long term rituals can feel hurt when those rituals are changed, seeing them as judgments on the way things were done in the past; the reality is that folk new to a community can feel just as hurt by an insistence on sticking with traditional ways of doing things, seeing this as a rejection of their world and hence of them.

Still, the reality is that often God does not give us a choice about whether to remain the same or to change. 

Elisha could not let go of Elijah.  He knew that his master was going to leave him soon.  Everyone around him kept telling him as well.  But he basically kept saying to them “shut up!!  I don’t want to hear it!!”  again and again.  He did not want to accept the change that was coming.  But in the end, he was given no choice and Elijah left.  Still, in rending his clothes after Elijah’s departure, Elisha, too, fell back on one of the rituals or traditions of grief to help him through.  There was inevitable change, but it was accepted with ritual and tradition.

So, too, with the story in Luke.  Jesus wanted to go to a village in Samaria that would not take him in because he was heading for Jerusalem.  The disciples had this plan in their head.  They did not want to stray from it.  They would rather bring down fire from heaven to consume the village than alter your course.  Jesus told them that was ridiculous.  He “rebuked them sternly”, and they changed their plans.  But it still reflects the same challenge.  No, we can’t stay here. There is still work to be done – there is still community to be established, there is still a message to be passed on, there is still a salvific journey for all of humanity that begins with Jesus and therefore must continue forward.  This message was the same for the early church – they could not just stay where they were, they were called to go out and act, to spread the good news, to show the love of God for all people, to teach about God in a new way.  And the same is true for the church now.  The call to spread the news, to form and heal community, to be God’s people in the world cannot be delayed.  We cannot stay in the comfort of our rituals when we are called to change the world.  We are called, to quote Psalm 96, to “Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth.”  And yet still, there are elements that remain the same. While the song is new, it is the same God we are singing to.  And while Jesus died and was resurrected, it was the same Jesus we met both before and after. 

In the end, we must seek, as in all things, to find a balance.  And when old things do change, we must find ways to grieve and to honor what was, what went before.  To take a quote from my big fat Greek Wedding, “Don't let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become.”

All of this recalls me to the musical Fiddler on the Roof.  As Reb Tevye said, “Our traditions have kept us balanced for many, many years….Without our traditions we would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”  And throughout the musical he continues to hold on to many of his rituals and traditions, even as he must let go of others.  He is faced with the challenge of choosing between his traditions and his relationships with his daughters.  For two of them he chooses his daughters, letting go, though it is ever so painful for him, of his traditions.  But for the third one he cannot do the same.  The challenge to his traditions pushes him too far.  And in the face of his choice between tradition and even his daughter, he chooses his tradition.  For us, too, we may come to a point where we feel pushed too far.  But we are called to choose love again and again.  And that love means looking for balance, determining what is most important to us, being willing at times to let go, and at other times to rejoice and find comfort in what we know.  We are called to choose love.  We are called to allow God to bring change within us, both as the church and as individuals.  We are called to sing a new song to the same God.  And sometimes that will mean keeping things the same.  And other times that will mean letting go and allowing change.  Both will be challenges.  But as we say every week…it is all that easy, and it is all that hard.  Amen.