How Shall We Sing It Here

The song played the whole way through and she never opened her mouth.

She had put it on herself. That is the part that snags. She had gone and found it, and turned the volume up because the house is not small, and picked up the dish towel, and then the first line came and something in her throat simply closed, the way a door closes when the wind takes it. She stood at the counter with a wet plate in her hand until the last verse was over, and then she dried the plate.

She can pray. Praying is fine, praying is talking and she has always been able to talk. She reads most mornings. It is the singing. Singing needs somebody, and there is nobody, and her own voice going up alone in a house with the drapes half open sounds to her like a woman talking to herself in a grocery aisle. It embarrasses her, and she is alone, and being embarrassed with nobody watching is its own strange kind of lonely.

It has been two years and some months since she was in a room with another believer. Not a fight, not a falling out. Life just moved everybody, the way it does, and she ended up here.

And here is what has actually been eating at her, and it is not the quiet. It is what she has decided the quiet proves. Somewhere in the second year she began to read her own silence as a verdict. A woman who used to sing and cannot sing now must have lost something, or let something go, or drifted while she was not looking. That is the sentence she has been serving, and nobody handed it down to her. She wrote it herself and then sat down under it.

If you have stopped being able to get a song out in your own house, then that sentence is probably somewhere in you too, and I want to take it apart before we go one step further.

The question got kept

There is a line in the psalms that a careful editor would have cut, and God kept it.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?Psalm 137:4

Sit with what that is. It is not a rebuke of the exiles, recorded so that later readers would know what not to say. It is not a footnote. It is inside the songbook, numbered with the rest, held in the same collection as the ones that shout. The hymnal of the people of God contains, on purpose, the sentence of people who could not get a hymn out.

Nobody edited it into something more useful. Nobody appended a correction underneath it. It stands there in the book, and it has stood there for thousands of years, and every generation of God's people since has read it and not been ashamed of it.

Right now, as you read, you have the exiles' own question and it costs you nothing to ask it. Psalm 137:4 keeps that question in the book and nobody struck it out, and the Holy Spirit who carried it into Scripture is not embarrassed by it in you.

And read who is asking. How shall we sing. We. They were together. They were sitting down by the rivers in a group, with the instruments hung up in the branches over their heads, and being together did not restore one note to a single one of them. Which takes the whole foundation out from under the sentence you have been serving. If a crowd of them could not sing, then your not singing is not a measurement of your isolation and it is not a measurement of you.

You are one of God's people this evening and your voice is not where that is kept. Scripture records that complaint and files it as a psalm, and the same Spirit who inspired it holds you steady in a quiet kitchen.

The question itself was sung

Now look at what nobody points out about that psalm, and it is the whole turn of this message.

Psalm 137 is a song. Somebody in the strange land, in the middle of not being able to sing, sang that. The complaint has a tune. The sentence that says we cannot do this here was done there, in that country, by those people, and then carried in the collection of God's people ever since as one of their own songs.

That is not clever. That is the mercy of it. He did not require them to arrive somewhere before their voice counted. He took what came out of them in the far country and put it in the book.

You have a share in that book that the distance never reduced. It is written down and it has not been revised since, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old sentence land in a quiet house.

And He is not silent on the subject of far countries generally. He had a letter written to those exiles, to the elders and the priests and to all the people carried away, addressing them there, as a people, in Babylon. He gave them instruction for that country. He did not open with an apology for the address, and He did not describe their years there as a waiting room. In that same letter He says, I will be found of you.

Found of you there. In the strange land, in the kitchen, on the ridge, in the room with the drapes half open and nobody else in it. Your share in God's people is not being held in trust for you somewhere else, to be released when you next stand next to somebody who believes what you believe.

You are joined to them from where you are, and the miles hold no authority over the joining. Jeremiah 29:14 puts I will be found of you in writing, over His own name, and His Spirit did not stay behind at the border.