How Shall We Sing the Lord's Song?

Kathy Young

As Presbyterians we have had a Criminal Justice Sunday since the

mid-1970s. Since the PHEWA Conference traditionally concludes on the
second Sunday in February, Criminal Justice Sunday, Tve been responsi-
ble for coordinating the closing worship for several conferences. This year
we are concluding on what has appeared on our calendars for many years
as Race Relations Sunday. I agreed again to coordinate the worship, be-
lieving that it would be appropriate to make the bridges, the connections
between the human alienation and brokenness that lead to the need for a
Race Relations Sunday and the human alienation and brokenness that lead
to the need for a Criminal Justice Sunday. This is the challenge before us
today: can we make those connections?
Listen to the Word of God as it comes to us in Psalm 137—including the
difficult final verses that I usually prefer to avoid:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.
There on the willow trees we hung up our harps,
for there those who carried us off demanded music and singing,
and our captors called on us to be merry:
44
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 away;
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 people of Edom the day of Jerusalem's fall,
when they said, "Down with it, down with it, down to its very foundations!"
O Babylon, Babylon the destroyer,
happy the man who repays you for all that you did to us!
Happy is he who shall seize your children and dash them against the rock.
(New English Bible)

The Reverend Kathy Young is the Director of the Presbyterian Criminal Justice
Program, on staff in New York and Atlanta since the program was consolidated in
1982, as well as Program Agency Associate for Justice System Issues and an ad-
ministrator of the Fund for Legal Aid for Racial and Intercultural Justice. This
sermon was delivered on Race Relations Sunday, February 3, 1985.
38 CHURCH & SOCIETY

Listen also for God's Word as it shines through these verses in Paul's
Letter to the Romans, 8:31-39, reading the Phillips translation:
In face of all this, what is there left to say? If God is for us, who can be against
us? He who did not hesitate to spare his own Son but gave him up for us all—can
we not trust such a God to give us, with him, everything else that we can need?
Who would dare to accuse us, whom God has chosen? The judge himself has
declared us free from sin. Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ, and
Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays
for us!
Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, pain or persecution?
Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of
arms? Indeed, some of us know the truth of that ancient text:
44
For thy sake we are killed all the day long;
We were accounted as sheep for the slaughter."
No, in all these things we win an overwhelming victory through him who has
proved his love for us.
I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messen-
ger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today from below nor
anything else in God's whole world has any power to separate us from the love
of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!
"What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us?"
Well, that sounds wonderful: for some reason it reminds me of the closing
couplet in that otherwise sensible hymn, There's a Wideness in God's
Mercy:
If our love were but more simple, we should take him at his word,
and our lives would be all sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord.
Is life like that? For Paul it wasn't. In the Romans passage and in several
other places he listed the tribulations that he had already suffered: he de-
scribes himself as afflicted, perplexed and struck down; hungry and
thirsty, ill clad, buffeted and homeless; he identifies eight specific sources
of danger (including from his own people as well as from false brethren),
and he lists his labors, imprisonments, and beatings. Anything here sound
familiar?
The list may look like this conference's program guide: discern the
times, address questions of criminal justice, family violence, refugees,
racism and other discriminations, hunger and famine, and on and on. Cri-
sis, tribulation, suffering: familiar to Paul, familiar to us. A study note to
the Romans passage in my Oxford Annotated Bible says, "To be a Chris-
tian in the first century was both difficult and dangerous." Paul knew it.
We know it, and we know it's not limited to the first century A.D. Or to
Christians. Being alive today is dangerous for some of us in Tucson, in El
MAY/JUNE 1985 39

Salvador, in South Africa. For many more of us, it is at least difficult.

For the exiles, too, existence was difficult. The captives, taken from
Jerusalem to Babylon, called upon Yahweh in this unique psalm of cursing
or imprecation, to this community lament. And how many times during
this conference—which has seemed at times like a community lament of
our own!—have we heard or thought the familiar phrase, "How shall we
sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Even with Jeremiah's counsel to
"seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to
the Lord on its behalf," the exiles were alienated. They were separated
from their homeland, their temple, their God. They were despairing, and
they sat down and wept. They cried to God, they refused to sing or be
merry, even when their tormentors demanded it, and they promised faith-
fulness to their memory and vision of Jerusalem. They finally gave in to
their deep anger and prayed for vengeance upon their captors and those
who had helped bring about the destruction of Jerusalem.
From exiles to epistle writers, deportees to disciples, sixth century B.C.
to 1985—we know what it's like to be separated from home, from custom
and comfort, and from God. And we know what it's like, in this alienation,
to fear that restoration is impossible. So the Psalmist and the Apostle have
it right: we cannot sing, we despair, we threaten vengeance, we truly be-
lieve that "we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to
be slaughtered."
So here we are on Race Relations Sunday, struggling with the continuing
need to worship, to confess, pray, and sing. Can we sing the Lord's song,
or have we exiled ourselves too far from each other and from God—
because we remain separated over questions of skin color, cultural heri-
tage, traditions and pronunciation? When Raquel Welty, a Hispanic theolo-
gian, met with the Criminal Justice Consulting Committee, she told of her
recurring experience of knowing that many people did not listen to her
once she started to speak because of her Spanish accent. George Cum-
mings, a Baptist minister who is black, reminded the Consulting Commit-

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tee of the way the black experience in America has been shaped by their
exile, by their forced migration from Africa. That we in the church, focus-
ing on criminal justice or any other area of ministry, should need those
40 CHURCH & SOCIETY

reminders only points up for me the continuing, painful validity of Race

Relations Sunday remaining on our calendars, and why we have Councils
on Church and Race now working to unite, and why the racial justice staffs
in Atlanta and New York are so beleaguered.
And in the wider world, the foreign land that this country is becoming
for many of us, we have Dr. Kenneth Clark sharing his bewilderment. This
distinguished black professor of psychology said to a New York Times re-
porter recently: "I believed in the 1950s that a significant percentage of
Americans were looking for a way out of the morass of segregation. It was
wishful thinking. It took me 10 to 15 years to realize that I seriously under-
estimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism." He also said, "It
may be possible to maintain a high standard of life for whites at the same
time that minorities are kept at oppressed levels, but I don't believe it. Am
I naive about that? If so, we'll never get rid of American racism."
Well, at this conference, you've heard Allan Boesak, and Catherine and
Justo Gonzales, and the workshop leaders. You know why there's a Race
Relations Sunday. And you probably understand, too, why the juxtaposi-
tion of this Sunday and Criminal Justice Sunday the following week isn't
really so inappropriate or offensive. We have a continuing need to worship,
confess, pray and sing, because we remain separated over basic issues of
justice, of crime, victimization, alienation from each other and from com-
munity. Here, in this country's criminal justice system, there is racism,
discrimination and prejudice.
The Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee points out:
The U.S. prison system is indeed a bastion of racism. The number of Blacks and
other people of color warehoused in U.S. prisons is alarming. . . . But the
numbers are only the beginning. Information regarding sentencing disparity, an
analysis of the underlying societal values—cultural, social and economic—and a
critique of the conditions from which the black, Hispanic or native American
street criminal emerges are integral to understanding crime and punishment to-
day. The role of prisons in containing the anger in response to decades of eco-
nomic and social injustice is not happenstance.
We know that more than half of the 1,500 men and women on death row
are black, Hispanic, native American, or Asian—and no whites have been
executed for killing racial/ethnic minority persons since capital punishment
resumed in 1977. Those on the National Interreligious Task Force on
Criminal Justice who are white understand and support the formation of a
People of Color Task Force on Justice to work on an agenda that we have
been neglecting because of our own white blinders. And the Presbyterian
Church continues to operate our own Fund for Legal Aid for Racial and
Intercultural Justice and to participate in the National Council of Churches'
Ecumenical Minority Bail Bond Fund because we know that the criminal
justice system, along with all its other injustices, is racist. You are here at
this conference. You know why there's a Criminal Justice Sunday.
"What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us?"
With this brief reminder of issues in criminal justice, in race relations, and
from this conference, it may seem that everyone is. But—we know that
isn't true. Listen to Paul very carefully: Who is against us? Who shall
bring any charge? Who is to condemn? Who shall separate us? In each
instance, the Greek verb suggests the future, not present, conditions: Who
can succeed in challenging us? Who can prevail in charging or condemning
us? Who, in the long run, will be successful in separating us—putting us
asunder—from God's love? Paul says, "No one." Of course, we are op-
posed, charged, condemned, momentarily separated from each other and
from God: we do it to ourselves—and others, God knows, do it to us. But
not successfully. Not now, not in this temporal dimension, and not in the
Kingdom to come.
Pie in the sky by and by? Sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord? I don't
think so—or, as Paul says, "By no means!"
Remember the exiles who promised to remember Jerusalem forever?
They hung up their lyres on the trees by theriverwhere they sat and wept—
and they may have been comforted by the soft music as breezes gently
42 CHURCH & SOCIETY

played on the strings. Small comfort, perhaps—not enough to keep them

from praying destruction for their captors, but even in their struggle, some-
thing to hold on to. (And I'll bet they did sing when their enemies weren't
within earshot. I know prisoners in the Westchester County Jail do.)
Remember Criminal Justice Sunday? There are signs of hope. We're
dealing with alternative punishments instead of prison, and we know of
places where the concept is being used successfully. In the Interreligious
Task Force we're beginning to get the Interfaith Conciliation Center off the
ground, and the theme of Breaking the Cycle of Violence and Vengeance is
spreading. There are individual situations where people's lives are changed
through the presence of a prison chaplain or a caring volunteer. Restoration
to community, the healing of alienation and separation, does happen.
Remember Race Relations Sunday? There are signs of hope. The church
continues to commit itself to racial justice ministries, and the 1983 General
Assembly endorsed a Comprehensive Strategy for Racial Justice for the
1980s. The budget for the Fund for Legal Aid has been increased. And
we're electing Committees on Representation throughout our governing
bodies. Joe Rauh, a white civil liberties lawyer still active after 50 turbu-
lent years in Washington, had this to say recently:
To the extent that there is a valley in the efforts toward equality today, it results
from a national fatigue based on the unprecedented efforts of recent decades.
But one can hope—no, expect—that this too will pass, that batteries will be
recharged and that increased racial tolerance will spark new gains of which
future generations will be as proud as we are of ours.
Although a conversation between Kenneth Clark and Joe Rauh might be
stimulating, I do believe that in some places and ways the healing of alien-
ation and separation does happen.
At this conference, we've heard yet again from Allan Boesak, who em-
bodies Paul's words of steadfastness, strength and determination, of living
in and living out the love of God. We've witnessed yet again the wonderful
perversity of exiled Christians in the sanctuary movement, becoming
stronger as we are charged, challenged, condemned—but not successfully
beaten. Each of us, I expect and pray, has had our own experiences that
have demonstrated for us yet again the truth of Paul's proclamation that
God's love is always ours, even when it seems most remote.
To declare it may not be enough, may not be satisfying to us in our exile
right now. We may still want to go out and wreak vengeance on the Edom-
ites and the Babylonians. But when we do—when we cry at yet another
loss, another discouraging headline, another reminder of our tribulations-
remember the sounds of the gentle breeze playing on our harps. Remember
the signs of hope from this conference. And remember what Paul and Jesus
Christ, and God, promise us:
MAY/JUNE 1985 43

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any-
thing else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord

May it be so for each one of us Amen

 ^ s
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