It’s time for a new song

Let’s start with this point about seemingly unanswered prayer from the last blogpost today and dig a little deeper –

So as churches, we don’t know what to do with this and we look the other way and focus on the victories and all the ways in which God has answered our prayers and sing our songs of victory…and those still suffering are left in confusion and doubt, not sure what to think and not sure how they can go on another day.

Because we have plenty of songs of victory, but we need some new songs.  Faith’s new song. If our faith is ‘wide enough and flexible enough to embrace the whole breadth of the experience of God’, then what goes on in our churches need to be able to also. Our worship. What we offer and express to God in our services. In his book ‘Stretch’, Gerard Kelly talks about elastic faith – a faith that does not rely on our circumstances adapting to our desires but a faith that is elastic enough to stretch and accommodate our circumstances.

For the Hebrew exiles, everything was foreign. They felt lost and disoriented and deeply sad for all they had lost. Their Babylonian tormentors urged them to sing the songs of Zion, but they replied –

How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  Psalm 137

The songs they knew and sang before didn’t work any more. These songs of victory were redundant. They had no songs to express what was going on in their hearts and lives in this moment. It’s not that they were refusing to sing as an act of defiance – they simply had all the wrong songs. How could they sing these songs of victory before their oppressors, their captors, their tormentors?

How could they sing empty words of victory when they were finding themselves in this place of lament?

The same goes for us in our churches today. How can we sing songs of victory when what we need most sometimes is a language for our pain, songs to express our lament? Our faith is never to be rooted in denial – in singing of rejoicing when our hearts are breaking. God is not honoured by songs of denial.

What we need is a different song –

a song that acknowledges loss, yet looks to hope…a song that embraces both the shadow and the light that worships God in both testing and triumph.  Page 87, Stretch

A blend of suffering and joy. Present pain and future healing. Loss and promise. A song like this –

We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome some day.

Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.

This isn’t just about the songs that we sing. It’s about the prayers that we pray and the sermons that we preach and the conversations that we have at the back of the church. It’s allowing space in our churches for suffering, for ongoing suffering, for all the hurt and pain that we have no idea what to do with, all those questions that we have no satisfactory answers to. It’s not about looking the other way and pretending they don’t exist. It’s about developing a corporate faith that is elastic enough to accommodate all of this lament.

It’s about learning to rely on the grace of God in every situation and affirming that this grace is enough –

When we have reached the end of our energies,

And face the end of ourselves,

But can’t yet see the end of our task,

It is enough.  Page 90, Stretch