How Could We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Foreign Land?

This line from Psalm 137:4 expressed the despair of the exiles who were taken from Judah to Babylon. Curious Babylonians, who were perhaps even thinking they were being respectful, wanted to hear the “songs of Zion.” However, in their sadness, the exiles were struggling to preserve hope and loyalty to their homeland. As a counterpoint, through the prophet Jeremiah, God urged the exiles to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (29:7) These two lines keep coming back to me as guidance for how we who trust and aspire to follow Jesus can respond to the cultural context in which we live in our time in the US.

Perhaps you feel like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien in a country that allows abortion and same-sex marriage, and that is officially secular and seems to be undermining even a generic Judeo-Christian social consensus. Perhaps you feel like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien in a country that changes its laws and how they are enforced to exclude immigrants fleeing violence and imposes harsh measures on them in order to deter others, or that ignores or denies generations of deep racial injustices, or that laughs off sexual harassment and assault even for those in the highest positions of power. Rather than arguing with these characterizations, I hope to prompt you to get in touch with the things that evoke your feelings of being an outsider in your own country. What makes it hard for you to sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land?

Yes, I intentionally wrote “this foreign land” indicating the US. If we who trust and aspire to follow Jesus expect any human country, including the US, to be “our native land” we will be disappointed or deceived. The idea of a “Christian nation” is an extension of the identification of Europe and Christendom, growing out of the Holy Roman Empire, that arose from Constantine’s adoption of his peculiar form of Christianity as the religion of his empire. The European colonists who settled on the eastern seaboard of North America brought several of versions of Christendom with them. All of the original colonies had official established churches except for Rhode Island under the leadership of Baptist Roger Williams and Pennsylvania under the leadership of Quaker William Penn. Political and religious leaders in the other colonies thought that allowing people to choose their own church was dangerously foolish. One of the Massachusetts Puritans even called Rhode Island “the insane asylum of the colonies.”

At Thanksgiving we casually celebrate the Puritan Pilgrims who came to Massachusetts as champions of religious freedom. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from the King and the Church of England so they could establish what they envisioned as a uniquely Christian commonwealth. Their writings are the source of much of the sentiment of trying to imagine the US as being established on Christian principles. They wrote of “a new Israel in the wilderness” and “a city set on a hill.” In order to vote or hold public office in colonial Massachusetts one had to be a white male property owner and a member in good standing of the Congregational Church. If you were not a Congregationalist, you were a stranger in a foreign land. Even before the Revolutionary War, that model became unsustainable, and they adopted what came to be called the “half-way covenant.” That allowed church membership for voting and holding public office without affirming the church’s doctrine or accepting its discipline.

The framers of the US Constitution were intentional about both the free exercise of religion and that there be no establishment of religion in the country. Part of that was from recognizing the divisive, practical issues left over from the established colonial churches. And even greater was their concern that the new nation not descend into the fierce and violent inter-religious wars that had plagued Europe since the time of Constantine.

The early Christians were keenly aware that they were outsiders and strangers, outcasts and aliens in the Roman Empire. The New Testament Epistles frequently acknowledged this such as where Philippians 3:20 says “our citizenship is in heaven,” and Ephesians 2:19 says, we “are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,” and Hebrews 11:13 identifies with the heroes of faith who “confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.”

The earliest and most basic Christian confession was (and still is) “Jesus is Lord.” (Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3) In the Roman Empire the essential pledge of allegiance and loyalty oath (to use modern equivalents) was “Caesar is lord,” so for Christians to refuse loyalty to the emperor and instead confess “Jesus is Lord” was at best unpatriotic and was considered to be treasonous, sometimes met with torture and death.

The response of the empire to the Church ranged from ignoring them to violent hostility seeking their obliteration. Besides the perceived treason of confessing “Jesus is Lord,” the Roman Empire was frustrated at trying to control this new movement. With Christians’ complete confidence of expecting to share in Jesus’ resurrection threats, torture, and even death were not effective control mechanisms. This reality is necessary to understand Paul’s teaching about responding to those in authority, such as in Romans 13. The concern was not to rankle the empire unnecessarily so as to have peaceful conditions for spreading the Gospel. We might say “to fly under the empire’s radar.” Nero was emperor at the time Paul wrote about respecting government authorities. Nero was a definitively evil ruler who eventually executed both Paul and Peter. Thus, the principles of how to respond to those in authority must be able to be applied to despots as well as even devout Christians duly elected to office. Though Paul certainly recognized that he was being persecuted by the Roman Empire, he invoked his Roman citizenship in Acts 16 and 22 when the Roman legal system sought to curtail his proclaiming the Gospel.

When a rather distorted and watered down version of Christianity was legalized and became the religion of the empire, spiritual vitality declined disastrously. The government assumed authority over theology, worship, and church leadership.  To be a Roman citizen was to be a Christian. Baptism became the proof of citizenship. Baptist and other Free Church people in Christendom Europe were excluded from public life, and my own Swedish Baptist forbearers faced challenges with both military service and immigration. Nazis used that as a tool for persecuting Jews as not being German citizens since they had no baptism certificates.

In the first generation after this spiritual collapse, communities of spiritual renewal began forming in the deserts, and by the fourth century the movement we know as the Desert Fathers and Mothers was attracting spiritually hungry pilgrims. In the sixth century Benedict of Nursia was studying for ministry and became disgusted with the immorality and spiritual weakness of his teachers, fellow students, and church leaders. He set out in search of authentic spiritual renewal which led him to found the monastic order the still bears his name today. From those seeds grew a diversity of monastic movements and communities that functioned outside the bounds of the empire and church hegemony. At the time of the Reformation (and since), Anabaptists have insisted on life outside of the (unholy) alliance between state and church.

Some monastics and some Anabaptists responded by withdrawing almost entirely from almost all forms of public life. In more recent generations, some Evangelical/Protestant circles relegated the Kingdom of God (Reign, Dream, Song – more about that language follows) to an indeterminate eschatological future return of Christ to a Millennial or Eternal Kingdom, in the present opting for power politics perhaps with a vague approximation of Christendom.

 God’s word through Jeremiah to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” transforms “how could we sing the lord’s song in a foreign land” from an exclamation of despair and grief into a question seeking God’s way of singing the song of welfare in exile in a foreign land.

Growing up in Evangelical context I often heard that we are “in the world but not of the world.” My impression was that this was applied largely to personal morality and lifestyle and not so much to public life. So in the world I guarded my heart from worldly influences such as movies and music. Though perhaps coming off as a superficial cliché, I do think it points to a principle for how those who follow Jesus engage in public life. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon explored this in their 1989 book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony.  I would suggest that the “resident aliens” imagery offers a rich way to explore how as outsiders, strangers, foreigners, and outcasts we who follow Jesus can seek the welfare of the city where we are in exile and sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land.

At the time when John the Baptist and Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God was at hand, their listeners recognized that they were proclaiming an alternate to the oppressive Roman Empire that was much, much more than a revival of the Davidic dynasty of a millennium earlier. Their context did not question the issue of gender as we do today that has prompted moving language to speak of the “Reign of God” as an appropriate equivalent. The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by John the Baptist and Jesus was also a distinct contrast to hierarchal power as imposed not just in the Roman Empire but is common in human politics. Trying to make that clear, some in our time have begun to use the “Dream of God” or the “Song of God” as equivalents. I do not want to get sidetracked by debating the legitimacy of these contemporary shifts in language. Rather, I want to consider seriously what it means to follow Jesus as Lord in ways that seek the welfare of our world and sing the Lord’s Song in foreign lands.

What we call the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7) and it parallel, sometimes called the “Sermon on the Plain” (Luke 6:17ff), are the manifesto for the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it. (If “kingdom” bothers you, blame it on me being 73 years old who in many ways relishes ancient traditions.) I believe the Gospels suggest that Jesus repeatedly and consistently preached and taught these themes. We are given these two verbatims so we have his message. His parables and other teachings were designed to prompt reflection and exploration of how these themes worked in the messiness of real life and relationships. They would be what I would call “divergent thinking” rather than “convergent thinking.” Jesus pointedly did not give a rule or proverb for every life situation but a way of being in touch with God whatever life brought. Indeed, in the two sermon verbatims he did bring this up against common and typical life issues.

The two sermon verbatims (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6:17ff) and Jesus’ other teaching are clearly good news for those who have been relegated to the margins of society. He offered ways to live in intimacy with God, free from both the judgmental restrictions of pious leaders as well as the oppression of the Roman occupiers. To be sure, some folk who had economic means, in positions of religious leadership, and even among the Roman military followed Jesus into new lives of joy, generosity, love, and justice. So both those from privilege and those who were excluded lived together as equals. This experience is translated into teaching in the New Testament Epistles. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 10:12; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28). James 2:1-7; 5:1-6 is explicit about welcoming those most likely to be excluded.

The Beatitudes of Matthew 5 and the Blessings and Woes of Luke 6 form a sort of preamble to Jesus’ manifesto of the Kingdom of God. They made those who may seem to be the outcasts, foreigners, strangers, aliens of human - even religious - society the core citizens of the Kingdom of God. We dare not dismiss the Beatitudes as beautiful sentiments without being challenged by their radical intent.

·         Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

·         Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 

·         Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

·         Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

·         Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

·         Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

·         Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 

·         Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

·         Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

I am more than suggesting that we sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land and seek the welfare of the city in which we are exiles when those whom Jesus pronounced “blessed” are at the center of our relationships, communities, congregations, advocacy, compassion, respect, inclusion, influence, economics, politics. Neither capitalism nor socialism are the economics of the Kingdom of God. In both, the marginalized suffer from their exclusion.  Neither monarchy (regardless of what current name it is given) nor democracy are the politics of the Kingdom of God. In both, the marginalized are denied a voice. To be sure, though no human economic or political system or philosophy, no political party is totally congruent with the Kingdom of God, that does not mean justice is evenly distributed in all systems. Some do far better than others. We who follow Jesus as Lord know that as citizens of the Kingdom of God, we will always be resident aliens. We will celebrate and advocate justice, peace, compassion, and integrity regardless of its context.

James Weldon Johnson’s 1921 hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing conveys the creative tensions of being outsiders in your own country. It has been informally designated as “the Negro National Anthem” and is sung with feeling in Black congregations across the US. It was written when some freed slaves were still alive to tell their stories It was written in the midst of “Jim Crow” oppression before the Civil Rights Movement. With hope, the second verse recounts the bleak history of Black folk in the US.

Stony the road we trod,

bitter the chastening rod,

felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

yet with a steady beat,

have not our weary feet

come to the place for which our people sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;

we have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

out from the gloomy past,

till we now stand at last

where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

To me the ironic power of the concluding line of the hymn points to the challenges of living as resident aliens. Those who first sang this hymn remembered that their ancestors were brought to the US as slaves against their will. Some in their own community had been slaves and most were being brutally oppressed. Still, the hymn ended with, “May we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.”