proclaim salvation day after day. Declare God’s glory among the nations, God’s wonderful deeds among all peoples. For God is great, most worthy of praise, and to be held in awe above all gods. All the gods of the nations are idols; God made the heavens. Splendor and majesty, strength and glory are in God’s sanctuary.
Ascribe to God glory and strength, all you families of nations. Bring offerings and come to God’s presence. Worship God in the splendor of holiness; all the earth. Say among the nations, “God reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; and God will judge the peoples with equity.
Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and everything in the sea. Let the fields and everything in them sing for joy; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy. Let all creation rejoice before God, who comes to judge the earth, and who will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in faithfulness.
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Sing. Sing a song. Sing out loud, sing out strong.
Sing of good things, not bad. Sing of happy, not sad.
Sing. Sing a song. Make it simple to last your whole life long.
Don´t worry that it´s not good enough for anyone else to hear.
Just sing. Sing a song.
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But look at what he says. “Sing a new song? I never had an old one.”
I find myself wondering if that isn’t part of our problem with our faith. We don’t want to sing a new song, we want to keep singing the same old one. But the Psalmist - good heavens that’s how many thousand years ago - four or five, that this was written - the Psalmist says “Sing a NEW song.”
I want to ask you, though - as you read through the Psalm - is the song restricted to Christians? The first part of the psalm might suggest that. “Sing to God a new song; sing to God, all the earth.” We are clearly called to offer praise, and worship; but then it goes on - to ‘sing all the nations’; the physical creation, not just the people, will sing. The heavens, the earth, the sea and everything in it, the fields and the trees, will sing and shout for joy!
Melissa Florer-Bixler is a theological student at Princeton University, and is a member of the Mennonite Church of the USA . She says worship that stops with “God and me” doesn’t take into account how big God really is. The Psalm starts out as a sort of “God and me”, but then goes on to remind us that we sing to the God of Creation, the God of the Universe. She says “Over and over again we read that the whole earth is supposed to hear, in song, about God’s good work. And we know from the newer testament that this is actually happening”. When God sent Jesus, that declaration to the nations we read about in the psalm went into overdrive. In Acts we learn how this happened, how those who followed Jesus took up his command to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the world. It was time for the whole world to get in on the relationship with God that before was reserved for the Jews.
This means that our worship and our evangelism are always intertwined. Rev. William Willimon, a United Methodist bishop now teaching at Duke Divinity School, shares a story about how important it is that our praise be witness to the fullness of life in God. It was the end of the day when Willimon decided to visit a member of his congregation, a lawyer. He dropped by his office and everyone had gone home but this lawyer who was working late. Starting off the conversation Willimon asked, “What sort of day have you had?” The lawyer replied: “A typical day…full of misery. In the morning I assisted a couple to evict their aging father from his house so they could take everything while he was in a nursing home. All legal, not particularly moral, but legal. By lunchtime I was helping a client evade his worker’s comp insurance payment. It’s legal. This afternoon I have been enabling a woman to ruin her husband’s life forever with the sweetest divorce you ever saw. That’s my day.”
Willimon thought, “What could I say?” The lawyer continued, “Which helps explain why I’m in your church on a Sunday morning.” Willimon replied, “I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed thinking what on earth I have to say in a sermon which might help you for a Sunday.”
The lawyer said, “It’s not the sermon I come for, preacher. It’s the music. I go a whole week with nothing beautiful, little good, until Sunday. Sometimes when the choir sings, it is for me the difference between death and life.”
Christian theologian Marva Dawn explains that, “It is a major flaw in present-day churches that we don’t realize that our primary evangelistic tool is the corporate life of the believing community. Our neighbors need to see the Christian way of life that gives warrant for belief.” The strength and conviction of our singing vertically is going to reverberate horizontally, into the world.
I noticed a line in this Psalm which threw everything into perspective - the Psalm talks about the idols of the world, the “other gods”. It occurred to me that this isn’t talking about people of other faiths, who don’t worship the name we worship. It’s talking about the things we think are so important. How about the things that make us complain if the service goes over an hour? Stuff that we think is so important that even God’s song is put on a timer? When did that happen? Family is important, yes; recreation is important, yes: saving for the future has some importance; work is important, yes;- but not if it takes over so much of our lives of faith that we forget how to sing God’s song, or maybe hide behind the excuse that our voice isn’t so good, or we don’t have any talent. What “other gods” are there in our lives?
In the same way, if we sing to God as if God is just one of the idols of this world, if we sing like singing is something our own little insular group does when it’s not too busy doing real work, then no one will want to be a part of what we do here. People are busy! People have things to do. We’ve all got our idols to worship, whether that’s money, prestige, relationships, sex or politics. Psalm 96 reminds us that our singing says something about those other idols:
Singing like this, singing to the God Who Rules Everything, might actually blow the doors right off the church. If even the trees of the fields will clap their hands, clearly our songs will sometimes find themselves breaking out into the world in unexpected ways. Most of us remember the song “We Shall Overcome” which became such an integral part of the Civil Rights movement. This gospel song can be heard as a longing for the time when pain and trials will cease. It can be heard as a song about strength for our earthly journey as we face the perils of daily life. When churches were burned to the ground, black girls kidnapped and raped, young black men strung up and tortured - when people dressed in white robes and pointy hats, this song of Rev. Dr. Charles Tindley became an anthem of longing for justice on this earth that reflected God’s song. It began simply as a gospel song called “I’ll Overcome Someday” but was re-written and literally became a *new* song which gave commitment and energy to the Civil Rights movement.
And in this song we can see that our singing taps into something bigger than all of us can imagine. Songs like “We Shall Overcome” are a strong reminder that God’s love is embedded in good worship. Sometimes we just have to be willing to let it run wild in the world - run with the Spirit, and we have to run with it. We might even have to sing in dangerous places. Protests have begun in Turkey, in Taksim Square, the central square in Istanbul. The Gezi Park is to be demolished, in order to make way for a huge shopping mall. People have been beaten, shot and water-cannoned, even though the protests have been shown to be peaceful. Oh that’s how it began, but it’s now a statement about repressive police and government, in a so-called secular democracy. Most of those Turks are Muslim, not Christian - but they are singing God’s song - in the expression of their concern for a world gone awry. And now there are more people, walking across the bridge over the Bosporus, from northern Africa, to support the ordinary Turkish people. Around the world there are countless other songs like this one - being sung all the time. All people who stand up for justice and right relations sing God’s song - and that’s what this Psalm says to us, I believe.
That’s where worship should take us - to demonstrations, to jails, to lost jobs and sometimes even to death. It will be called rebellious, rabble-rouser and agitator. It will sing the words of wholeness where the spirit and the body are at peace. When Martin Luther King said “We Shall Overcome” it wasn’t just that we would live in a world which recognised all people as equal, he also meant that we overcome even death.
Singing takes our faith in every direction imaginable. Our praises go up to God, but they also go out to our neighbours, into places we might never ever think they could or would go. So let us all sing a new song. Let all the nations of the world sing God’s song. Let the trees of the forest sing for joy. Let our praise be an announcement of the risks taken by those who work to build up the realm of God in the world. Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear, just sing. Sing God’s song. Amen.
Sources:
1. “Why We Sing,” A Sermon on Psalm 96 Melissa Florer-Bixler March 2013
2. “Sing a Song” - by R&B/funk band, “Earth, Wind & Fire”, written by Maurice White and Al McKay, 1975
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