A couple of Sundays ago, Ginger talked about numbers in her sermon, bouncing off of the scripture about God knowing the number of hairs on our collective heads. A couple of nights ago, I talked about the role the Beatles have played in the soundtrack of my life. Tonight, they both come to mind because I am a couple of hours away from closing out my sixty-fourth year. Cue the clarinets . . .
The story of the song is that is one of the first songs he ever wrote–at sixteen. The Beatles performed it in their early days in Liverpool and then it found its way on to the Sgt. Pepper’s record. It was recorded in early December fifty-four years ago.
I remember hearing the song as a teenager and thinking sixty-four seemed a long way off. Tonight, it doesn’t feel like it took that long to get here. In Ed Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud” he proclaims, “I’ll be loving you when we’re seventy.” When I hear the song I want to tell him to raise his expectations.
As for numbers, in sixty-four years I’ve lived in thirteen cities in five countries and four states. I’ve been to fifteen schools. I’ve lived in forty-five different residences. We’ve had eight schnauzers. This will be my 2,044th blog post and they have garnered 7,542 comments. I’ve published four books (one was self-published), been to youth camp for twenty-two summers, owned two KitchenAid mixers, had the same guitar for thirty-eight years, and I have one love of my life.
But the numbers don’t tell the best story. On the last night of Year Sixty-Four and the eve of what will be, I’m sure, the least-peopled birthday I can remember, it is the very loved ones I can’t be with that are the best story, chapter after chapter of connection and challenge, of failure and friendship, of laughter and heartbreak and hope, and meals. Lots and lots of meals.
It feels good to get to tonight and think, no whens about it:
I was probably seven or eight when I started by records–forty-fives, singles. I’m talking 1963 or 1964. Every Sunday after church in Lusaka, we listened to Top of the Pops that was broadcast from the UK on Radio Zambia. I should say I listened. The rest of my family endured it. I couldn’t get enough.
To listen to the radio in those days meant to listen to the Beatles. I can remember the announcers teasing with the promise of a new single–a Beatles song we had never heard. “Nowhere Man.” “Paperback Writer.” “Help!” “We Can Work It Out.” “Hey, Jude.” Then I moved on to albums. Rubber Soul.
I still feel those songs in my bones.
We were back in the States my sixth grade year when Sgt. Pepper’s came out (I had the record the came with the paper cutouts) and then Magical Mystery Tour. Then the White Album. We were back in Kenya for Abbey Road and Let It Be. Once again, Top of the Pops played “Get Back” for the first time.
Then the Beatles broke up. And I blamed John (and Yoko) mostly because that is how the story was told. And my dad liked to bad talk John because he never forgave him for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. But part of it was I connected more with Paul’s melodies.
I had to grow into John.
I was in seminary when he was killed. In the years that followed, I began to realize what we lost when he died: “Working Class Hero,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Instant Karma,” “Imagine,” “Give Peace a Chance (War is Over).” In the weeks following his death, I heard this song in a new way:
So this is Christmas And what have you done Another year over A new one just begun
And so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear ones The old and the young
A very merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fears
It’s still one of the songs I listen for each December.
Marking the fortieth anniversary of his death in the same week that Bob Dylan sold the publishing rights to his entire catalog for $300 million makes me mindful of how much John’s music, with or without the Beatles, has been in my life. Tonight, that is all I wanted to say.
I am grateful for the songs we have and saddened for the ones we missed.
It’s late. It’s been a long day. I am looking for words to offer.
Part of my day was looking at the lectionary passages for this coming Sunday, since I am preaching. Maybe I am just tired enough for this to make sense, but I found myself paraphrasing 1 Thessalonians 5 as though it was written during a pandemic.
Here is how I imagine the letter.
And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the anti-maskers, encourage the exhausted, help the isolated, be patient with everyone. See that none of you repays anger with anger, but always seeks the common good for one another. For everyone! Rejoice always, pray continually, live gratefully, wear your mask, wash your hands, and keep your distance, for this is how God would have us live. Don’t quench the Spirit or skip the sanitizer.
One of the annual events Ginger and I have been a part of in Guilford is a service of remembrance for parents who have lost children. It is an astounding time of both grief and healing. Ginger usually speaks or prays and I sing. This year, the service was live streamed, but it was moving nonetheless. The song I was asked to sing was “I Wish You Peace” by the Eagles, which set me to thinking that on this Sunday when we light the peace candle perhaps some songs about peace might serve us well.
I wish you peace when times are hard the light to guide you through the dark and when storms are high and your, your dreams are low I wish you the strength to let love grow on I wish you the strength to let love flow
The next song that popped into my head is Paul Simon’s “Peace Like a River.” The title has always stuck with me because I knew it first as a youth group song. Now that I have let that ear worm loose, listen to Simon’s song about civil rights protest.
Peace like a river ran through the city long past the midnight curfew we sat starry-eyed oh, we were satisfied
and I remember misinformation followed us like a plague nobody knew from time to time if the plans where changed oh, if the plans were changed
you can beat us with wires you can beat us with chains you can run out your rules but you know you can’t outrun the history train I‘ve seen a glorious day
Another old favorite popped up in the jukebox of my heart: Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?”
and as I walk on through troubled times my spirit gets so downhearted sometimes so where are the strong and who are the trusted? and where is the harmony, sweet harmony?
‘cause each time I feel it slippin’ away just makes me wanna cry what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?
You might know the Elvis Costello version better, but Nick wrote the song, so I thought I would let him sing it–accompanied here by Los Straitjackets.
Kate Campbell is a roots singer-songwriter who has songs that reach deep in the heart. She also has a deep appreciation for the history of music, particularly in the roots and gospel traditions. “Peace, Precious Peace” is one she says she found on album by Stringbean–David Akeman–who I remember from Hee Haw. His words and music offer a carol of sorts.
there’s a wonderful feeling in the hearts and the minds in a world that is sick of blood and shame and the battle for glory and the peace we shall find when we lay down the sword and the flame
there’ll be shouting and singing there’ll be joy everywhere there’ll be banners from every land unfurled there’ll be jubilant ringing of the bells everywhere when there’s peace, precious peace in this world
Beth Neilsen Chapman’s “Peace” is a carol of yearning. I think we could sing it anytime of year. I couldn’t find her singing it, but I did find Michael McDonald’s cover.
Oh wondrous child of whom the angels sing know my joy feel my suffering shining star make this love you bring so bright that I may believe that my way will not be lost from now on, ’til that rivers crossed my soul renewed my spirit free in you I’ll find my peace
Though my opinion would quickly be contested at my house, I think John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together is the definitive Christmas album. One of the songs it contains is The Peace Carol.
add all the grief that people may bear total the strife, the troubles and care put them in columns and leave them right there the peace of Christmas Day
Sam Baker’s story is as intriguing as his songwriting and performing. “Go in Peace” is one of my favorites. The melody plays off of “Come, Thou Fount;” the words are a simple and profound benediction.
go in peace go in kindness go in love go in faith leave the day the day behind us day is done go in grace let us go into the dark not afraid not alone let us hope by some good pleasure safely to arrive at home
We will let him close the set.
I hope you are finding the music of peace to carry you in these days.
Friday morning I got a text from my cousin who is still in ICU with COVID pneumonia. “Today is the first day I don’t feel like doing this,” she wrote. “I’m beat. Three weeks is too long.”
The night before, I wrote this poem at the end of a long day. It’s called “tired words.”
the word exhaust
means to empty
but I feel full of tired
and grief weighed
down with weary
don’t you
that’s not intended
to be a question
I know you do
I see the loss in
your eyes the bend
in your back
I don’t have much
to offer tonight
except to say
tired is not
the last word
neither is grief
but whatever the
last word is
I’m not even sure
we’re even close
to starting the
sentence
let us sleep
even if it’s not rest
I need to sleep
don’t you
if you dream
remember to tell me
These exhausting days offer us a new connection with our texts this morning. Isaiah spoke after seventy years of Babylonian exile. John the Baptist showed up after a hundred years of Roman occupation, and Mark wrote his gospel another seventy or eighty years after that–and the Romans were still there. Our scripture passages for today were written and spoken for and by tired people.
Isaiah starts with God saying, “Comfort my people,” and then moves on to say words that are echoed in Mark, as a setup for John the Baptist:
“A voice cries out, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
When Isaiah spoke those words, he wasn’t predicting the future. He was talking in real time to people coming back to a land where there was nothing to come back to. Most everything felt like wilderness, I imagine, and in the middle of their exhaustion, the prophet said, “Get ready for God; start building a way for God to do something.”
In the next section, a voice tells the prophet to cry out. When Isaiah asks what to say, the voice says, “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass.” It sounds like the voice knew the people were tired and felt blown about.
These are days when we feel about as permanent as the flowers that mostly passed with autumn. The colors have changed from pinks and blues and greens to the oranges, reds, and yellows of fall to the greys and browns of the coming winter. I spent part of one afternoon this week spreading dead leaves to cover our mostly dormant vegetable beds, stepping between the skeletons of marigolds and wilted kale. I understand when the voice says we are like flowers and grass. And the reason I was spreading leaves is that it helps get the ground ready for new life next spring.
In that same spirit, the voice didn’t stop with the withering grass. “God is coming,” she says, “to gather us up into God’s arms.”
John was in the wilderness calling people to repentance in the face of oppression and despair. He wanted them to see a change in themselves as the beginning of a change in the world. They couldn’t control the Romans, but they could control how they treated each other. It was another way to say, “God is coming.”
We are living in tough days. We may not be at the hands of a foreign oppressor, but we have much to remind us we are in need of words of both comfort and repentance. We are unsettled, exhausted, grieving; maybe even angry and confused. And, as Advent pulls us towards Christmas, we are called once more to prepare away in our present wilderness because God is coming.
How do we do that when we cannot be physically together? How do we do that when we are a country that feels at war with itself? How do keep going when we feel so tired?
In 1849, Edmund Sears was a pastor in Wayland, Massachusetts. He suffered personally from melancholy, or what we would call depression. The nation had just come out of a brutal war with Mexico and was beginning to manifest deeper and deeper divisions over slavery. Europe was in upheaval. A fellow pastor from Quincy asked him to write a carol. What he wrote is perhaps my favorite: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” One of the verses rarely shows up in our hymnals, but it speaks to the same sort of circumstances we are enduring:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
It’s not exactly “Joy to the World,” is it? But he follows it with a verse that is the reason I love the carol so much:
And you, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!
I don’t know if the glad and golden hours are going to come swiftly, but I do know we are feeling the crushing load of life and we long for a song of peace and comfort. I know we are ready for things to be different. We can’t change most of our circumstances. We can change how we respond to them. We can commit ourselves to sharing the crushing load with one another, step by step along the weary road.
And so today we have lighted the candles of hope and peace, even as we bear the weight of life. We hear the call of the prophets to comfort one another and to repent—to look for ways we can change in words and actions to help change the world around us. Weariness and wonder are not mutually exclusive. These are heavy days, and they are hopeful days. Maybe that is what Paul meant when he talked to the Philippians about a peace that passes all understanding. Rest, repent, get ready for God. Amen.
Somedays I come to this page with something to say already in mind, as if to make an offering. Sometimes I come with nothing but raw feelings, almost like a confession or simply a statement of how things are. Tonight is the latter. Thanks for meeting me here.
tired
the word exhaust
means to empty
but I feel full of tired
and grief weighed
down with weary
don’t you
that’s not intended
to be a question
I know you do
I see the loss in
your eyes the bend
in your back
I don’t have much
to offer tonight
except to say
tired is not
the last word
neither is grief
whatever the
last word is
I’m not even sure
we’re even close
to starting the
last sentence
let us sleep
even if it’s not rest
I need to sleep
don’t you
if you dream
remember to tell me
