Revelation 7.9-17, Matthew 5.1-12
All Saints’ Day 1st November 2020
Eldroth, Clapham and online
‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’, sang Bessie Smith, in September 1929, just as the stock market crashed and the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression. ‘In my pocket, not one penny, and my friends, I haven’t any,’ the song goes. It’s music from the heart of someone who is struggling, but because it’s a song it lifts the spirits. [1]
Consider those songs of the trenches: ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag and smile, smile, smile,’ ‘Oh! It’s a lovely war,’ or ‘When this bleedin’ war is over’ (sung to the tune of ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’). [2] Seldom patriotic, more often satirical and sarcastic and sometimes scatalogical, but how these songs kept the soldiers going.
Recall the songs of the slaves like ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, Nobody Knows but Jesus’. [3]
Consider the music of the great protest movements of our times: ‘The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle,’ said Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early ‘sixties: ‘They give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours.’ [4]
‘When I’m sad I sing’, I once heard a struggling young mother say. She had cause to be sad, for she was abandoned and alone after a brutal relationship left her physically and emotionally scarred for life. But music kept her spirits up. For her it was Motown, the songs of the Four Tops like ‘I’ll be there’: ‘Now if you feel that you can’t go on, Because all of your hope is gone,… reach out, I’ll be there, with a love that will shelter you. I’ll be there, with a love that will see you through.’ [5]
The day after the Manchester Arena bombing three years ago a large crowd gathered together in St Anne’s Square in a silent vigil for those who had lost their lives. And when the crowd sensed the time of silence had come to an end, in that moment a lone woman began singing the refrain of a popular song of the famous Manchester group, Oasis, ‘Don’t look back in anger.’ And, their hearts strangely warmed, the crowd gently joined in, singing together until they reached a crescendo. [6]
These songs, they work like prayers, and those who sing them find their hearts lifted from a world of pain to a world of hope, drawn out from the darkness of their day towards a place of light.
When we are struggling in life, at those times when we are forced to face terrible suffering, we find it hard to find any reason to it. How could a loving God stand by and let such things happen to us? Suffering seems beyond any form of explanation or reasoning. But there are songs and poems and prayers which keep us going and help us through. [7]
Do you know that the Book of Revelation was written to be read aloud, in one sitting, like a liturgy whose ‘kaleidoscopic visions have an effect more like music than a logical argument’? [8]
And can you also feel the music in the Beatitudes of Jesus, their rhythmic pattern singing out a vision of a world redeemed?
Revelation can be seen as an extended song of praise to a God who will put a broken world back together. John, the seer of Patmos composed it in a time of turbulence in the Roman world, when the Christian community was in some places under threat from aggressive forces, and in other places in danger of drifting as the pressure to conform to local culture weighed in. In the face of Rome and its emperor, the ‘harlot’ and the ‘beast’, John’s words sing out of a God who will come in strength to overcome these powers, redeem his people and make all things new. [9]
Can you imagine how it felt to be one of these struggling Christians in their small Mediterranean churches, as they sat and listened to these words of Revelation being read to them, like music to their ears, soaking in its poetry, basking in its vision of a God who will be their shepherd, who will guide them to the springs of the water of life, who will wipe away every tear from their eyes?
And can you imagine how it felt to be in the audience of the Sermon on the Mount, a rag-tag gathering of ordinary folk with their everyday struggles in an occupied land, as in a very similar way Jesus’ Beatitudes made their hearts sing with hope of a day when their troubles would cease, when the wrongs being done to them would be reversed?
Today is All Saint’s Day and a chance for us to consider that the Saints are those who keep singing on through their struggles, the Saints are those who keep praising through life’s pain. Whether the celebrated saints of old, like Stephen who looked up and saw heaven, with God and Jesus standing there even as the stones beat down on his body, [10] or the everyday saints of our own time and place like those we know who bear their sufferings with such great grace and love that it melts our hearts to think of them.
There’s a hymn which begins, ‘I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.’ ‘One was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green: they were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one too.’ [11]
From whatever background they come, and whatever life brings them, saints are simply people like those described in Revelation, who spend their time ‘before the throne of God, and worship him day and night,’ in the faith that through all their ordeals, ‘he will shelter them.’
The Saints are those who keep singing on through the struggles; today’s Saints are those who keep praising through the pandemic. Isn’t it good to be among them?
My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the sweet, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation …
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing? [12]
Notes
[1] Bessie Smith: Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.
[2] Great War Songs from the Trenches. Source: tommy1418.com.
[3] ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’, African-American traditional.
[4] Robert Shelton, “Songs a Weapon in Rights Battle,” New York Times, 20 August 1962, quoted in Songs and the Civil Rights Movement, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
[5] This section inspired by the ever-moving story told by Billy Bragg in Levi Stubbs’ Tears. ‘When the world falls apart some things stay in place, Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.’ (Stubbs was lead vocalist in The Four Tops. Full lyrics here).
[6] See also my sermon That’s the Spirit (2018).
[7] Paul Nuechterlein, ‘Reflections and Questions’ in Girardian Lectionary, All Saints Sunday, Year A. His contemplations (in section 3) of the role which liturgy can play in addressing our suffering, was the starting point of this sermon. ‘My most difficult times as pastor are when grown victims of severe child abuse appear in my office to recount their lives of terrible suffering. A nonviolent God can seem more of a problem to them than a comfort. How could a loving God stand by and let such things happen? I cannot listen to their stories and try to reason with them. Their suffering is beyond a discursive reasoning. But perhaps a liturgy can help. The Book of Revelation was written for those who continue to suffer. It’s vivid pictures of a slaughtered lamb who nevertheless invites us to a feast of victory is beyond discursive reasoning, too. Yet I think it gives the most appropriate answer to the experience of suffering.’
[8] John Bowker, ‘Revelation’ in The Complete Bible Handbook. p.468-9.
[9] John Bowker, ‘Revelation’ in The Complete Bible Handbook. p.468-9.
[10] Acts 7.
[11] I sing a song of the saints of God, Lesbia Scott (1929).
[12] How can I keep from singing?, Robert Lowry.