Each Week Fr. Scott's sermons may be read here on line.
Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 4, 2009
Sermon for Pentecost 16 – October 2, 2011
“Admit it, love stinks.” There’s an attention grabber for you. The advertisement announcing this sentiment continues: “Feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, guilt; the music found herein pulls you further into the quagmire that is love gone wrong…Coping strategies and self-help books? Who needs them? Slap this CD into the hi-fi and wallow. There is no hope.” Though you know that it’s meant to be tongue in cheek, you also know there is some truth here; anyone who has reached any stage of maturity knows what heartbreak feels like. The CD is called “When Love Goes Wrong: Songs for the Broken-Hearted,” and it contains, the company says proudly, “Fifteen of the most thoroughly depressing songs ever recorded.”
Not something you’d think you’d be likely to charge to your Visa card, is it? But, if you’ve ever been through what these songs describe, you know that there are times when a good wallow is what is called for; times when all you want to do is sit inside on a rainy fall day and stare out the window, watching as the drops trace the tracks of your tears; immersed in revelry of loves’ labors lost.
Of course, at such a moody, melodramatic moment, the proper soundtrack is essential. So, before settling into the wallowing process, you insert the “When Love Goes Wrong” CD into your system, push the button for the first track, and this is what comes out: “Good morning heartache, you old gloomy sight/ Good morning heartache, thought we said goodbye last night/ I turned and tossed until it seemed you were gone, but here you are with the dawn/ Wish I’d forget you, but you’re here to stay/ It seems I met you when my love went away.”
Recorded by Billie Holiday, considered by those who know these things to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, this is a perfect pick to kick off a collection of bittersweet love songs. “Good morning heartache,” the song ends; “Here we go again…Might as well get used to you hanging around.” Hearing this song, you know she’s been there before and she’ll probably be there again. And you can hear a tongue in cheek tone in her voice on the recording, a kind of amused detachment as if the singer has long ago accepted the fact that her love affairs will head south.
Like the blues at its best, the pain is always there, but, as long as you’ve got a song, the pain will not prevail; as long as there is a song, the time of sorrow will be survived. And God knows Billie Holiday – who called her autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” with good reason, knew both songs and sorrows.
Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, raised primarily by her mother – her father was a jazz guitarist - Holiday spent her childhood in Baltimore, living in extreme poverty. When she reached the fifth grade, she dropped out of school and found a job running errands in a brothel. When she was twelve, Holiday moved with her mother to Harlem, where young Billie was eventually arrested for prostitution.
Hard up for money, she looked for work as a dancer in a Harlem speakeasy and when there wasn’t an opening, she auditioned as a singer and her career began. In 1933, she had her first major breakthrough, and would go on to record some of the finest, most heart breaking, music ever made. “Her vocals,” said one writer, “made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards.” It was as if people heard songs they knew by heart for the first time.
And yet, while Holiday’s popularity was growing, her personal life was a shambles. One of the highest paid performers of the time, most of her money went to sustain her heroin habit. Still, says a biographer, “Though plagued by health problems, bad relationships, and addiction, Holiday remained an unequaled performer, with emotive vocals that added a new dimension to jazz singing.
And, according to a number of sources, where she really hit her stride and found her audience, was with a song that is nowhere near to being a jazz standard; a song no one knew by heart; one that would do more than break hearts, it would, in its way, do much to transform them.
Called “Strange Fruit,” it was written by a Jewish High School teacher from the Bronx who wrote under the name Lewis Allen, inspired, he said, by a photograph of a lynching in the South. A revelation in its time – 1939 - it still delivers a wallop. Time Magazine, in its special December 31st, 1999 edition, dubbed it the best song of the 20th century, calling it “sad and shadowy,” saying “History’s greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.”
And when she does, you hear no ironic detachment, only pure despair; you hear no sweetness, only bitterness; no longer is the tongue in the cheek. The singer’s heart is broken, and it will take more than a pleasantly melancholy wallow on a rainy day to heal it. It will take a brand new song. Here’s a bit: “Southern trees bear strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
“Strange fruit,” it could very well be the title of Isaiah’s blues on God’s behalf – known as “The Song of the Vineyard”- hardly a common composition, as biblical standards tend to be the stuff of celebration, not of heartbreak. “I will sing to the Lord,” Moses exults after the Israelites have been led through the parted waters, “for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”
God brings deliverance – it’s time to sing. The Psalms – while they have their share of blues - are well stocked with feel good music. “Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me,” says Psalm 27. “And I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.” “Our mouths were filled with laughter,” says Psalm 126, “our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’” And so on.
So, when we hear the opening lines today – “Let me sing for my beloved a love song” – we expect to hear Doris Day not Billie Holiday. The only place in the Old Testament where the word translated as “beloved” occurs with any frequency is in the frankly erotic Song of Solomon, which commentators have tried, with limited success, to read as an allegory of God’s love for his people: “Ah, you are beautiful, my love; ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are like doves. Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely. Our couch is green.” Better stop there. The word for “beloved” appears more than two dozen times in this book of eight chapters which, incidentally, appears in the Bible just before Isaiah.
By the time we get to Isaiah’s song, which all scholars agree is a carefully constructed allegory, God’s heart has been broken; the beloved has betrayed her lover; the sweet fruit of the vine has turned bitter. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose ear was opened to his people’s sufferings, whose hand delivered them out of the misery of Egypt and into the promised land, now beholds with his eyes what his people have made of the vineyard he has planted for them. “He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes…He expected justice but saw bloodshed.” In Hebrew, he expected “mishpat,” but saw “mishpah.” A play on words in what is far from a playful song; blood on the leaves and blood at the root, strange fruit indeed.
Israel, the beloved, had failed to live up to God’s expectations, and God’s heartache is deeper than that of a jilted lover, for he expected much more from his people. Just as the owner of the vineyard did not plant grapes solely for his own pleasure; he expected to reap the fruits of his labors. Just so, God did not create Israel solely to have a group of people to sing songs of praises to him – or that they might exist as some sort of privileged nation. No, he created them and he chose them for a particular purpose. “I will make of you a great nation,” he told Abraham, “And I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” To be a great nation; to be blessed; to be in a loving relationship with God, is to bear the fruits of righteousness and justice. That, as they used to say, is the name of that tune.
“Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps,” God says in Amos. “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream;” words which are prominently featured on the entrance to the recently opened Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
To enter the memorial visitors pass through two stones described as “the mountain of despair” to reach a third, labeled “the stone of hope,” echoing a phrase found in the famous “I have a dream” speech. Hope, of course, a solid, undying principle of Dr. King’s life until he was lynched by an assassin’s bullet in April of 1968.
Yes, even when love goes wrong, hope will not die, at least not as long as our desire to bear the fruits of the kingdom and sow the seeds of righteousness, remains. Despite God’s threat to abandon Israel and leave it to its own devices: “I will remove its hedge…I will break down its wall… I will make it a waste,” and so on – sounding like an abandoned lover ready to throw the bum’s clothes out the window or tear up every wedding picture he can find – Despite God’s threats, let us be thankful and take comfort that God’s heart is larger than ours.
It can be broken; never forget that. But, unlike people who brood over the past, God, who has made a substantial investment in the human race, still lifts us out of the quagmire. And He can do something we have a hard time doing: forget. “The days are surely coming,” God says in Jeremiah, “When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people…for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sins no more.”
For us that new covenant came when Mary burst forth in the Judean hill country with her own song of deliverance and praise: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.” For us, our broken hearts were healed when we answered the call to “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.” For us, our iniquities were forgiven and our sins forgotten following the sad shadow caused by the cross when the weeping women went to the tomb and, finding it empty, their song became not one of heartache but hallelujah.
Love went right that day, my friends; love went right. “His anger is but for a moment; he favor is for a lifetime,” says yet another Psalm. Adding, if I may paraphrase here, “The blues may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”