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Hebrew Scripture Reading– Jeremiah 33:10-16
Arlo Gutherie is the son of Woody Gutherie and a highly regarded folk singer in his own right. After 9-11, he recalls how he “didn’t feel like playing.” He didn’t want sing, but then he realized that there were others who were counting on him and counting on musicians everywhere to keep a sense of hope alive through their song. At every show now, Gutherie says to the audience, “Somewhere somebody’s ducking for cover. Somewhere somebody’s shooting at somebody that’s hiding in a hole, hoping that somewhere in the world somebody’s singing, somebody’s playing, and life is worth living.” There is a sense in which folk singers, and perhaps, musicians in general, serve as our designated contrarians. When us average folk are feeling miserable about the state of the world, we rely on them to present us with a contrary perspective and feeling, so that our spirits might be lifted up.
In a way, Jeremiah was the folk singer of his time. In our scripture, everyone else is talking about how Jerusalem and the towns of Judah are a wasteland without any humans or even animals, but then Jeremiah comes along and says that on the streets that are now desolate and empty the people of Israel will one day hear voices of joy and gladness again. It will be like a wedding party. There will be singing and gifts of thanksgiving. The Jewish rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once characterized the contrast between the situation of the Israelites and Jeremiah’s theological outlook in this way: He noted how at the time the temple, the palace, and the large houses of Jerusalem had all been burned down, how the city walls had fallen to the ground, and how most of the inhabitants had been deported. In short, soldiers had been busy destroying the city, but then along comes Jeremiah saying that amid all of this “God is erecting.” God is building a new and just world out of the ashes. In stark contrast to everyone else, Jeremiah was in essence listening to a different melody and singing a different tune.
Jeremiah wasn’t always the voice of hope, however. Before the destruction came, Jeremiah was a contrarian of a different sort. While others thought that all was good with the world, he was busy telling people to watch out because they are about to be ruined. He went around saying, “Woe to us” and “Woe to you” for what is about to happen. Apparently, he developed a reputation for being a contrarian because at one point, he even said, “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land!” A leading biblical scholar once observed that it is “in character for Jeremiah to preach doom when everyone else was clinging to hope, but [then] to [also] entertain hope when everyone else was in a state of despair.”
Folksingers can be like this as well. Malvina Reynolds was a folk singer who in her later years became known in the mainstream for her Sesame Street songs and her guest appearances on the show. She eventually discovered that she didn’t like being stereotyped and pigeonholed as a children’s singer, so she once said:
“I don’t think of myself primarily as a writer of children’s songs. In fact, I tend to avoid that title, because the first thought is…this nice old grandma who makes cookies and sings for kids, and that’s not my character at all. I have a very acid edge toward many aspects of modern life, and I’m pretty outspoken about it. I don’t mind crossing swords with people when I disagree with them, and I’m not your nice old grandma. However, I always make it clear that the reason I have this sharp cutting edge is because I do care for people. I care about children, and I think the world is ripping them off, taking away their natural environment and much more than that.”
Like Jeremiah, Reynolds could be a rabble rousing contrarian who saw a lot of reasons for doom and gloom, but who also like Jeremiah, could be a voice of hope. Some of my favorite song lyrics come from a song she wrote that Pete Seeger made famous. The song is called “God Bless the Grass.” In a way, it evokes an image similar Jeremiah’s image of the pastures coming back to life in the wasteland. She wrote the song after reading a book about the JFK’s assassination. The song goes, “God bless the grass that grows through cement. It’s green, and it’s tender, and it’s easily bent. But after a while, it lifts up its head, for the grass is living and the stone is dead, and God bless the grass.”
Beyond the lyrics sung by folksingers, I think there is an element of hope that can also be found in the simple act of singing itself. That could be why Jeremiah invokes singing as he paints a picture of what Israel will be like when it is restored. Pete Seeger touched upon the hope found in singing when he was interviewed by a religious magazine once. He was asked whether a spirit takes over “when people sing together in community.” In response, he reflected on how music has the power to transcend barriers and bring people with different opinions and backgrounds together. At the time, Seeger was almost 90 years old, and he commented on how he could be on a stage in front of a thousand people and how he will see “somebody over on [his] right [who] had a great-great grandfather” who once tried “to kill the great-great grandfather of somebody off to [his] left.” Seeger then thinks about how they are all singing together and how it would “surprise all those great-grandfathers if they could see their great-grandchildren singing together.” He imagines that they would ask each other, “Why did we fight so hard?”
For me, Pete Seeger’s songs often brim with prophetic hope. Last month on Election Day Seeger posted a music video on YouTube called, “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You.” In the video, he performs the song on a boat he built in 1968. He built the boat in order to sail down the Hudson River and teach people about the dangers of pollution. The boat was part of the movement that led to the Clean Water Act three years later and eventually to the restoration of the Hudson. To perform the song in the video, Seeger got back on the boat in 2010 after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The lyrics say, “Yes, there’s big problems to be solved; let’s get everyone involved, God’s counting on me, God’s counting on you, Hoping we’ll all pull through, hoping we’ll all pull through, me and you.”
Seeger is a contrarian prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah, and I like to think that all of us our called to be contrarians, to see the injustices of the present world but to also see the hope that is there as well. This morning we have our own folk singer Kit Stowell here to lead us in singing another Pete Seeger song. Kit, by the way, once performed with Malvina Reynolds. The song we will be singing is one that Seeger performed on the Colbert Show four months ago. On the show, Seeger mentioned how at the age of 93, he still splits his own wood. Seeger is a walking advertisement for hope, and his songs are gifts of hope that point us to a future of possibilities. As the song we are about to sing says, “Through all this world of joy and sorrow, we still can have singing tomorrows.” Amen.