Covenant
United Methodist Church
Sunday School 9:45 Worship 8:30 & 10:45 am
Epiphany 2 "Sing a Song" Psalm 118-1-9, 24-26
In Europe there is a little bird called the chaffinch bird. It is a popular bird purchased by the thousands. It looks very much like our male robin, yet it sings like a canary. There you find persons buying this little bird, taking it home in a cage and they discover that the chaffinch bird has a peculiar characteristic about it. For unlike the canary, the chaffinch bird can forget how to sing. Thus the owner has to take the little bird back into the woods two or three times a year so that it can hear other chaffinch birds sing. For if it does not hear the singing of other chaffinch birds the chaffinch bird will mope and mope and eventually will die because it has forgotten how to sing.
That might be a message for the church. If we forget how to sing the good news of Jesus Christ, we will mope, loose our way and, in fact, we too might die.
You know it is easy to forget how to sing, it is easy to lose hope, with all the bad news we hear each day isn’t it. On a national and global level we listen to the news at night and hear about the oil crisis, the Iraq war, earthquakes, tornadoes, freezing weather, global warming, and some hurricane that destroyed a whole city… nothing but bad news. On a local level, we hear about drive by shootings, bank robberies, and drug busts… on a personal level we go to the doctor and he says if we are lucky… that our cholesterol count is up, or our triglycerides are high… if we aren’t lucky, we hear about a surgery we need or some member of our family or a friend needs. We hear about cancer or stroke or heart attacks… we can forget how to sing we can lose hope just from listening to all the bad news around us.
Perhaps that is what our scripture lesson is talking to us about… remember that David wrote many of the Psalms. I have always wondered if he didn’t write this one. Remember David life. He was one of the big singers we have in the Bible. David sings in the midst of adversity with Goliath… he sings when sinning with Bathsheba, and he sings when his son Absalom first turns traitor on his dad and then dies in battle… David knew how to sing and it seems that he sung a song of hope, no matter what was going on in his life. Perhaps that is the reason the Psalmist, if David, could say, “This is the day the Lord has made I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
There was an exciting little book entitled, Tracks in the Straw. It is a book of various stories. One is a little story about a swallow. It’s called, “The Song of a Swallow”. It tells of a swallow who goes to the manger scene, looks into the eye of the baby Jesus and something happens to the swallow. The swallow is changed in all of its dimensions. This story is about the swallow who now is wondering why we, whom it calls its “featherless friends”, no longer sing. The swallow says of us, “Oh you have forgotten how to sing, you have forgotten how to sing. Oh, you make noises, you make sounds,” says the swallow, “but your heart is not in it, and if your heart is not in it, it is only technique, notes, pretense.”
You have forgotten how to sing. The world needs to hear our song. A song of faith. A song of love. A song of hope. The little swallow says, “Of course you know, swallows don’t really sing. Swallows only twitter.” And then the little swallow says this, “But when I looked in the eyes of Jesus, the twitter became a song.” That’s what Jesus does when you look into his eyes. The twitter becomes a song. The heartache becomes less of an ache. A sense of lostness becomes a sense of hope. The twitter becomes a song. We must learn how to sing again so that those who so desperately need to hear the song will hear it from those who know it.
Most of you know by now that my dad fainted a couple of weeks ago. He was in the bathroom feeling very nauseous. He had his head leaning over the commode and he fainted. His head landed face first on the ground and he hit the bathroom scales head on. My mother was in the bathroom with him kinda looking after him when according to who you believe my dad said either “I am going to throw up” or “I am going to faint.” The next thing I know I get this call from my mom saying “ Mike…your dad had a little accident… he fainted and hit his head on the floor. We are taking him to the emergency room at the hospital… by the time I got there dad was in a room at the emergency room at the hospital. He had a paper towel over his eye which had ballooned to the size of a golf ball. It was bleeding down into his face and eye and periodically he would ask mom for another towel, one with less blood on it. A nurse was asking him questions concerning his cognitive functioning, like “Mr. Redd do you know where you are?” my dad said “The hospital.” They asked him, “Do you know what city you are in?” and he said, “How would I know what city I’m in, I came here in the back of an ambulance!” I like that answer don’t you… still dad was a little confused about some of the answers so they decided to take him down for an MRI. When the attendant took dad down the hall on a gurney mom said, “Mike follow him!” when mom says follow you follow… so I am follow dad down the hall and he doesn’t know I am there. He is cracking jokes with the attendant and laughing and getting information about the attendant’s family and giving out information about all his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren… and then all of a sudden my dad breaks into song… Something you need to know about my dad. Dad is 82 years old and says, Mike I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t know how to laugh and I didn’t know how to sing… so dad breaks into song and sings “ High hopes, he has high hopes he has high apple pie in the sky hopes”…
Now the question comes to you today… Do you have high hopes? Do you still know how to sing? All you need to do is look into the eyes of Jesus, and even in the midst of tragedy you can say, “This is the day the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it.” You can sing, you can have high hopes, just look into the eyes of the savior…