"Message: Songs and Signs
It is no secret that I have a soundtrack of music running through my head almost every moment of everyday. To the horror of some, I break into song and dance unexpectedly and without warning. I wonder if my life should be a musical.
Songs of the show tunes variety, Broadway, animated films, popular songs and country ballads rock up right alongside the hymns embedded in my brain and psalms I have known for decades that have been sung for millennia.
Songs and thoughts flood my mind and even my conversations. Yes, I have been known to quote lyrics from a variety of sources in sermons and everyday conversations. And if I’m honest, in reading through the bible readings for today from I Samuel 2:1 - 10 (Hannah’s song) and Jesus’s warning in Mark’s gospel, I found myself thinking about many songs from a variety of genres from Handel’s Messiah to Hamilton the musical, from Lego Movie 2 to the Pilgrim Chorus in Tannhauser. Yes, it’s quite an unquiet ride in my here brain.
As we come to worship today, we have songs in our hearts and minds that have been carried for years, decades even, but also songs that we only recently heard but have been struck by their words or cadence.
We humans are a storied people and a people of song and dance. While not all of us can share stories in ways that spark the imagination of others, nor can we all sing like songbirds or move like the great dancers, each of us has a story to tell, a song to sing and movement in our lives that bear witness to life and for those who follow Jesus of God’s saving love.
Here in this place together we often sing the same hymns but maybe not always off the same hymn sheet because we come with a variety of experiences and expectations. We come to this place with shared stories but a multiplicity of viewpoints and vantage points from along the way. We also come together and yet we do not move at the same pace or in the same way through these days we are living.
Hearing the song of Hannah as she has been graced with a long hoped for child and hearing the words of warning from Jesus to pay attention, call us to look back and look forward while not getting lost in looking inward. Yes, we are called to introspection and reflection but throughout the scriptures God is continually calling us beyond. Noticing what God has done and remembering the songs of old bear within them an invitation to pay attention to the signs of what God is inviting us into for these days. Being aware of how our hearts yearn for deep desires of fulfilment and fruitfulness while at the same time not focusing too much on ourselves, we are called to look around at the ways God meets us even in the unexpected or unwanted situations of life.
Jesus’s warning of ‘Beware that no one leads you astray’ also holds within it a BE AWARE – pay attention to your inner wellbeing, your outer world as well as God’s workings. The songs and signs God is seeking for us to notice are all around and have been all around for each generation to notice and work alongside. Mark’s gospel is believed to be the earliest written record that survived of Jesus’s life, while it is hard to have full original source material from the first gospel, we glean the heart of the urgency of Mark’s telling of Jesus’s time among the disciples and his teachings that mattered deeply to them. The signs and stories of Jesus’s interaction during his earthly days speak to the lived experiences of the disciples and the urgency of their days as they continued to share the Good News of Jesus with others.
While we are 2000 years on from the gospel urgency of Jesus’s disciples, we have our own urgency as our time on earth is in a sense fleeting. We don’t have unlimited time. The Good News is that we don’t have to save the world, fix all the problems, make it all okay, however we are called and tasked to play our part, sing our song, pay attention to the signs for us to work with Jesus for the Kingdom of God.
The time we have as followers of Jesus invites us to sing of Jesus’s life and love, to share the story of God’s saving love, and to walk in this world as one changed because of an encounter with the embodiment of God’s love in action.
While the words of others may shape our stories, while we are inspired and encouraged to remember, we are also challenged to be aware that we too may write our parts, and live our lives as a song for others to notice and wonder. Like Hannah’s song is immortalised in 2 Samuel, and our hymns remember the lives of other faithful followers, our lives become a living witness in the days we are given.
So, sing the songs of faith, share the stories of God in our midst and move within the world of your everyday so that others see God’s love in action. Through our living in faith, we pray that God will inspire and invite neighbours, friends and family to come and see as we follow Jesus together. The Good News is we do not have to invent something absolutely new; we only to need share the Good News of Jesus which is evergreen and timely in ways that speak into the days we live. Let us see the signs and sing the songs of God’s promises, God’s love, and God’s ways, here and now and together."