Love Song

Isaiah 5:1-7, Luke 12:49-56, Psalm 80:1-3, 8-16

I searched in vain this week for a list of top Australian love songs. I remember one being produced a few years ago including the Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Throw your arms around me’ and, my favourite, Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Slice of heaven’. What about you? Is it The Way you look tonight or , When I fall in love or , Love me tender, love me true…

Love songs remind us of the past; those warm – and perhaps rosy memories - of falling in love or love lost. But can love songs affect the future?

For this we turn to the experts! French researchers recently published a study claiming women who listen to romantic lyrics are more likely to say ‘yes’!. A group of 87 single female undergraduate students were played a romantic French song or a neutral French song and invited to sit with a 20-year-old man who, after a brief standardised conversation, would say:

"My name is Antoine, as you know, I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number."

Of the women who listened to the romantic song, 52.2% gave him their number. Among the others was only 27.9 per cent. The French psychologists have referred to other studies associating music with pro-social and consumer behaviour, but state that theirs was the first to link it to "more intimate affects" …and that further research must be done in this area!

Isaiah 5:1-7 begins like a popular love song. ‘Let me sing for my beloved’ evokes the poetry of the Song of Solomon. Perhaps the prophet wrote it this way intending for it be performed at a festival in Israel when such popular songs were sung.

The lyrics tell of a vineyard, planted and tended with care, which has produced worthless grapes. “What more could I have done?” asks verse 3, but now the singer is the vine grower... Then all is spelt out. The vine grower is God, but the song is about more than unfruitful vines. It is about unfruitful lives, about a society thriving on its oppression of the poor. “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses,” says Isaiah 3:14.

The song reaches a climax in the wordplay of verse 7:

He looked for justice (mispat), but saw bloodshed (mispah)

Righteousness (sedaqah) but heard distress (se’aqah)

One word sounds just like another, but there is an appalling dissonance in their meanings.

‘Let me sing you a love song.’

Can I tell you the part of this that bothers me? It is verses 5 and 6… Yes, their crime is terrible, but God’s response seems… wrong – even in a ‘somebody done somebody wrong song’: How can Isaiah sing this love song about God of love?

And how can Isaiah call this a love song? Is he, in the festival setting that I described earlier, just trying to trick his audience long enough to hear what he has to say? Or does the prophet hope a love song might – even now - increase Judah’s percentage chance of responding to God’s advances? Or does he sing a love song because God’s love will not murmur sweet nothings and maintain the status quo. God’s love desires justice. God’s love hungers for righteousness.

Let me sing for you my love-song about the Baliem Valley:

When the first Westerners discovered the Baliem in West Papua it was hailed as ‘Shan-gri-la’, but when the missionaries reached the area in the 1950’s they discovered a people whose lives were dominated by fear; appeasing the spirits which involved elaborate rituals including the mutilation, mostly of young girls, and constant warfare. The gospel brought peace and freedom from this oppression and there were mass conversions throughout the Baliem.

But now…the missionaries and the Indonesians have opened this society to the West. Now the people see all the stuff, the barang, they do not have and they want it. Sexually transmitted diseases are common because young people go away to study and find discover their bodies are the only commodity they have to support themselves. Pig cholera has wiped out the local pigs, making the people even more dependent on the Indonesian trade stories for food and breaking down traditional customs around bride price and marriage. There are brothels in the grass roofed villages of my childhood.

And the church leaders there look at us and ask, “What does the church in the West know about living with materialism? What can you tell us about being content with what you have? Of giving up what you have in order to benefit others?”

Can we sing God’s love song? A song of justice, a song of righteousness?

In Luke 12:49 Jesus’ patience wears thin with his disciples. We know from our last two weeks in Luke 12 that Jesus has been trying to tell his disciples that a reckoning must be made for our lives, but in verse 41 Peter’s still not getting it, “Lord, all this stuff about being ready for the Son of Man – is that for us or just for them?” And Jesus loses it!

“Look, I didn’t come to make nice. The gospel is a bushfire that will torch everything in its path. I must face this terrible future and all you can think about is what you’ll get out of it! Following me is not a love-in. We’re not going to sit and sing ‘give peace a chance’ and it – voila – it will happen. No! The gospel will tear open all the fault lines that our society and communities and families are currently papering over.”

Jesus’ love song does not say ‘there, there’ and maintain the status quo. Jesus’ love song desires justice. Jesus’ love song hungers for righteousness. The lyrics of Jesus’ love song is that there are things you love so much that they are worth dying for. Wouldn’t you agree, baby, you and me, got a crazy kind of love…

On Monday a few of the Sunday School teachers and I went to an information night about the group that write the Sunday School material we’re using. A few years ago they made an apparently crazy decision, to stop writing this highly successful and lucrative product, and start writing materials free on line. Their thinking was (that along with so many other resource) Christian education materials are in abundance in the West, but unaffordable in the countries where they are desperately needed.

So now they write material that can be downloaded anywhere in the world, and invite contributors from around the world to upload their ideas or translate what’s there into their languages. And the site editor sang us a love story (story) about one of their contributors, a woman from Liberia.

During the war in that country this woman and her baby boy were found by child soldiers. How you might be treated by adult soldiers was somewhat predictable, but no one knew what child soldiers, often high on drugs, would do. Her fear naturally transferred to her child who began crying and the soldiers demanded that she shut him up. When she couldn’t, one of them cut off her child’s head…

A few years later, when the war had ended, this woman was in the market and she saw, begging for food, the boy who had killed her baby. She asked him to carry her bags to her car…and when they reached the car she said to him, “Do you know who I am? I am the mother whose child you murdered. I want you to come home with me and be my son.”

She sang God’s love song.

I don’t want to get political…I had my little go at it last week and in today’s bulletin…but it seems to me that we should be careful of leaders that murmur sweet nothings, and say ‘there, there’…

- that offer us financial incentives for votes

- that tell us that our standard of living should never and will never drop

- that are terrified of disrupting the status quo

- that will not face the terrible things that are present in our world, our society and our families

- that will not say that there are things you love so much that they are worth dying for, forgiving for, living for…

The Psalm that we read this morning also takes up the theme of the vine, but here the psalmist gives us a song to sing – a song we can sing with confidence to our God who desires justice and hungers for righteousness.

Restore us. Give us life. Let you face shine of us that we may be saved.

For we sing to God who we know falls in love with us forever and gives to us completely.

Call to worship:

My life flows on in endless song:

above earth's lamentation,

I catch the sweet, tho' far-off hymn,

that hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing;

It finds an echo in my soul—

How can I keep from singing?

What tho' my joys and comfort die?

The Lord my Saviour liveth;

What tho' the darkness gather round?

Songs in the night he giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,

while to that rock I’m clinging;

Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,

how can I keep from singing?

Canberra Baptist Church

Currie Crescent, Kingston 2604

Phone: (02) 6295 9470

Email: belinda@canbap.org

Dear Parent/Guardian,

The following details relate to an education excursion to: -

Canberra Baptist Church Meeting

The excursion has been booked for Monday, 23 August. Please bring your child (and yourself!) to Canberra Baptist Church at approximately 7:45pm. (The children will be excused from the meeting at 9:00pm.). The venue for the excursion is the Canberra Baptist Church Lounge.

The purpose of our excursion is for the Year 5 and 6 Sunday School class to learn about Baptist church meetings as part of our Baptist Basics series.

There is no cost for this excursion! J

Yours faithfully,

Belinda Groves

Excursion Coordinator