Woodstock School being what it was when I was there, one of the things that all of us carried away, in one way or another, was a mandate to sing the Lord's song. And like the Jews in Babylon, three thousand five hundred years ago, most of us have faced challenges in carrying out this mandate. The words of this psalm came to mind when I was asked to for some reflections this morning. In the words of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, I heard our stories as we encountered the lands of our passports. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

Imagine, if you will, that moment long ago. Their trauma was certainly greater than ours. First, Jerusalem a comfortable place where the faces are familiar, family and friends, and the places are familiar, winding cobblestone streets, smelly hovels and grand palaces, small expressions of piety honed by common speech over the centuries and grand gestures of temple sacrifice, the aromas of incense and burning meat on the altar. And then moments of apprehension and fear, armies surrounding the city in an ever tightening siege, hardship and suffering and starvation and then that moment of total loss on that day 586 years before Christ when the enemy broke down Jerusalem's gates, slaughtering, raping, looting and burning, destroying the city they called home, and carried the traumatized survivors hundreds of miles away into a strange land, captive by the rivers of Babylon where their captors taunted them saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." And the Jews-for with their exile, for the first time in history, they were Jews now and not just Judeans, responded, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

In becoming strangers they experienced the loss of their Lord's song, and their own. And like the Jews in Babylon, we know the experience of being strangers.

For many of us it began in childhood. We were from somewhere else, and people asked us for songs. Sing us one of the songs of India. Sing us a song you learned in China. I still remember the tune for a little song my sister and I learned in Chengtu, China, after the Communists took over in 1950, a very simple but Chinese tune in praise of Mao Tse-tung. It probably didn't hurt that on our way out of China, on a boat travelling down the Yangtze River under the watchful eye of Chinese soldiers, it was a song in praise of Mao Tse-tung that we sang to entertain them.

In our youngest days many of us didn't know we were strangers. When some of us came to consciousness as children on Indian mission stations this was the only life we knew. It wasn't strange to us, and we weren't old enough to know that we were strange to others. As a boy of nine in China I rode my bicycle exploring villages -- fluent in a 9 year old's Szechuanese -- as comfortable among the only kind of people I really had ever known as I was balancing the bicycle on the narrow paths between rice paddies. What matter that they must have thought how strange this Western boy was, with his round eyes and pink skin, 9 years old and with no apparent responsibilities!

But for most of us that early comfort didn't last. Our parents moved, and then we were strangers. We went to new schools, and then we were strangers. We came to Woodstock, and we were strangers. We were strangers to the students already there. We were strangers to teachers and staff. Those among us who were Indian students or who came from embassies and companies found themselves strangers in a new world of Western missionary culture. By the time Woodstock had lost its strangeness we graduated and became strangers again, for the most part in a North America we had never known.

It took me years to discover God has a fondness for strangers. God sends strangers to test the hospitality of Sodom⁽²⁾; God reminds the Israelites in the book of Exodus⁽³⁾, "You know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The Jewish seder service gives a special place to the stranger, for the Israelites were once strangers in Egypt.⁽⁴⁾ Isaiah pictured Israel as a healing stranger in the world⁽⁵⁾, and Christians later applied these passages to Christ.⁽⁶⁾ The ethic of ancient Israel and its God are so filled with hospitality to strangers that the thought emerges that the Lord's song must include strangers-- or it's not the Lord's Song.

Like the Jews in Babylon, at Woodstock we were not only strangers, we were away from home.

I look at a cousin's life with wonder. He grew up on the farm where my father was born. Infancy, childhood and adolescence were spent in one place, and they were spent amidst others who spent all their lives in one place, amidst others who were a small galaxy of friends and relatives linked by bonds of blood and marriage and stories passed from one to another, and to the land they walked and tilled and loved every day stretching back in time to the days before George III was king and Lord Baltimore was Proprietary of the Province of Maryland and Avalon.

But for many of us who were at Woodstock, home was something different. For her Woodstock class one year recently my sister Vivia wrote a series of definitions including one for "home":

Home - where your parents live. The place you anticipated going to when you sang how many days were left until "going down day." You're not there much because it's too far away. I spent about 2 months a year there. The funny thing is that even when you're "home" with your parents, you're still not home. They have tears in their eyes at Christmas as they put cotton under the moth eaten, artificial tree. They are thinking of "home" on the other side of the world. You know then that you're still not "home." I remember walking into a store in Indonesia and seeing an apple! My mother and I stood in wonder and amazement. There were six of them. They were "very dear." We found the money for one. We took this amazing fruit home and placed it on the table worshipfully. She popped corn and we cut the apple in little pieces. There in the tropics surrounded by palm trees, glorious orchids growing wild, and numerous exotic fruits we ceremoniously ate an apple that reminded us that we weren't "home."⁽⁷⁾

It took me years to discover for my own life Jeremiah's⁽⁸⁾ words to the exiles in Babylon: "Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce...But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." The Lord's song that we must sing carries a tension between the fact of exile and the imperative to make homes where we are.

When Jerusalem was destroyed and the survivors of that terrible day exiled to Babylon, they found themselves not only strangers and homeless, but also Godless. Judea was the "land of the living"-to be there was to be in the presence of God and to be alive. To be exiled from Jerusalem was to be a dead person, cut off from life and from God. The comparison holds for our experience as well.

For me, Woodstock was our Jerusalem, and in our Jerusalem we learned to sing what we believed to be the Lord's song. We had required Scripture classes and chapel. Participation in Christian Endeavor was viewed with favor. But for a large number of us in that culture shock of graduation and travel to our American Babylon, it all fell apart. Some of us made dramatic changes; for others of us our estrangement from God was more subtle and persisted until we found our own ways.

Gradually, over time, many of us began to hear the Lord's song in different ways. I could see a grand natural vista and hear the echo of the chorus of the Himalayan snows. I could see acts of sacrifice and devotion and hear the echo of the selflessness and commitment of many of our parents. I went to seminary and heard echoes of the Lord's song in ancient scriptures and analytic theology. In the social justice movement of the 1960's I saw the echoes of Jesus once again walking from town to town with a message of shalom and in the rejection that followed saw once again the silhouette of the cross.

Eventually, I had to come to terms with this idea of salvation that was central at Woodstock. I groped back through the halls of memory to find my child's picture of salvation - heaven knows how I picked it up- there's no reason to imagine anyone at Woodstock would have claimed teaching it.

In my child's picture, salvation was an experience I imagined as letting all the air out of my chest - and not drawing any back. My mental child had taken literally the idea of giving up myself in order to find God. To be saved, I would have to stop being Jack Day. In fact, I would have to stop being, period. What I had harbored all these years as the Lord's song was not an image of life, but of death. In all the years since, I instinctively knew this was not a good thing, and any time I would encounter what people call the old time religion, evangelical preaching or gospel hymns, my deepest instincts sensed danger, and I experienced discomfort and anger. When the song of salvation was played, I did not hear it as the Lord's song.

It turns out that the Greek word for save - "swzw" -is also the word for heal -- and God has sent some healing for that old wound.

Our United Methodist congregation has now had two concerts by Marsha Stevens⁽⁹⁾, who has been called the mother of contemporary Christian music. She is thoroughly evangelical, the very type of religion I always had a problem with. Marsha Stevens achieved initial fame while still a teenager, with the song, "For these tears I died." For years she was in the mainstream of Christian gospel music. And then the day she came out as a lesbian, she was instantly transported from Jerusalem to Babylon. The rejection was so total that people tore her songs out of their hymn books and mailed them back to her in envelopes filled with violent words. After her own time in exile, wondering if she would ever sing the Lord's song again, she has found her voice. Now Christian Century magazine calls her "conservative Christianity's worst nightmare - a Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, born-again lesbian Christian." In Marsha Stevens' healing music I heard the Lord's song.

Her songs are songs of life and not death, of affirmation and not rejection. Born of her rebirth in affirming the sexual identity God had given her, her witness is that to sing the Lord's song, you must be who God created you to be.

When she sings, you hear the stranger who is no longer welcome in so many Christian churches. When she sings, you hear the person who has been sent out from what once was home. And you realize that these things are essential to the Lord's song. And so when Marsha Stevens sings a song of praise to God, I believe her and want to join in.

For when we hear the song of the stranger, we hear the song of the God who has been a stranger to humanity ever since the creation of human freedom with its freedom to turn one's back on God. When we hear the song of the homeless, we hear the song of the One who said, "foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."⁽¹⁰⁾ When we hear the song that says, "I'm so lost, so goldarn lost, not even God can't find me,"⁽¹¹⁾ we are hearing the song of the One on the cross who said, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me."⁽¹²⁾ These are not all of the Lord's song, but they are essential to it, and I am convinced any song which does not contain these things is not the Lord's song.

The 1960's musical "The Fantastics" has the memorable line, "without a hurt, the heart is hollow." It turns out that the painful things are essential things when we would sing the Lord's song. Allan Boesak of South Africa told the parable, "We will go before God to be judged - and God will ask us, "where are your wounds?" And if we say, "we have no wounds," God will say, "Was nothing worth struggling for?"⁽¹³⁾

Or as the Woodstock motto puts it, "Palma non sine pulvere," which has been translated, "There is no palm of victory with out the dust of struggle."

To sing the Lord's song is to put ourselves into relationship with God, the source and sustainer of life. Our Babylons are the place of struggle, and it is precisely in that strange land that we can sing the Lord's song.

1. Woodstock School is a Christian international boarding school located in India's Himalaya mountains. In the 1950's the student body was about 1/3 American missionary, 1/3 other American, and 1/3 other. Except for the Indian students at the school, students' parents were expatriates working overseas. Later, children of such expatriates have been called "Third Culture Kids" reflecting the experience of growing up in a culture other than the culture of their passports.

2. Genesis 19:1-10

3. Exodus 23:9

4. Nahum N. Glatzer, The Passover Haggadah, New York: Schocken Books, 1953, pp 25, 39

5. Isaiah 53;3-5

6. Acts 8:32-33

7. Vivia Tatum, "Woodstock Wisdom", GNID Anthology, 30^th Reunion of the Class of '63, 1993. Revised August 1996.

8. Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

9. See web site at www.allfaith.com/BALM/

10. Matthew 8:20

11. From the song, "They Called the Wind Mariah"

12. Psalm 22

13. Adapted. In original version, God will ask us "where are your wounds. We will answer, "We have no wounds." And God will say, "Was nothing worth struggling for?"