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by the rivers of Babylon. There we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. During these Tuesdays this fall, this Tuesday evening, and henceforth, all of the Tuesday mornings of this semester

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. The faculty is preaching a series on the songs . Every Tuesday the preaching text will be a text from the psalms, the first hymnal of the Children of Israel. And if you came here knowing that

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you may have expected that we would start with something upbeat tonight. Something befitting new beginnings, new ventures , excitement about a new year psalm 1 45 maybe I will extol you, my God and king,

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and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. And since. Surely being in seminary is all about that nothing but praising God every day endlessly

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forever. Even during hebrew, even during ordination exams , you may have had this song in mind for the first sermon in a series on the psalms or psalm 33 rejoice in the Lord. Oh you righteous

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! Make melody to the Lord with the harp of 10 strings. Sing to God! A new song play skillfully on the strings with loud shouts. Seminary is one endless, joyful choir practice where we sing

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all the time, day and day, day and night, day after day, night after night about the new world that yahoo is now creating, about , about how the earth is full of the steadfast

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love of the Lord or sol mate, that wonderful expression of creation faith, that would have been a good choice for a night like this. Oh Lord ! Our sovereign, How majestic is your name and

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all the earth. When I look at your heavens , the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established all sheep and oxen , all juniors and Midler's also the beasts of the

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field. That would have been a good one. So maybe you're scratching your head over my choice of psalms for this first sermon of this new Year. This first sermon on this series of psalms, because

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this is a night of new beginnings and beginnings are just always full of un deluded joy and single mindedness , aren't they? Never any doubts, never any regrets. We're all just thoroughly ready for this new

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thing that stretches before us. So why these words of complaint and lament? Our newest students have just finished orientation. So why this psalm psalm 11 37 which scholars call a psalm of disorientation by the rivers

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of Babylon. There we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. Not necessarily such a good choice for this occasion, maybe unless there's somebody here tonight who maybe just a little anxious about what

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lies ahead, who maybe even had to talk herself finally into coming here and now is wondering if she should have After all? Some of you almost talked yourselves out of coming and who could blame you?

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There were all those farewells back home, all the preparations that you had to make that took you beyond your comfort zone, all those other vocations from which you had to extricate yourselves, all the going away

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parties where you looked around the room and beheld the most important people to you in the whole wide world and wondered if you could ever say goodbye. In the late, john Updike's posthumously published book of essays

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, my father's tears. There's a wonderfully sad essay about the first and only time Updike watched his father cry. They were standing at the train station in his hometown in pennsylvania. And Updike, who had

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been home for a visit from college, was on his way back to Harvard and to the new life he had been building there for a couple of years , within a decade. That grand old train station

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where they were standing would be padlocked, boarded up . Passenger service to philadelphia would cease to exist. The progress of that area would be halted in its tracks. But my father did foresee he writes,

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the glitter in his eyes told me the time consumes us, that the boy I had been was dying , if not already dead and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life

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had come out of his and now I was stealing away with it, saying goodbye to a now completed chapter in your life. It's hard, it's hard on everybody. Just a few weeks ago, the

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baby in our household went off to college. This is the normal course of things. We came back from taking her to college and the first thing K did was go into a room with a pair of

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rubber gloves and cleaned out the room piles of things . We found jimmy hoffa's body under one of those piles. This is the normal course of things, but in her case she's the baby so it's somehow

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harder. We did all the farewells. Just right , pack the car drive the two days. They're good conversations on the road. Unpack the bags, hang the clothes in the closet, meet the roommate

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, decorate the room, Go out together as a family for one last meal. The pizza is good , but none of us are hungry because we know what's next by agreement ahead of time. Nothing sentimental

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. Not even any final words. Just drive back to campus, opened the car door, get out and walk bravely and purposefully to the first event of orientation. Why did they call it that? Somewhere

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inside of all of us, we know that transitions that any transitions in which we find ourselves moving from one context to another will rip us inside out before it is orientation, it is disorientation. And if

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you think about it lament in such a circumstance is natural. Do you recall the last time you moved Seven years ago? Now? After close to 12 years in Atlanta, we moved here to Austin.

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I was moving from the life of a pastor to the life of a seminary president. We were moving as a family from the southeast where there are four seasons to the southwest, Whereas Jack Barton puts it

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, there are two seasons summer and not summer. It was hard for all of us. Our older daughter, 1/9 grader, then first year in high school ripped in voluntarily out of the world. That

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had been her oyster. Could hardly bear it. I would come home at night and she would look at me with scrunched up eyes as if to say , here he comes again. This one who heard

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a call to come to texas in a voice not loud enough for any of the rest of us to hear. Thank you mm. In time she put her arms around this new setting and now she loves

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it. But for a while there it was only lament because lament, in fact, is the natural voice For those who are moving from one place to another by the rivers of Babylon. There we sat

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down and wept when we remembered Zion him 1 37 in the book of psalms lament. A psalm For those moments when life has turned you upside down, not every psalm, thanks be to God is full

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of confidence and certainty and un deluded praise. Walter Brueggemann has said that the problem with ahem needy that focuses on equilibrium and coherence and cemetery is that it may deceive and cover over life is not like that

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. Life is also savagely marked by dis equilibrium incoherence and unrelieved. A symmetry in our time. Perhaps in any time that needs no argument or documentation for it's not just moving from one town to another,

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from one of life's chapters to another of life's chapters . It's not just the personal and existential disruptions of life that bring on this sense of disorientation. Americans living in the wake of 9 11 know that in

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spades, we here at this seminary living through the last year of the worst global recession in memory know that in spades and for the people who first sang this song, It like 9:11 was a public and

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literal historical event. This in fact, is one of the few psalms that is so completely rooted in historical specificity, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and those who sang this song first

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, we're singing about the wiping out of meaning the temple after all, was the point of reference for all of life. And when the Babylonians came in and destroyed it and marched all of Jerusalem's citizens into

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exile, every physical point of orientation and coherence was obliterated. Every religious truth had to be reimagined and reclaimed. It was not just a spiritual or metaphorical matter, it was a concrete event. And so

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years later, when those exiles there by the rivers of Babylon, remembered that event and sang about it and reflected in anguish upon its meaning. They're ethical . Starting point was that the present arrangements were not

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right, Not ultimately and thus were not finally acceptable under any terms, there was bitterness for sure when they sang and even now when we sing that song , it's hard for us to get through the last

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verses that dream of taking their captors babies and dashing them against the rock and still somehow find the breath to blithely say the word of the Lord, Thanks be to God. There was bitterness for sure.

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But please understand this tonight. There was also hope the bitterness came from the humiliation of it all, such as when their captors in an effort to shame them out of their identity would make them sing and

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dance. Sing us one of those songs of Zion , entertain us a little bit you stupid hebrew captives . And let's all decide if your songs really matter anymore. So there was bitterness. Yes. But

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beyond that there was also hope. The hope came out of their steely determination that even in those song and dance spectacles there would be no raid on their memory in a radically disoriented context. They would not

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forget the substance of their faith. No, they would maintain a faithful tenacity, memory and hope. After all, we're the primary partners in the story of Israel's faith, just as they remain partners in

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the story of our faith. Even in a culture like ours, it seems hell bent on forgetting anything older than we are. The very future of our faith depends upon our nurturing, unashamedly, both our

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memory and our hope. If I forget you, o Jerusalem, let my right hand with her, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth . If I do not remember you. What do

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we do in a season of disorientation When, in a host of ways our world is moving from one place to another. Perhaps we lament and perhaps we complain, but mainly at our faithful best. We

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remember The one who lives even when the temple falls , the one who companions us day by day, even when we are led beyond the precincts of the familiar couple of Saturdays ago, Professor Wit Bodman and

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I went together to a service of worship at the jewish congregation Agudath Achim, a large and wondrous congregation of conservative jews here in Austin all weekend long in various occasions of worship, they were celebrating the investiture

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of their new rabbi. Rabbi Neil bloom off. He is a fixture in jewish and interfaith life here in Austin and I hope that when he is next on campus you will make an opportunity to meet him

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and perhaps someday take a course from him. For years before he completed his rabbinical training, NEal served as the Hassan at a good as Hakeem a kind of combination cantor and religious education director and in this

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capacity he earned the affection of that congregation and now he is there rabbi on this saturday morning they're beautiful sacred space was filled with members and visitors like us and their worship was rooted in memory. One after

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another of the members would come to the bima there in the middle of that space and read or chant or sing from the Torah. An impressive number of them were young people, just teenagers but already fluent

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in Hebrew and there they were reading and singing the Hebrew scriptures. Over time it struck me that however well placed in society, many of those members are , however many of them are players in this city

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and in this country on that day. Their main order of business was to remember Zion and as they were doing so, they were remembering as well that they aren't home yet. I was particularly moved by

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one moment near the end of that service when before putting it back into the Tabernacle, they took the Torah scroll and processed it all around that sacred space . All the young people in that particular service who

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had been bar mitzvahed or bat mitzvah under Neil bloom off. Maybe 100 of them all came forward to be part of the great procession that wound its way through that large assembly. And as it snaked its

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way through the assembly, nobody dared touch the Torah with their fingers. But with their prayer shawls, they would touch the Torah and then kiss it. If they could not reach the scroll as it made

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its way past them, they would point their own personal copies of scripture at the Torah and then kiss it. It was an act of memory. And somehow in that moment they were no longer disoriented exiles

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in austin texas In the year 2009. They were in Jerusalem and you tonight, even if it's still more disorientation than orientation, more the rivers of Babylon than the sturdy foundations of Zion, your destiny is

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certain in the hands of that inscrutable god who has had much to do with your being here now and who will lead you purposefully into your future? Meanwhile remember and hope and sing for most of this past

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june I was in Zambia at our sister seminary there and I was teaching liturgies to the most remarkable collection of African students. They're getting ready to serve the burgeoning presbyterian and reformed churches there. And even in

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the midst of grinding poverty, a corrupt and self serving government health system near collapse. Not much infrastructure and a shortage of skills. Even in the midst of all of that, they are the most joyful

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and expectant christians I have ever met in a liturgical class in which of course not only talked about worship but also did a good bit of it. The thing that liquefied me over and over again was the

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singing, I said to them once you can't be a christian here without singing. And they all agreed . Our churches in sub Saharan Africa were established in the main by faithful Scottish presbyterian and dutch, reformed

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missionaries who came there during the colonial period and they printed up all these european style hymnals printed in the fashion of the mother churches of those days without music , All the texts of those stout old European hymns

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from the 17th, 18th, 19th, early 20th centuries, the same hymns that formed many of us are there in those hymnals to without music. And when the colonial period ended in the missionaries left,

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the Africans, appreciative lee kept those hymnals with their wonderful hymn texts, but they changed the music. They took out the old european pump organs and not knowing what to do with them and not wanting to

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dishonor the work of the missionaries, they gathered them all up and stored them in a small warehouse in lusaka where those organs remain today, gathering dust and then they brought in the drums and they brought to

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those formative old texts, the most amazing new melodies . And it is that unique sound of sweet call and response harmonies, the likes of which I've never heard anywhere else in my life that stays with me

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. Even now, I never felt more inadequate Then on the day in my class, when according to my syllabus, I would be teaching them about music , I abandoned my lecture and asked my class to

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talk about what their music means to them In traditional understatement. One student, the president of the student body paul lendu rose to speak abou moussa, he said in africa, it has been so very hard

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. What he meant by just that sentence, I think, was the harshness of colonial powers and in these days the harshness of a host of things that don't work. The harshness of cruel regimes like the

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one in neighboring Zimbabwe, the harshness of a new kind of colonialism coming in from china, an economic colonialism instead of a political one, where the mines are built shabbily so that the highest mortality rate of

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mining in the world comes from the copperbelt of Zambia . The harshness of inflation, the harshness of the deplorable compounds where most zambians live in sewage flows and streams down the middle of dirt streets in africa,

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he said it has been so very hard and he went on. And what has sustained us has been the capacity to sing. They could take away everything else, but they couldn't steal our song. Archbishop

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tutu once put it this way when the white people came, we had the land and they had the bible. They said, let us pray. And when we opened our eyes again, they had the

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land and we had the bible and we got the better end of the deal. That's worth remembering and hoping for and singing about in a time of disorientation . And if you are genuinely disoriented right now,

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I can't promise that reorientation is right around the corner . But if you will remember that this image of singing the Lord's Song is one way of describing the gift you've been given of a story, of a

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legacy, of a nurturing and redemptive narrative that has been given to you, then you to have the better end of the deal and in and under and beyond all of the exegesis and theology and the ethics

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and the personal work and all the other challenges that will be thrown at you this year while you're learning maybe that Biblical study, for example is more than just knowing that jesus didn't necessarily say every syllable that's

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in red letters in your bible, in and under and beyond all of that is the creator God who has bestowed under each one of us a holy redemptive world, making song. And even in the midst

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of disorientation, that's all that gift of the faith is the one thing we must never lose. If I forget you o Jerusalem, let my right hand with er let my tongue cling to the roof of

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my mouth. If I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy