On Making a Joyful Noise

 On Making a Joyful Noise 

January 12, 2025 

For 

First Congregational UCC Bellevue Choir Retreat 

Rev. Tom Sorenson 

Scripture: Psalm 100 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of your hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. 

I don’t know about you. I won’t ever claim to speak for any of you. That’s not my role, and I have no intention of doing it today. But speaking only for myself, I have to say that I don’t find the times we’re living in to be particularly joyful. There is just too much trouble everywhere. I mean, just look at the world around us. Violent Russian aggression against Ukraine. Violent Israeli assault on Gaza. Violent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Jordan. Oppression of women in Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The growth of right wing political movements in many nations including our own. A president-elect about to take office in this country who seems to all appearances intent on destroying our federal government for the benefit only of the uber-wealthy. Assault on the personal autonomy and integrity of women in many of our states that our president-elect apparently intends to attempt to spread nationwide. Irresponsible environmental policies that threaten to cause even more extensive damage worldwide than they already have. A threat that wildly irresponsible trade and taxation policies will make life harder for ordinary Americans. Hundreds of thousands of unhoused people in what we claim is the richest country on earth combined with an apparent unwillingness to do what would have to be done to address the problem in a serious way. Not a pretty picture, is it? It certainly isn’t to me. 

Then we encounter scripture passages like the opening lines of Psalm 100 that we just heard. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing.” And I have to tell you: When I read passages like that my first reaction is: Yeah. Sure. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to do that in today’s world? It just doesn’t seem possible. A joyful noise? Serve God with gladness? Come into God’s presence with singing? I have to confess that I just think: I don’t think so! Not today. Not in the foreseeable future. The world is just too ugly for that. 

But then I get to thinking a bit more. These verses talk about music. “Make a joyful noise.” What’s a joyful noise? It isn’t the noise of hotrod cars or motorcycles with punctured mufflers that we often hear in the neighborhood where I live. It isn’t the sound of traffic on the freeway. It isn’t the sound of cries of anguish, despair, or grief that we sometimes hear and sometimes make ourselves. It isn’t incessant, unavoidable, and mostly immensely stupid advertising on television. It isn’t the speech of most of our politicians. It isn’t the demand we hear to deport hundreds of thousands of decent people who play indispensable roles in our economy and who only want peace and a better life for themselves and their children. It isn’t the lies some of our politicians tell us about the threat those people present. It isn’t the demand we hear to let politicians, mostly male, decide what women can and can’t do with their own bodies. In other words, it isn’t most of the noise we hear day after day. 

So what is a joyful noise? For me, and I hope for most of you, the most joyful noise we hear is music. Music in general, but more specifically the music we make together in our choir. Some of that music is meant to be joyful. Some of it is more serious or somber than we usually think of joy as being; but joy is both happy and deep. Deep, serious music can be joyful too. I don’t know about you, but I always feel substantially better after we have sung together than I did before we began. I often remember the old saying: The one who sings prays twice. We pray with our lyrics, and we offer a different kind of prayer with our melodies and harmonies. For me, music can be a joyful noise when it seems not much else in the world is. 

So as we enter this new year so full of doubt and promise, let me share with you one way that I see music, especially our music. To me, music is a refuge. It is a shelter. It is an escape from a world I’m usually not much pleased with. Sometimes it is a place of peace. Sometimes it is a place of excitement. Sometimes it is a place of inspiration. Sometimes it’s a place of challenge. Something it’s not, ever, is a place of despair, or depression, or fear. The world often oppresses our spirits. Music can raise our spirits better than anything else. The world often gives us violence and injustice. Music can, I suppose, be used in support of violence and injustice. I mean, the Nazis certainly used it that way. But the music we sing is sacred music. It is music of hope and of love not of hatred and despair.  

In other words, whether it is expressly joyful or expressly more somber, it is a joyful noise. It speaks of what should be and of what could be but is not. It points to God’s promise that God is with us always and never abandons us, no matter what. It speaks of the hope we can have only in God in this world that so often seems so hopeless. It is, to a considerable extent, a voice that looks the world in the eye and says: No! You are not how things are supposed to be. You are not the way things one day will be. It looks the world in the eye and says: Nonetheless! Nonetheless, we will have hope! Nonetheless, we will make a joyful noise in a world so often full of very different kinds of noises. We will make a joyful noise because be believe that God is with us every minute of every day. 

You know, I and other ordained preacher types can use a lot of words to try to convey what God is trying to tell us through Jesus Christ, the one we call Lord and Savior. We can give sermons that are probably too long. We can write books that are definitely too long. But nothing we can do has power that remotely approaches the power of music. Words mostly touch our superficial cognitive abilities. Music goes much deeper than that. Music touches the soul in a way mere words never can. Our words may struggle to be joyful. Our music finds it easy to be joyful. It is joyful because it always points beyond itself to the love of God, and it does that more powerfully than mere words ever can. 

So, let us say together: Nonetheless! Nonetheless, we will make a joyful noise to the Lord! We will sing. We will sing with our voices from the depths of our souls. We will sing with joy to the people on earth and to God in highest heaven. Maybe, like me, you can’t find much joy I the world today. So be it. God is still with us, and there is still music. We can still make a joyful noise to the Lord. So let’s keep doing it, shall we? Thanks be to God! Amen. 

It's Fascism, Folks. Truth Doesn't Matter

 

It’s Fascism, Folks.  Truth Doesn’t Matter

January 8, 2025

There’s a truth about totalitarian and, perhaps, even somewhat less extreme authoritarian regimes, that few Americans understand. Those regimes are not grounded in provable facts. They are grounded in lies. They are always grounded in lies. The advocates of these regimes garner popular support, at least to the extent they ever do, by getting their people no longer to care about truth. Would-be dictators typically tell one big lie more constantly and more loudly than they tell smaller lies, though they rarely if ever speak the truth. The great theoretician of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt taught us that would-be dictators, especially fascists, lie far more than they ever tell the truth but not so much because they want people to believe their lies. They do it so that people give up on the truth. People may well know that these people are lying, but they come to the point where they don’t care that they’re being lied to. They begin to think that everyone lies all the time and that there actually is no truth. Truth ceases to matter to them. The two most horrific totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are perfect examples of this aspect of totalitarianism.

I’ll start with the Soviet Communists. The big lie of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was that that party represented the interests of the people, especially the working people, and always acted in the people’s best interests. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. From the very beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire in 1917, The Communist regime’s claim that the Party represented the interests of the people was a lie because from its very beginning the Soviet Communist regime came to power through and ruled by violence not by any actual truth. One of the first things Lenin did after his Bolsheviks pulled off a successful coup de état that the Party always called a glorious socialist revolution was to create an institution initially called the Cheka, that name being the first letters of the words of the institution’s name, Extraordinary Commission, in Russian. It is better known in the West by the last of its several names, the KGB. It was from the beginning a terrorist organization. It was formed to root out and, usually, to kill people perceived or at least claimed to be opponents of the Communist coup and the regime it created.

Lenin, Stalin, and the other Bolshevik leaders justified the creation and use of a terrorist organization by claiming that it was necessary to secure the victory of so-called people’s revolution, that revolution supposedly being a people’s movement for the betterment of the life of the proletariat, the working people of the country. It never did work for the betterment of anyone’s life, and in the years after the Bolshevik coup, especially but not exclusively under Josef Stalin, it wielded terrorism as a way of giving the Party and its General Secretary totalitarian power over the lives of the people. By the time Stalin died in 1953, the Cheka, by then called the NKVD, had killed millions of Soviet citizens and created the personal dictatorship of Stalin, something that was hardly beneficial to most of the Soviet people. The big lie became less that the Party was the great friend of the people as that Josef Stalin personally was a great friend of the people, never mind that he starved four million Ukrainians to death and otherwise killed or imprisoned millions of other Soviet people. Stalin sold the people that big lie. Many of them actually believed it. Many of them didn’t, but they knew that speaking out against it was likely to get them killed or, at best, imprisoned in the Gulag. The truth didn’t matter. It was the lies that kept the Soviet Communists in power for as long as they were.

Then there were the German Nazis. Hitler sold the German people on a big lie different from the one the Soviet Communists told but, if anything, even less true than big lie model Hitler probably learned from the Soviets. Hitler’s big lie was that all of Germany’s problems were the fault of the country’s Jews. Indeed, all of the world’s problems were, in the Nazi lie, the fault of the world’s Jews. That claim never was true. Jews were a very small percentage of the German population. There were more of them in Central Europe, but they ruled nowhere in Europe (or anywhere else at that time before the creation of the modern state of Israel). Yet Germany did indeed have massive problems after World War I. The country had just lost a horrific war that they never thought they could lose. The economy was a disaster, with rates of inflation we can’t even begin to imagine. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed enormous war reparations on the Germans, something that was grossly unfair and that kept the Germany economy hogtied. That treaty barred the German military from presence in part of the country’s territory. By the mid-1920s or so the country faced two powerful anti-democratic movements, the Social Democrats, i.e., the German Marxists, and the Nazis. Neither movement was the least bit averse to using violence to achieve its goals.

Before World War I, a war Germany was no more responsible for starting than were several other European powers, Germany had been both the economic powerhouse of Europe and the home of one of the most advanced scientific and artistic cultures in the world. After that war, the victorious allies, especially the British and the French, made sure that it was a shadow of its former self, especially economically. Most Germans found it very hard to understand how such a calamity had happened to their beloved country.

Many Germans came to believe an explanation called the “stab in the back” theory. Germany had lost the war only because someone, some group of people, had stabbed the country in the back. It was internal treason not anything wrong with the country that had cost it a victory in the war. Hitler told the people who had committed the stab in the back. It was, he said, the Jews; and that, of course, was his big lie. It certainly wasn’t his only lie. He exaggerated the threat the Social Democrats posed to the country. He lied to the world about what his plans actually were. He lied to the people about them being racially superior to all other people. But that the Jews were responsible for all of the country’s problems was his biggest lie of all. And the people bought it. In 1958, only thirteen years after the end of the Second World War, I heard an ordinary German, whose late husband had been a real Nazi, say: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but, then, something had to be done.” She bought Hitler’s big lie. Millions upon millions of other ordinary Germans did too. Hitler’s totalitarian regime, that engaged in such horrendous atrocities across Europe, was grounded in those lies. Totalitarianism is always grounded in lies.

My country, the Unites States of America, has just, for the second time, elected a man, Donald Trump, as president who essentially never tells the truth about anything. He lies about himself. He lies about his political opponents. He lies about the things he intends to do to the American economy. He lies about what he intends to do to individual civil and human rights. He occasionally tells the truth about some of the horrendous things he intends to do, things like imposing tariffs on imported goods and deporting an enormous number of people without regard for whether they are here legally or not or what deporting them would do to the country’s economy.

That is his big lie. Immigrants are responsible for the country’s problems, he says. He says they’re rapists and murderers. He blames them for crimes committed by native-born Americans. He says they take jobs away from real Americans. It is quite obvious that he particularly hates immigrants who are people of color coming from poor countries with oppressive and violent governments. Except that Trump is a racist, all of those things are untrue.

The combination of Trump’s big lie about immigrants and his constant lying about so many other things clearly have convinced enough Americans either that there is no truth or that the truth doesn’t matter to get himself reelected president. He is a convicted felon who ought to be in jail, but instead this country has put him back in the White House. That would never have happened if a majority of American voters still believed that there is such a thing as truth and that truth matters.

I have been saying for years that Donald Trump is an American fascist. Yet just the other day a colleague/friend of mine said of Trump and his incoming administration “just wait and see. We don’t know yet.” She is just flat wrong about that. That Trump is an American fascist hellbent on destroying the country’s democracy and putting himself in power for life is obvious to anyone who will look at him with clear eyes and a concern for the truth.

And it is Trump’s big and constant lies that, more perhaps than anything else, should have tipped Americans off  to who Trump really is. But he and his right-wing propaganda machine have convinced a majority of Americans that what is true isn’t true. No, they believe, he didn’t instigate a seditious riot on January 6, 2021. Yes, they believe, maybe he has been convicted of thirty-four felonies, but all of the myriad legal claims against him are false and that it is a good thing that he has, so far at least, escaped legal responsibility for them. They believe immigrants cause our country’s problems, which they don’t. Many of them are Christian nationalists who are white supremacists  who want white Christians like them to rule the country, and all of that is grounded in lies.

No folks, the truth no longer matters in our national politics. Donald Trump has convinced at least millions of Americans that what is true is not true. Or, if some of those Americans know that what Trump says isn’t true, he has gotten them not to care. Trump has made 1984 come true. Lies are the truth, and truths are lies. That is a purely fascist, totalitarian thing for him to have done. Beginning thirteen days from today, we will be ruled by American fascists. Trump will swear to protect and defend the US Constitution, and neither understands nor give a damn about the US Constitution. We’re all in trouble. It’s fascism, folks, and truth doesn’t matter.

It Really Is That Simple

 t isn’t hard. It’s really quite simple. God is real. God is universal. Grace is universal. God loves everyone. No exceptions. Not one. There is no hell. God condemns no one. All killing is wrong including when it’s done by a government in a prison or in a war. No law or governmental order, be it from a legal system or a military, can make killing anything but sin. Yes, society has the right and even the duty to protect itself from dangerous individuals. That does not mean it has the right to kill anyone. Everyone is equal. Absolutely everyone. No exceptions. Not one. Ever. God is love. Period. Love beyond our understanding, but infinitely more loving than we are not less. All morality is grounded in love. Not in rules. Not in judgment. Not in condemnation. Not condemnation of anyone ever. Love is all that makes life worth living. Not wealth. Not success. Not power. Love. Period. Always. No exceptions. The Bible isn’t divine. It is a collection of ancient documents that express understandings of ancient cultures that have next to nothing in common with ours except that both those cultures and ours are both human.. It is a collection of symbols and of stories, some of which are myths that point beyond themselves to God and some of which are nothing of the sort. God doesn’t want us to make everyone think like us. God wants us to spread love, peace, nonviolence, and justice as broadly around our country and around the world as we can. It really is that simple. 

And we keep insisting on making it all so much more complicated. And so much more less attractive. We make God a judge and condemner rather than a universal lover, and we think God calls us to be judged and condemners too. We make morality be about rigid rules rather than about love. We justify human beings killing other human beings in a myriad of circumstances. We condemn a wide variety of people for being who they are. We cite the Great Commandment and say it is our duty to convert everyone to our version of Christianity. We even say it is moral for us to use deception, coercion, and even violence to do it. We call people sinners simply for being who God made them to be. We don’t enact love in our public policies. Rather, we institutionalize violence and a preference for the rich rather than a preference for the poor. We won’t live with something as simple as God is love and God’s love determines everything. Yet it really is that simple. Period. 

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

 

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

For

Northshore UCC, Woodinville, WA

December 22, 2024

 

Scripture: Luke 1:46-55

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Have any of you been feeling much peace lately? I have to tell you, I haven’t. I think that’s partly because though I’ve been retired for nearly seven years, I haven’t really adjusted to it yet. I still spend a fair amount of time fussing about what I’m supposed to be doing, which, it usually turns out, isn’t much. I often feel my soul ill at ease. Perhaps some of you feel your souls ill at ease too. The results of this year’s presidential and congressional elections are another reason for my spiritual unease. I don’t know how all of you feel about that result, but I’ll tell you that it hardly brings me peace. It brings me more worry, fear even, than it does peace. The news of this country and of this world is so bad that I watch a whole lot less TV news than I used to, and I don’t read much news online or anywhere else either. The news just disturbs me too much. So for me, and perhaps for some of you, peace is a hard thing to come by these days.

Yet we are in the season of Advent, and Christmas is just three days away. It has struck me this year how many Christmas carols speak of peace. The lyrics of the carol “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” include the line: “When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling.” The Huron carol “’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” refers to “the radiant Child who brings you beauty, peace so mild.” The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” says that the angels sing of “peace on earth and mercy mild” and of “God and sinners reconciled.” Another of my favorite carols, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” ends every verse with the phrase “Of peace on earth, goodwill toward men.” It certainly seems that the birth of the Messiah that we are about to celebrate once more has something to do with peace.

OK. But what is peace, exactly? It seems we must know what peace is, or at least is supposed to be, if we are to understand the peace that is somehow connected with Christmas. Dictionary definitions are of some help here. They say that peace is: The state of absence of disturbance. It is a state of tranquility or quiet, of freedom from disturbance, and from war and violence. It is also the state of not being interrupted by annoying things.

OK. Fair enough, but a Bible dictionary I use approaches the meaning of peace a bit differently. It says that in the Old Testament the word translated as peace is from the word shalom, which means “wholeness, or well-being.” This source says that the word “peace” means much the same thing in the New Testament as it does in the Old. So I think that we, as Christians, need to ask: How is the birth of Jesus Christ associated with, or how does it bring us, peace that is both freedom from war and destruction and from a sense of wholeness or well-being?

And I think we can get some answers to those questions from the scripture we heard this morning. It’s called The Magnificat, from its first words in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” “my soul magnifies the Lord.” In her magnificent hymn, for that’s surely what the Magnificat is, Mary does a couple of things. She first says that God has “looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” It is, I think, important here that Mary refers to her own “lowliness.” What does that mean? It means, I think, that, by the standards of the world, Mary was essentially nobody. Yes, she may have been personally virtuous, but she wasn’t rich. She was married to a carpenter in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. She had no power. She had no authority. She was no one the world would take any notice of.

Yet God chose her to be the Theotokos, the Mother of God, as the Christian tradition has called her since a couple of ecumenical councils in the fifth century CE. God chose this young woman, probably  a very young woman by our standards, for the most sacred task God had ever given to anyone. God chose her, out of all of the women in the world, to do nothing less than bring the Messiah, the Christ, into the world.

Now, some of us have on occasion felt a divine call of one sort or another, but I doubt that any of us has been called to a task as holy as giving birth to the Son of God. God chose someone who was no one for that sacred task. And if God was so intimately present with the lowly Mary, don’t you think that God is with each one of us too? With every one of you? Even with me? I do. My favorite verse in the Bible, Romans 8:39, says that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. Mary’s lowliness didn’t separate her from the love of God. Our lowliness, whatever our individual lowliness may be, can’t separate us from the love of God either.

And I think that God’s unfailing, unshakable, unconditional presence with each and every one of us as love is where we can actually find peace in our troubled lives and in this very, very troubled world. God, after all, is the ultimate power behind the universe, behind everything that is. God is the only reality in all creation that represents eternal, universal peace. God’s peace is always available to us if we’ll just open ourselves to it and let God fill our souls with it. The peace I find, and about the only peace I can find, comes from my deep conviction that ultimately everything will be all right because—God. Because in the end, everything both begins and ends with God. Mary knew God’s love. So do I, as unworthy of it as I believe myself to be. God looked with favor on Mary’s lowliness. I know that God looks with favor on my lowliness too. And I know that God looks with favor on each and every one of you. Therein lies, for me at least, the only meaningful source of peace.

Now, an awful lot of the world’s lack of peace results from the gross imbalance of wealth and power that characterizes our country and a great many countries the earth around. The people of the world, more so in some countries and perhaps less so in others, are divided into the haves and the have nots. Between the rich and the poor. Between those with power and those who lack power. Between those who are heard and those who are never heard. Those divisions create tensions within societies. They produce stress in the lives of the have nots, of those without power, of those who are never heard, stress that robs most of them of inner peace.

Sometimes those divisions erupt into violence. Into civil war. Into terrorism. Frankly, folks, the pervasive presence of violence in our world appalls me and puzzles me. How did it ever get to be OK for some humans to kill other humans, be that in criminal acts or in war? More particularly, how did it ever get OK for Christians, who claim to follow the greatest prophet of nonviolence the world has ever known, to kill anyone? Ever. Because, folks, it just isn’t OK, but Christians have always been every bit as violent as other people if not even more violent.

May’s Magnificat gives us hope for peace in this world of division, oppression, and violence. In English translation, she speaks in the past tense. She says “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” I’ve always had trouble with the past tense here, though I understand that these words are in a different tense in the original Greek that means something more like these are things God is doing, has always done, and always will do.

I understand Mary’s words to give us God’s dream for the world. God’s dream of how the world should be; and, more importantly, how one day the world actually will be. Therein lies a hope for peace. The oppressions and injustices that so characterize the world are not how God wants the world to be. I don’t know why the world doesn’t conform to God’s dream of justice, though I sure know that it doesn’t. I can, however, take hope from Mary’s confession that some day the world will conform to that dream. That one day the world will be a place of peace because it will have overcome the causes of its present violence.

So today, as we think about peace, we can take hope. We can take hope for our spirits and our world. We can take hope from Mary’s words in the Magnificat. Even more than that, we can find hope for peace in what we’re waiting for in this Advent season. In the coming birth of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, in the traditional language of our Christian tradition, our Savior. For it isn’t really with Mary that our hope for peace lies. It is, rather, with Jesus, the one with whom Mary was pregnant when she spoke the Magnificat.

The day when we especially celebrate his birth is nearly here. Three more days is all. Yes, for most children, Christmas is all about presents; and in a sense it is about presents, or rather, a present, for adult Christians too. It’s not about the presents the magi gave baby Jesus. That’s what we celebrate on Epiphany not on Christmas. It’s not about the presents that may be under our Christmas tree at home. It is, rather, about the one great gift that God gave us when Jesus was born.

What is that gift? The Gospel of Matthew says what it is in one word. Matthew, citing Isaiah, calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” and that means “God with us.” On Christmas we celebrate the ultimate foundation of our peace. We celebrate God coming to us as one of us, as irrational and impossible to believe as that may be. Yet Christmas can renew and strengthen our trust that that is who Jesus was and is: God With Us. And therein lies our peace. For me, therein lies our only possible hope for peace. The only possible ground of peace. Peace for my soul. Eventually, though certainly not while I’m alive, peace in my world, which of course isn’t my world at all but is God’s world.

So on Christmas Eve, as we sing Silent Night, that most peaceful of all Christmas carols, let’s remember what and who we are celebrating. Let us cling to baby Jesus as God’s great gift to us, a gift in may ways but perhaps most importantly, a gift of peace. May it be so. Amen.

 

Giving Prayer:

Loving and gracious God, in three days we will celebrate the coming of your greatest gift to us, the gift of your Son Jesus the Christ. We have nothing we can return to you that is in any way comparable to your divine gift to us. Yet today we return a small portion of the blessings we have received. May they, and we, go out into the world to do the sacred work of building your realm of peace and justice on your good earth. Amen.

 

Benediction

Friends, the holy day is almost here. Two evenings from today, on Christmas Eve, in this church and in a great many churches, we will hear the Christmas stories and sing the old, familiar carols. I pray that for you, and for me, that it will be a night of peace and hope. For Jesus Christ is our peace. For Jesus Christ is our hope. So as you go on your way, may the One whose birth we await go with you. May he go before you to show you the way, behind you to encourage you, beside you to befriend you, above you to watch over, and within you give you peace this day, and forever more. Amen.