Song of Summber

Sermon

As of Friday, even with all the madness happening in the world, it is officially summer. We’re commemorating with jazz music, sending our youth off on their service-learning trip, and eating ice cream before noon, inside. We come to this space to remind ourselves that we are not God, and thus don’t control if this is the weekend in June when it is hot or the one when it’s wet and cold again. That’s how summer starts.

How summer goes can often be defined by a song of summer. A song of summer could be the call that summer has over you, like when you’re so excited about eating watermelon at 9 p.m., while it’s still light out, that you don’t care that too much sun gives you a rash. Or there’s the more literal “song of the summer,” which is a popular, long-standing, annual, cultural measurement. There is data for, and articles written about, what “the song” of each summer is. Then there are songs that will make you smell sunscreen, no matter what time of year it is, like most of the Beach Boys’ songs, James Taylor or Taylor Swift, and that one Bananarama song that goes: “it’s a cruel, it’s a cruel, cruel summer…”

In a previous job, I kept an office on a large university campus in Nashville, Tennessee, and so my surroundings very much were influenced by summer and music. The summer was the quiet season of great campus parking, and Nashville is known for country music, but there is music of all kinds to be immersed in. And one of my favorite things to do with students, and other members of our community there, was to talk about their song of summer. From that we started a playlist; we called it a mixtape, but it was simply all the songs that one student would collect from a Google form we all filled out. And because we were a mix of ages and life experiences, we had truly all sorts of songs, artists, genres, on these playlists: Kesha; Earth, Wind, and Fire; Chance the Rapper; the Chicks; Miles Davis; Kenny Loggins; and the theme song from the Ghostbusters? That was an odd one.

When our list was finished, we’d host a chapel service that was primarily a listening party for these songs. We never did play the theme to Ghostbusters in the chapel we met in, which feels like a missed opportunity, but we did play some bangers about growing up, what it meant to be a woman, relationships, justice—the stuff songs are about; the vast intricacies of collected stories somehow existed together in one sacred space. Courtney Pace, a womanist scholar in Memphis, says this of the songs, rather, the psalms like the ones we prayed earlier, which are two of my favorites that also happened to be in the lectionary for today. “This was a guide to worship, rather than a record of a particular faith journey… [these] words offered the community a structure in which to express their deepest suffering to God, even as they remembered God’s promises. Laments, like the blues, make intimate friends of strangers, awakening us to our shared experiences of humanity.”

Many of the texts we hold sacred are or were probably songs; that’s how they have continued to connect us through time and space. That’s why we call a song timeless or refer to this music as classic. And that’s how sacred texts would’ve been remembered and passed down through generations of folks who couldn’t read or write.

Now, I don’t know that anyone would want to put any of the Apostle Paul’s letters to song. He is known (by me) for being verbose and self-righteous; he may do better as an instrumental jazz tune, that without words can have meaning for millions. And in revisiting these verses from Paul to Galatia last week, I’ve felt meaning, and learned a lot, from Brigitte Kahl, professor of New Testament at Union Seminary in New York. Her commentary might be my song of summer—she is my Sabrina Carpenter or the Carpenters. She writes that this “text seems to capture the best and the worst of Pauline interpretation; it declares the end of all racial, class, and gender divisions, inspiring justice-seekers throughout the centuries [as have the blues, jazz, rock, or gospel songs]. But the sharp contrast between ‘law’ and ‘faith’ has also fueled Christian anti-Judaism, pious individualism, and self-righteous othering of many kinds.”

Many of the ideals that this church holds dear—like the leadership and ordination of women, the affirmation and celebration of same-sex relationships, the desire for marginalized voices to be re-centered in our conversations, peaceful protest—many of those ideals have been well supported by these words of Paul. Sadly, songs or sayings we have all heard that may sound good to us at first, but probably don’t sit right with us later, have also been held up by this passage. Like saying that we “don’t see color or gender” or that a person’s sexuality doesn’t matter; I want to believe these kinds of sayings are well-intentioned, to pronounce freedom or peace, but they seem to completely miss the fact that we still can’t all expect the same treatment, policy, or medical care in each situation.

These are classic songs. Many of us would’ve heard Supreme Court justices and other groups sing these tunes recently in the news, combining reviewed law with “political whims,” as Justice Sotomayor said in a dissent this week. Professor Kahl continues in her writing about this text from Galatians: “The first part of this passage is permeated by prison language. Translations say the law’s role can vary from a “guardian” (NIV) to the harsher “disciplinarian” [what we read just now in our pew translation]. Within the prison setting of Paul, the negative connotation seems most plausible…” But it’s not the only one of note.

It’s also “crucial to understand that the law in Paul’s world means more than Jewish law, or written law, the law he speaks of would have also covered customs, laws of the universe, and specific laws.” Maybe even political whims. Paul is in the Greco-Roman philosophic academic world after all, so that makes sense. Paul is not just talking about Torah, or Roman customs, or even scientific logic; he is talking about all of that and more. The Apostle Paul was a student of Torah and a Roman citizen; he’s also a human, so he hears, and feels, music and protest and is influenced by culture and a society that put him in prison. However, “Paul’s great project of bringing Jews and Gentiles like the Galatians together in one inclusive community, without making them the same, clashes with all of that. For Paul, this means the reconciliation of God’s promise to Abraham, ‘in you’ all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

To be a blessing, of course, is a good understanding of the purpose of the church. It’s what we’re baptized into and sent out to be, yet it is a service that we often poorly provide because we haven’t unlearned all these binaries. And so, Professor Kahl continues: “If these binaries are no longer valid, but must give way to restorative community, this means the prisons of self or other, superior or inferior, citizen or alien, separating human from human by barbed-wire lines of self-interest, hatred…” are not in Christ. Professor Kahl’s words this week, for me, were like a song I found that I can’t stop telling everyone I know about. It’s drowning out the divisive, and the degrading, noise that we’re all having to hear at loud and louder volumes.

And yet, Professor Kahl continues to sing: “Since being in Christ means immersion into a baptism beyond binaries, Paul’s letter to Galatia is an effort to protect difference and prevent uniformity of an all-same assembly of followers… he does not say that all believers become ‘Christians,’ but that they are one in Christ.” Another translation, the Message, says that we are all considered equal in Christ’s family. And I don’t disagree with that, but I feel like it misses some notes. It’s hard to imagine all these different songs existing on one playlist, but I’ve heard it; I feel that we can be transformed toward restorative community across and inclusive of difference. That is beyond but certainly inclusive of biology; that’s found family, fostered family, friends.

What’s this mean for our biases? For anyone, and any part of us, that is not on the dominant side of the binary hierarchy? How do we heal? And what does it mean when we are the privileged? Professor Kahl says, “Tensions with the laws of the empire are simmering under the text… binaries and hierarchies is the law of domination. Rome rules by dividing…”  The law of the empire works by dividing. Binary thinking, assuming it has to be this or that, the tendencies we have to harm, even with the best intentions; those laws of the empire aren’t gathering together, playing jazz and eating ice cream on the first Sunday of summer when they pray and send their youth off to learn and serve. Experiencing joy with those you would otherwise not be around—that’s something. One last verse, from Professor Kahl: “Faith for Paul nullifies disciplining through polarizing… faith means resistant and transformative trust that another world is possible, where human beings no longer act one against other but with One-an(d)-Other.” What does that mean? I don’t know.

It sounds like an odd song, or maybe an old song we’ve missed hearing, from a band I have never heard of, that a much younger person found on a social media I don’t use, but it’s a song I’d like to hear more. A song I hope gets stuck in our heads and stays with us when the light fades. Hallelujah. Amen.