472 - The Lord's Song In a Strange Land

The Lord's Song In a Strange Land
By James I. McCord

"How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

(Psalm 137: 4).

This plaintive query stemmed from the memory of an exile Jerusalem who had languished long and brooding years Babylonian captivity. Etched in his memory were the days when "by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof." The Psalmist remained a captive, and he never forgot it. They could transport him in body to a foreign capital, but his spirit remained in Zion. Babylon was no responsibility of his. It was the land of heathen, outside the pale of God's interest and activity, a strange land! They could keep him there, but he would remain an alien.

What is reflected in the experience of the unknown author of this Psalm may well be the greatest temptation that will come to this generation. Charles C. West has written in his Introduction to Johannes Hamel's A Christian in East Germany (1960): "the danger of inner emigration . . . is the greatest single danger which confronts the Church. It amounts to an inner withdrawal from all responsible life." Of course, he is writing against the background of those who live in the (East) German Democratic Republic and who attempt to live with their imagination and hopes in another zone rather than to accept the place they are as the ordering of God himself.

We are tempted to our own forms of inner emigration. Many are striving to emigrate from the new age that is dawning. A few years ago we were accustomed to speak of "a time between the times," an historical parenthesis sandwiched between an old age which was expiring and a new age not yet born. Now the new age has come, ushering in an era of universal history and with it a chain of revolutions. Old structures are dissolving, and old orders are crumbling.

473 - The Lord's Song In a Strange Land

The emergence of universal history has challenged our parochialism, and revolutions challenge our privileges and our position. In the face of all this we are tempted to withdraw, to emigrate inwardly, to seek security in another age, as if God and none other had not brought in this age as a gift to his people.

We are tempted today to inner emigration from the urban culture that has developed in a technological age. Even those who were born in cities are chock full of images of rural America, and the church appears spiritually homeless in the new culture that is developing. We seek to re-establish old rural patterns in suburbia, and only rarely does one meet the person who looks forward joyfully to the new life evolving in the city. We have not yet begun to seek out new forms of ministry and witness and to adapt our practices and institutions to these new conditions. In our spirits we emigrate to the countryside, while we hang our harps on a willow, lamenting, "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

Our inner emigration extends even to the church. The church has grown in size and complexity, is more highly organized, and requires more and more attention to her institutional life, all the while we have been singing about "the church in the valley by the wildwood." Unable to match spirit and place, we are tempted to lose confidence in the church's mission and openly to wonder if she should not disengage from this age, withdraw from its complex structures, and assume a ghetto existence in another place and another century. How else can we account for the negativism about the church and the captious anti-institutionalism rampant today?

When one begins to look about for a text in the Bible that supports this experience, the task is exceedingly difficult. For the attitude of inner emigration is completely alien to the Bible's way of looking at the world. All the world and all its structures belong to Christ, and all history is the arena of God's activity. A contemporary of the Psalmist, the unknown author whom we call Deutero Isaiah, shared the experience of exile and knew Israel's darkest hour. But it was in a strange land and in a black hour that he saw a vision of a new Jerusalem, redeemed and restored, fit now to be the instrument of God's redeeming purpose among all men.