Songs of Justice and Peace

Amos 5.21-24

Micah 6.6-8

Luke 1.46b-55

Songs of Justice and Peace

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

            Having spent the better part of this week scouring the many obituaries and wonderful tributes and testimonials to Pete Seeger, I could not help but notice a rather glaring omission.  It was Thursday night, May 25, 1995, when Pete performed at White Hall on the campus of Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.  Pete’s brother John was, and remains, an active member of a Congregational church a few miles north of Danbury, and Pete had agreed to perform a benefit concert for the church, which was in the process of purchasing and installing a new organ.  As part of the concert, the church’s choir gathered on stage and sang as Pete’s backup vocals, though if you’ve ever seen a Pete Seeger concert, you’ll know that one of his trademarks is that he likes to get everyone singing, so to sing backup with Pete is as much to take the lead as it is to sing behind him.  Now this particular performance was the only time in his ninety-four years that Pete ever got to sing with that church’s minister – me – and yet for all those many obituaries and wonderful tributes and testimonials to him in the past week, somehow this seminal and formative moment in Pete’s musical history was overlooked.  Consider it rectified.

            Pete had great faith in the power of music and song to transform individuals and society alike.  Here’s an excerpt from an introduction he wrote to a book of popular music:

“Take a lung full of air and push it out with some kind of song – it’s an act of survival, whether you’re singing in a shower, a car, a bar, in a chorus, at a birthday party, at a church, or wherever.  Try it – you’ll live longer.  Of course, it’s harder to find songs all folks want to sing together, but that’s alright.  Little by little, we’re learning to like each other’s songs and getting less enthusiastic about killing each other... and (maybe) industrialized, polluted, TV-addicted people will learn to sing again.  Hooray!”

            That final “Hooray” is typical Pete.  His music was always imbued with enthusiasm for the song itself, and it was almost always influenced by the passion and politics of the world in which he – and we - live.  This is one way we can remember Pete as a prophet – not only did much of his music offer a critique of society, whether it is the anti-war “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Little Boxes,” a song that warns about cultural homogenization, or the pro-union “If I Had a Hammer” – not only did his music offer a critique of society like many of the Old Testament prophets, but like many of those prophets he couched his prophecy in song.

            The scripture passages Gail and Jack read for us this morning are all words of prophecy, and they are all couched in song – technically, we would call them hymns.  If we were to look up those passages in our Bibles, we would see they are scanned out as poetry, which for the Hebrews would mean they could be sung as much as spoken.  And each one is a powerful indictment of injustice and oppression, and each one sets out to draw a picture of justice and peace.  Take the scathing opening words of Amos’ prophecy, who spares no feeling and takes no prisoners:  “I hate, I despise your festivals, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.”  Amos, by the way, is speaking to the religious establishment, who care more for their customs and traditions than they do the well-being of the people around them; “Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  Our opening hymn this morning, Pete’s “If I Had a Hammer,” is one of those that is so old and familiar, that we forget it too was considered a scathing indictment of injustice, composed in the 1940s as a song in support of the labor movement.  On the basis of that song, Pete’s folk group, The Weavers, was blacklisted by the FBI, and at a concert in Peekskill NY, Pete and Paul Robeson, and a handful of other performers, were ambushed and beaten up by a mob who thought they were all a bunch of communists because of the music they sang.

            Amos and Micah were ostracized by both the religious and political establishment because of their message of justice and righteousness; Pete was censured by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

            But Pete was more bemused by things like this than anything else.  There was a great story to that point in one of his obituaries this week.  Pete was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.  He and the Weavers had been blacklisted because of their supposed communist sympathies, and held in contempt of Congress in the late 1950s.  It was difficult for any of them to perform, and no concert manager would give them a venue.  Pete testified before the HUAC, saying, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.  I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”  But instead of answering the Committee’s questions, Pete offered to sing the songs that had been listed by those congressmen in their subpoena; the committee declined to hear them, and cited him for contempt.  By refusing even to hear them, the HUAC tacitly admitted the power of song to convict and transform.

            The passage from Luke we heard this morning is a familiar one, one we are used to hearing at Christmas time, Mary’s song of praise on learning she was expectant with God’s messiah.  And when we hear it every December, we hear in it a song of peace and of hope.  But maybe it bears hearing in other seasons of the year, because it is also a hymn of revolution and insurrection, a vision of turning the political and religious status quo on their heads.  “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; God has brought down the powerful from their thrones; [God has] lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things; [God has] sent the rich away empty.”  The elevation of the poor and outcast and the condemnation of the rich and powerful are as radical as anything Pete ever sang, but somehow we miss the fact that Mary’s rejection of the way things are constitute the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.

            The biblical notions of justice and righteousness echo through the centuries and millennia, and their timelessness is evident in the words attributed to Solomon three thousand years ago that still resonate today.  The question is, do we remember the words because Solomon wrote them, or do we remember them because Pete Seeger put them to music? 

“To everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:  a time to be born and a time to die; a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate, a time for was and a time for peace:  Turn, turn, turn.”

Again:  do we remember the words because Solomon wrote them, or do we remember them because Pete Seeger put them to music?

            The hymns of Micah and Amos, and the writers of the psalms, and Solomon and Mary and all the biblical song-writers whose words have endured throughout the years; we might say we can still find their living souls in the life of their poetry.  Pete Seeger  recognized the power of music – not just his own, but everybody’s – to endure far beyond the mortality of a human lifetime.  Here’s a bit of a song he wrote in the late 1950’s titled, “To My Old Brown Earth:”

“To my old brown earth and to my old blue sky, I’ll now give these last few molecules of “I.”

And you who sing, and you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry.

Guard well our human chain, watch well you keep it strong, as long as sun will shine.

And this our home, keep pure and sweet and green, for now I’m yours and you are also mine.”

            Let us pray.