Revelation 19:1-8 the Holy and the Broken Hallelujah June 29, 2014 Psalm 146 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham Ordinary 13 J

Home , Hallelujah

Revelation 19:1-8 The Holy and the Broken Hallelujah June 29, 2014 Psalm 146 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham Ordinary 13 J. Shannon Webster Sermon Series: The Singer and the Song, #3

We’re in the third week of our summer sermon series, The Singer and the Song, with two more songs to look at it, one from the Old and one from the New Testament. Psalm 146 is the first of what as been called the “Hallelujah Psalms” – the last 5 Psalms in the book – so called because they all begin with he Hebrew word Hallelujah. If your translation says, Praise the Lord at the beginning of the Psalm, it is because that is simply what Hallelujah means. It is a compound word meaning Praise the Lord.

I paired that Psalm with the passage from Revelation 19 because that is the only place in the New Testament where the word Hallelujah appears. That is usually a surprising fact for most people, because it is a word with which we are so familiar – Hallelujah, or the Greek version Alleluia, is found throughout our liturgy and our hymns. But it is an Old Testament word, so common in the Psalms. It is also common in the lifeblood of the church, as seen in the choice of hymns today. It seems fitting that it appears in the last book of the Bible, as a callback to the Old Testament. God’s covenant is with us still, at the conclusion of the story. Praise the Lord!

You may remember that Revelation was written to a church under persecution, and that the dramatic casts of baddies, like something out of Resident Evil 3 (console game), is coded language, usually for the Roman oppressors and their collaborators. The writer uses “Babylon” instead of saying “Rome,” to get by the censors. In his future scenario, Babylon (Rome) has fallen, and the people who had been persecuted are now preparing for the arrival of a new heaven and a new earth. With Babylon, the rival for God’s praise, gone, the people sing “Hallelujah!” John the Revelator describes it as a marriage feast where the people of God become the Bride of God, and marry love itself – the Lamb (code for Christ). It’s the ultimate love story, in a way.

Hallelujah. In 146, the Psalmist begins with an imperative to us – “Praise the Lord!” and then internalizes it in a personal way, “Praise the Lord, O my soul!” If that sounds more personal, it probably was. Psalm 146 praises God for being not like earthly rulers, but one who could be forever trusted. Praise is offered in this Psalm because God is the one who executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets the prisoner free, opens the eyes of the blind, lifts the burdened watches over strangers, upholds the powerless widow and orphan, and brings to a halt the ways of the wicked. Those are the most compelling doxologies, when they are specific about God transforming real experience of people. Claus Westermann says of 146 “the God who is praised is the one who can reverse the destiny of his people” and is “the hope of Israel in hardest times… God looks to the depths and saves from the depths.”i

In both these texts, these songs, one a prayer and the other a promise, we have anticipation of God saving the people. In the Revelation text, we’ve even added a wedding consummating salvation. They both cry “Hallelujah!” It has been said music is the language of the soul. The two more recent (relatively) compositions that have captured people’s hearts with this word, this sentence-in-a-word, are the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, and the song Hallelujahii, by the great Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, now covered by more than 100 artists. Cohen, in a bit of a stretch, attributes to King David of Israel the composition of the first “Hallelujah.”

It goes like this: The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah

(See verse 1)

I’m going to talk some about this song of Leonard Cohen’s, even as I talk about Psalm 146, because I think it may get to the heart and meaning of the scripture as much or more than any scholarly work ever written. Cohen moves from talking about the Hebrew King in verse 1 to talking directly to him, in verse 2. We hear about Bathsheba on the roof, as well as other Biblical stories woven in, Samson’s issues with Delilah (or vice versa). Who is Cohen singing to” His love interest? David? Us? All of the above? The song is anyplace and anytime. Liel Leibovitz’s new book about Cohen observes that the poet is “attuned to the divine, not with the thinker’s complications of the zealot’s obstructions but with the unburdened heart of a believer.”iii

Cohen was always more flippant in his answers about why he wrote one thing or another. He told a reporter he wrote poetry to get girls. “They began showing it around and people started calling it poetry. When it didn’t work with women, I appealed to God,” he said.iv Women and God, love and religion, always did mix for him. That depth of passion and longing, for God or for love, was deep down the same thing. And we hear it in the song.

I've seen your flag on the marble arch, but love is not a victory march It's a cold and it's a lonely Hallelujah

(See verse 2

The idea of a “broken Hallelujah” is deeply Biblical. Norman Gottwald wrote of Psalm 146 that the economically feeble were considered throughout scripture as people with whom God had a special relationship, saying “The fact that God is on the side of the poor is always a genuine protest against those who trample justice underfoot.”v Old Testament guru Brueggemann makes it more personal, saying of 146, this Hallelujah Psalm, that its intent is to bring Israel to memory of painful experience, and keep God “committed to the same experience, so that new possibilities are imaginable. The connection of God to the reality of hurt is the ground of praise.”vi Cohen may have said the same thing, just shorter, when he said “Real spirituality has its feet in the mud and its heart in heaven.”vii Note that idea, by whatever language – that praise grows from the reality of our hurt, our pain, and God meeting us there…not from when everything is just dandy with us. God meets us at the point of the broken Hallelujah. God is the loneliest of all, says Liebovitz. “His loneliness is essential. By definition there is no one like him.”viii

(See verse 4) It’s not a cry you hear tonight, It’s not some pilgrim who has seen the light It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen was raised in a religious home – his grandfather was a Rabbi. He had deep interactions with Montreal Catholics in his life, and in the 1990’s he spent 5 years or so living as a Buddhist monk in an isolated monastic. Deeply spiritual, he is also mystical. Biographer Leibovitz observes that after 1984 there was a shift in Cohen, and his songs took on the cadences and themes of Jewish prayer, courted the liturgical. In some of his lines, you can almost hear his grandfather, and the prophetic proclamations of Isaiah. Not surprisingly, one of the criticisms of his music is often that it is moody, or sad. When he began, back in the 1960’s, his stuff was very 2 different from the upbeat and happy music of the time. Leibovitz writes that “Cohen was the boy who’d listened to Isaiah and written lines about it being hard to hold the hand of someone who is reaching to the sky just to surrender… There was nothing of the Age of Aquarius in Cohen’s lyrics, and even less of it in his tunes.”ix

There is the issue with how we read the Bible. We can hear, in Psalm 146, about God’s alliance with the hungry, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed, and we want to see resolution, we want it now. Rodger Nishioka, a Presbyterian minister famous for youth work, said a few years ago to a church staff that we erred in repeatedly telling our children, “All I want is for you to be happy.” They believed it. We, and they, thought the job of parents was to make them happy. (I confess to this error myself, to some degree. The problem is, we could never deliver on that. We can’t make them happy, they’ll have to figure that out on their own. What we can do is to help them find their way to a meaningful life. We can help them know what is important. Maybe we can instill in them a sense that there is mystery and transcendence in this life.

We know that in fact, whatever the Psalm says, very often the hungry stay hungry, the blind remain blind, and the oppressed remain so. What does it mean, that God keeps faith and can be trusted? What can that mean? We ask that and can almost hear Tori Amos singing, “God, sometimes you don’t come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?”x Or perhaps it means life contains pain, and often sadness; it just does. Psychologist Mary Pipher thinks “Much of the terrible craziness in the world comes from running from pain.”xi Perhaps the point is not that oppression will end and a perfect world will come in our lifetime, but that God is with us in our pain, and the point at which God and our hurt meet, there is the ground of praise. For us, in our faith, is who Jesus was and is, what he is about. The Word made flesh, like us.

Supposedly Beethoven once said to Anton Schindler that what distinguishes superior creative musicians from the mediocre ones of all periods is “the manner in which they create resolutions, and to create resolutions it is necessary to set up irresolution.”xii Music and theology both have an affinity for delay. Leibovitz notes how Beethoven’s Fifth begins with a “monumental blow, throwing us off balance” and that the rest of the symphony resolves the tension.xiii And he notes that both Testaments of the Bible, new and old, are “books of waiting – more than anything else, they linger in anticipation for God to act.” Tension. Beethoven’s irresolution. And Cohen’s songs. And the Psalmist. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann tells us, “The word of promise always created an interval of tension between the uttering and the redeeming of the promise… (allowing us) to be hopeful or resigned.”xiv

We serve the Lord’s Supper every other Wednesday at First Light Shelter; Weesa Matthews and I were there on Wednesday, and ran this Psalm 146 by them, asking about those promises. It was a good discussion. First Light residents tend not to be as literate as Moltmann, but can be every bit as profound. They are often people whose Hallelujah’s have been broken by life. If ever someone had reason to question God’s intentions, they are the ones. But our companions articulated a strong faith, in spite of circumstance, and a trust and hope that God was taking them, always, toward deliverance. Many found their praise at their most desperate point. They didn’t expect miracles tomorrow, but they do trust that God will love them. We talked about the Hallelujah psalms, and what you do when you’re down. They said, “Hallelujah anyway.”

That is where our Psalmist comes out. He addresses the faithful whose experience of sufferance was recent enough to still touch with words, and promises the presence of God who is for them. He ends with an imperative: “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah.” No matter what. In the end, that is 3 where Cohen comes out – our Zen-like, Jewish, songwriter, theologian of the day. In the next to last verse, he observes that the broken Hallelujah has fully as much value as the holy one. They blaze with light. And in the last verse, Cohen ends up talking directly to God, himself, admitting defeat. And at the same time his confession is followed by a joyful doxology. The last two lines of the song are a fine a theological commentary as you will find on the Psalms, maybe on life.

And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

i Westermann, Claus. Praise and Lament in the Psalms, John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1981, p. 124, 129. ii Cohen, Leonard. Hallelujah, Various Positions, Columbia Records, NY, 1984, iii Leibovitz, Liel. A Broken Hallelujah, W.W. Norton Co., NY, 2014, p. 16 iv Cohen, in Weekend magazine, Winnipeg Free Press, Sept. 12, 1970, p. 25 v Gottwald, Norman. The Bible and Liberation, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1983, p. 64. vi Brueggemann, Walter. Israel’s Praise, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1988, p. 95. vii Cohen, quoted by Joe Jackson, in The Irish Times, November 3, 1995. viii Op cit Leibovitz, p. 204 ix ibid, p. 128. x Amos, Tori. God, Under the Pink, Sword and Stone Publishing, Atlantic Records, NY 1994. xi Pipher, Mary. The Shelter of Each Other, Putnam’s Sons, NY, 1996, p. 229. xii Ostransky, Leroy. The Anatomy of Jazz, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1960, p. 83. xiii Op cit Leibovitz, p. 150. xiv Moltmann, Jürgen. A Theology of Hope, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 105.