What Song Will You Be Singing This Sunday?

A Song of Ascent – Hope keeps us going. It has been said that people can go for weeks without food, days without water, but won’t last even a few hours without hope.  

This morning I performed a funeral for a person I did not know, a person not even from Ennis. That is always a difficult thing to do for a family. You do not know the loved one. In this case, I did not even know any of the family. In fact, I met them only 30 minutes prior to the funeral. They had wanted a graveside service officiated by a Presbyterian pastor, and I was their only option in Ennis.

Every pastor is faced with something similar at some time in their ministry. We cannot speak to the loved one’s eternal condition. We cannot address their lifestyle, exemplary or otherwise! Usually what we do is speak of the hope of the resurrection! That is something to which we all look forward.

The Psalm of the day is the 126^th Psalm in the Bible. It is called A Song of Ascent. In case you were wondering what that meant. The common belief is that Songs of Ascent were sung by pilgrim or travelers on their way to Jerusalem. This song proclaims the goodness and blessings of God by the people returning from a generation of enslavement in a foreign country.

The captives returning from Babylon were travelling as though they were in a dream. They had been gone for about eighty years. This meant that there were those in the midst to whom Jerusalem and the temple were only legends, stories told by parents or grandparents – legends about a temple covered in gold and wondrous beyond belief. That temple was gone. It had been sacked, along with most of the rest of the city, when their ancestors had been capture many years before.

These pilgrims were travelling back to a city in ruins, one where the rats and the wild animals ran free. Yet, somehow, they returned filled with laughter and with a song on their tongues, proclaiming, “THE LORD HAS DONE GREAT THINGS FOR US AND WE ARE GLAD!”

Yahweh God, as it turned out, had NOT abandoned them. Yahweh, himself, had come to rescue them. He had moved the kings of the earth to rise up against each other to secure their freedom. Their captor had become the captured and the enslaved vassal had become the property owner! God had indeed done GREAT things.

This morning, as you wound your way to worship, did your heart sing the praises of God! Did you shout, even in the confines of your own heart, “The Lord has done great things for me, and I am glad!” You are indeed God’s child. He will move mountains and monarchs to bless you and to bring you to himself. GREAT THINGS, INDEED!

Pastor Craig