Singing songs, making intercession in noisy places

Man-made noises, clamor, cacophonous sounds fill our lives. The inane sounds of morning television magazine programing set my teeth on edge! Our nation is about to go to war while 100,000 screaming visitors in Manhattan egg on a boy band with shrill screams. The sound threatens to peel the skin off people like me who fail to appreciate the expenditure of emotion and energy, especially in light of looming war clouds.

I am listening for the voice of intercessors, a call for a call to prayer, a plea for wisdom and a spirit of restraint on those who carry the weight of decision making. In an arena where decisions are made that are too heavy and too complicated for mere mortals, must we be content with the voices of political operatives arguing for a single, often self-serving, point of view? Is there a voice of reason that can be heard above the screams of power brokers?

Our President promises to make a series of appearances today at which he will explain some of his rationale for threats and retaliation. Tomorrow night he will address us on national television, presumably to inform us why we will initiate another war. Syrian leaders likewise counter with arguments in support of their sovereignty and denial of heinous acts which has exterminated political adversaries – as well as innocent women and children. Are you like me? Do you find it impossible to know whose word is trustworthy? Can we be sure that any world leader is not as Thomas Carlyle describes as "spectacles behind which there is no eye?"¹

David’s song of ascent, Psalm 121, begins with a question, "I lift up my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from?" The scene evoked by David’s question is strikingly akin to today’s genuine Christian Americans. Psalm 121 was penned as a song of ascent, a song sung by people on pilgrimage toward Jerusalem, devoted worshipers en route to worship. As the crowd builds with citizens from villages converging into a crowd of 1000's, the worship leader calls out, "Psalm 121!" Worshipers look at the hills laden with Baal shrines. Sex-trade religious leaders had built images and sacristies into the hillsides. Each holy place celebrated a distortion of the true God’s intentions and creation. The hills were littered with moral debris as unsightly as the burned and rotting housing carcasses lining Detroit’s streets today. There was no help in the hills . . . and there was none of the horizon.

As we go to worship the blaring sounds of human reason, anthems of human triumph blare, butting into the air as a mean-spirited goat. The spiritually astute, God listeners, hear the sounds of the hills, the sounds of irreverence, the cacophony of what Eugene Peterson call "no-gods."² The air is filled with human reason without reverence, without awareness of the Holy, the Omniscient or the Omnipresent One.

The song goes on, the people continue the rhythmic chant, the volume builds as pilgrims to the Holy Place join in the procession and convictions about the True God are rehearsed in song. Ah, listen, one can hear the eternal truth above shrill screams of mere human reason. A song, an eternal melody is piercing the wet blankets of man’s stubbornness and human ignorance.
My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip-- he who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD watches over you – the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all harm -- he will watch over your life; the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Join in the song! Be refreshed with the eternal truth! Carry the melody to the place of prayer and appeal to the One who never slumbers or sleeps!