Redemption Songs

May 2, 2021 • Fifth Sunday of Easter
Reading: Psalm 137 (New Revised Standard Version &
adaptation by Cláudio Carvaelhaes)
Rev. Cláudio Carvalhaes, guest preacher

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.” ― Rumi

Psalm 137 - Lament over the Destruction of Brown People

1 By the Rio Grande river— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Belize and all the people crossing the river.

2 On the Oak Trees and Cedar Elm trees there we hung up our guitars and our violins.

3 For there our captors asked us for Mariachi songs, and our tormentors asked for our corridos saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of the Latino cucaracha people!’

4 How could we sing our coritos in a foreign land?

5 If I forget you, O mi tierra querida, let my right hand wither!

6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I forget the taste of tortillas y tamales, if I do not set mi gente above my highest joy.

7 Remember, O God, against the Yankees the day when our corn fields were poisoned, and how they said, ‘Build that wall! Build that wall! Cutting down our throats!

8 O Uncle Sam, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! To the earth! To the world!

9 Happy shall they be who take away your entitlement and make you feel how we feel!

People

1 By the Rio Grande river— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Belize and all the people crossing the river.

2 On the Oak Trees and Cedar Elm trees there we hung up our guitars and our violins.

3 For there our captors asked us for Mariachi songs, and our tormentors asked for our corridos saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of the Latino cucaracha people!’

4 How could we sing our coritos in a foreign land?

5 If I forget you, O mi tierra querida, let my right hand wither!

6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I forget the taste of tortillas y tamales if I do not set mi gente above my highest joy.

7 Remember, O God, against the Yankees the day when our corn fields were poisoned, and how they said, ‘Build that wall! Build that wall! Cutting down our throats!

8 O Uncle Sam, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! To the earth! To the world!

9 Happy shall they be who take away your entitlement and make you feel how we feel!

Dear Friends, what a joy to be back to the Church of the Village, a church that I learned to love and admire deeply. I feel I am one of your song birds! Thank you pastor Jeff for inviting me again and for being such a wonderful pastor to this community. I must say that I love coming back to preach because I get to spend time with Katie and Jorge. Katie and Jorge are two living libraries of songs and music. You know how blessed you are to have them don’t you? They are such a gift to the world!

In this series of Sundays dealing with songs and music oh there is so much to ponder. I wonder about the things that steal our singing. To lose songs, or to lose the ability to sing is to lose the ability to listen to my heartbeat.

So I wonder about the things that steal our singing.

Along with that concern, there is something that makes me angry: stop singing! My kids love to sing and I get mad when one tell the other to stop singing.

I remember being a guest preacher in a church one day and there was this baby making sounds or all kinds. It was as if he was happily singing: ahh ahhha ahhh. But you know, you are in church and singing has its proper allotted time. So I could see people looking to the mother saying “Please take care of your child.” But the baby continued to sing ahh ahh ahh. People then turned their evil eye and were sending columns of fire towards the poor mother. After a while she was so embarrassed that she stood up to leave. As she stood up and say: “sister, please stay. Your baby is singing so beautifully! Besides the kin-don of God belongs to this child not to us.” And turning to the congregation I said: “And from now until the end of the sermon, every time this baby makes a sound we will respond with a bold alleluia.” Sure enough, 15 seconds after the baby starts to sing, a shy alleluia was a response. As I preached I was interrupted so many times that it became so funny the church started to laugh. I can tell you this: this church said more alleluia in that 20 minutes sermon than they said in five years of worship!” But I know…

I know that we all go through times when we have less singing. When illnesses come. When losses knock at our door. When anxieties overflows. When fears threaten us paralyze us.

I am learning to listen to other sounds not only human. The sounds of the wales, of the birds, of the trees dancing in the wind, the sounds of creeks, of water, the sounds of the sky. Have you seen the movie Il Postino: The Postman. It is the story of a postman and Pablo Neruda. At a point, the postman records all kinds of sounds to send to someone. I will not tell you more otherwise I will destroy the story. Please watch it: Il Postino: The Postman.

Because of my connection to natural sounds, what has had the strongest potency to steal my singing has been the extinction of animals and thus the extinction of their sounds. A couple weeks ago I read a story about some birds called Honeyeaters who live in Australia running the risk of going extinct. And the reason is because they are losing their songs. Let us watch this video to understand it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKpD80VlZao
An endangered bird is forgetting its song as the species dies out

After I watched this video and read about them, this I wrote this note to them:

Dear Honeyeaters,

By the maple tree near my house I sat down and wept.
I have heard about you. How beautiful you all are!
Far away from you, I heard about your condition -
Your struggle to survive
Your home being desecrated
Your refugia being erased
Your people dwindling down…

I heard you can’t find your own singing
The young ones can’t find your elders to teach you your own songs
For they are all almost gone
But the few young ones are trying to learn your own songs
So you can mate and prosper and continue living

Your singing comes from learning with your own people
How wonderful is that!
You are literally the songs of your fathers, mothers, great fathers, great mothers, great grandmothers and great grandfathers.

But how tragic it is:
They are not there anymore and they cannot teach you the songs you so desperately need to sing
And without your own songs, you go on mimicking the songs of other birds.

In different places, we hear you sing different songs
You are trying to survive by learning whatever song you hear
But those songs are not your songs

And without your songs, your “warbly noises,” you can’t court the females
They are not attracted to the unrecognizable songs you sing.
You sound metallic, too loud, off of your own tune.

You are there but at the same time… you are not.
You exist yes, but for whom?

Your own people cannot come close to you
For your songs are not recognizable
You are losing your own self because your own self is not your own!

You are not a lone ranger singer
Your self is collective because your song is collective.
Your song belongs to generations past, made by ways of listening that only your people know

But now… now you are losing your self.
Your song doesn’t fulfill you
As much as you try
As much as you listen
As much as you are eager and perhaps even desperate to sing any songs

Your song now is a foreign song
You are becoming a foreign to yourself
The songs you sing are not yours, are not you
You live in a diaspora of songs

Yes I can utterly relate to you when
You don’t understand how, after a whole day singing
Nobody cares
Nobody approaches
Nobody listens

Your songs are becoming less complex!
And without your song you are losing your strength!
Through the regular battles of your day with other species, you easily lose your fights,
especially against the “noisy miners,” other Honeyeaters who are more aggressive.

I don’t much about you but there is little to say about your re-existence. I don’t know what will happen to the very few of you. What I know is that my heart falls to the ground and I feel that there is very little singing in me. With your death I also die. All I can do now is listen to your songs through my computer so I can keep you in my heart. I will sing a song for you everyday!

All my love to you.
Cláudio

These are the histories of colonization and coloniality: how settlers and capitalism continue to destroy worlds, erase languages, shut down songs, do away with any form of diversity and spirituality which is the only way life can happen.

I was reminded of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, in which Carson is very concerned with the deadly impact of DDT, a pesticide that once on earth, deeply affects the birds. Right on the opening chapter, A Vision for Tomorrow, Carlson describes a very scary future, where the American landscape has an eerie, lifeless silence that has come after the extermination of songbirds. From 1962 to know things got worst. The death of bees and butterflies and all pollinators due to pesticides are shifting patterns in nature and threatening the very possibility of our food to be produced. And nature to continue its bio-diversity.

The death of honeyeaters and the death of birds hit me hard. Their ability to live is our ability to live. Their diversity is our only way out. And their singing is fundamental to our singing. There is no human singing without bird singing.

The way I regain my singing is to be with those who love to sing and sing with me. The church is the place where we can recover our singing, time and again.

Let me share a video where a man is given the microphone in the church to offer a song. He is singing Amazing Grace. While this video is out there mostly to make fun of this man, this video always makes me cry. As you will see, he sings so badly. But if you pay attention, the church holds him together. The organ comes in to help. The church is not embarrasses or in any rush to stop him from singing. Look of what the church can do!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ke1H98ou_Q
Really Bad Singer Amazing Grace

Wasn’t this song a redemption song? Every time I hear this precious man singing I can hear Bob Marley singing to me:

Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

This man’s redemption song was the whole church redemption song! Whatever song he had sung would have been a redemption song! Everybody was blessed by his singing. That is the open and hidden gifts of the church. To teach each other redemption songs by the rivers of our sadness, solitude and foreignness. redemption songs in the midst of COVID, even in the mist of death!

To sing to each other when our songs are stolen, taken away and we feel we have very little singing in us.

The church is the best place for us to never lose our songs! Never go away from the church! Because here we are reminded to sing redemption songs! Here we are demanded to sing redemption songs!

For when I cannot sing because my songs were stolen, you will sing for me. And a strange song will become my redemption song. And tomorrow, when you cannot sing because your singing was stolen, we will sing a redemption song for you!

You sit with me by my rivers of Babylon or by the Hudson river and you sing a redemption song for me.
And I will sit with you by your rivers of Babylon or by the Hudson river and I will sing you a redemption song.

In that way, we will all be redeemed from our little singing.

We will all be redeemed from feeling alone, or in a foreign land.

We are each other’s song birds and bird songs!

I want to ask you to do something very simple this week. Every morning, Please do sing a song for the Honeyeaters in Australia. Sing them a song of love and kindness. Even if it is not a redemption song, it will be a song of love and kindness. Send your songs across the oceans!

In church we were always taught to count our blessings right?

Today I ask you to count your redemptions songs!

What are your redemption songs?

Start with the ones you will sing to the Honeyeaters

May we continue to be each other’s redemption songs.

Amen.

Copyright © 2021 Cláudio Carvalhaes
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