When I was in my 20s — I was a graduate student in theology at the University of Heidelberg — I participated in what you could call an urban mission year. There were about ten of us, men and women, graduate students in theology, sociology, and social work; we lived and studied together in a dorm-like facility in Mainz, and for three months we worked in entry-level industrial jobs, and for another three, with a union.
Several of us worked the second and third shift at a GM parts warehouse. It was the second-most boring work I have done in my life. We each had a palette jack truck with a twin-bed-sized basket, and after picking up a list of parts at the foreman’s office near the loading dock, we walked up and down endless aisles between massive, towering shelves, collecting the various items—everything from tiny light bulbs to complete exhaust systems, axles, doors and hoods for all kinds of vehicles.
There were no mp3 players or iPods then, and they probably would have been prohibited anyway, for safety reasons, as they told a colleague who wanted to bring in a Walkman. They also told us that a new warehouse was under construction, fully automated, with robots stocking the shelves as well as collecting and distributing items from the shelves to the loading dock. Good riddance, we thought, which was easy for us to say, since none of us depended on these jobs to make a living — which was what we discussed in union meetings and in workshops at the mission center. Anyway, criss-crossing the huge warehouse with my oversized shopping basket, my soul kept searching for the right song. I would sometimes get into a rhythm, humming melodies or softly chanting snippets of psalms I remembered.
The best part, though, was getting on the train after work each day, going back to my room, taking my boots off, turning up the volume on my stereo cassette player — U2 live, Under A Blood Red Sky — and dancing through most of the album, from Gloria to 40. Never got a complaint. Everybody in the building must have loved U2. “40” was the final track on their album War, which was released in 1983. Bono said,
When we were making our third record, the War LP, we were being thrown out of the studio by the studio manager because we had overrun or something and we had one more song to do. We wrote this song in about ten minutes, we recorded it in about ten minutes, we mixed it in about ten minutes and we played it, then, for another ten minutes and that’s nothing to do with why it’s called ‘40’.[1]
It’s called “40” after Psalm 40, which inspired its lyrics.
Billy Cerveny remembers going to a concert in Jacksonville in ’85:
The last song that U2 played that night was 40. …Towards the end, everyone at the show was singing the chorus at the top of their lungs as each member of the band left the stage except for the drummer …“I will sing, sing a new song. I will sing, sing a new song ... How long to sing this song? How long to sing this song? How long? How long? How long? How long to sing this song?” The drums eventually stopped. The lights came on, but the crowd kept singing. This went on for the next 30 minutes as we filed into the large dirt parking lot ... Nobody wanted it to stop. Most people didn’t realize it (including me), but they were singing a song that had been sung over them since the creation of the world. As I climbed into the back of my mother’s [car] and we pulled out of the parking lot, the voices began to fade, but I kept singing. I kept singing because deep down I knew the answer. How long to sing this song? As long as this song would be sung over me. Forever.[2]
The psalm is testimony to the saving power of God; the song is testimony to the power of the ancient poetry to inspire trust and joy, and Billy’s words are testimony to the power of the song to root us in the knowledge of God’s faithfulness. How long to sing this song? the question rings out, and Billy says, Forever.
I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the Lord.
I love the movement up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and unto a rock, firm and secure, and the complementary movement from crying and waiting to singing a new song — a song of joy and encouragement, of hope and trust in God: a song to carry in our heart for the days when we are down in the pit, stuck in the bog, waiting — whether patiently or urgently.
How long to sing this song? For as long as the faithfulness of God endures. But for many of us the question sounds more like, “How long — until we can finally, all, and wholeheartedly sing this song?” Asking “How long?” just seems more honest than singing while so many are still in the pit, still stuck in the bog.
Jesus asks his first followers at the beginning of John’s Gospel, “What are you looking for?” Those are the first words he speaks in that Gospel, and they are words addressed as much to those two in the narrative who started to follow him, as they are addressed to us, those who read and hear the testimonies of John who baptized Jesus and the other John after whom the Gospel is named.
What are you looking for? What is it you need, expect, seek, want, really want? You know we could just sit here for the next ten minutes and try to answer that, honestly and without any guilt or shame, just be here and tell Jesus what it is we are looking for.
John who baptized him said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who removes the burden of sin from the world.” Yes, I want that, a world no longer burdened by sin, a world bathed in God’s Spirit, human beings living fully in tune with the Spirit’s movement in the world. Perhaps that’s something the two disciples in that scene were looking for as well. They followed Jesus, and not because they knew and trusted him, but because they knew and trusted John. Rowan Williams says that “Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.”[3] The journey of discipleship doesn’t begin with a debate about the identity of Jesus and a winning argument, but with the trustworthy life of a witness who points to Jesus — a parent, a grandparent, a camp counselor, a congregation, a friend — believing people in whose words and actions we can see a world we’d like to live in.
Tomorrow the nation takes a day to honor the life and witness of Dr. King, the prophet of God’s kingdom whose dream of a world no longer burdened by racism, poverty, and war inspired a movement for civil rights and truthful reconciliation. Richard Lischer writes,
Long after King himself began to doubt the goodness of the “white brother” and the tainted principles of civil religion, his expression of hope in the kinship of races endures, as the Sermon on the Mount endures, as a mark to aim at in a sinfully divided society. The more pessimistic he grew with regard to humanity, the more optimistic he became about God. Even in the darkest period of his own discouragement, he continued to say to African Americans, “Go ahead! God can be trusted.”
After King’s death, his old mentor Pius Barbour said in a sermon, “[Martin] was a great believer in this, the attitude of Jesus: He believed spiritual power could down any power. Can it?” Lischer responds, “It is a measure of the preacher’s abiding influence in our lives that we still ask the question and want to answer, Yes.”[4]
Generations of witnesses in the struggle have testified that spiritual power can down any power, and some of us ask, Can it? And it’s up to us to want to answer, Yes. To want to affirm with our lives and our little courage and our spotty faithfulness that God’s commitment to the redemption of the world is firm.
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks us, and we hear the question like one we’ve heard and answered before and like this is the first time. We hear it on the Sunday after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in Richmond from Friday evening to Tuesday night, banning all weapons, including guns, from the capitol grounds. “We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies that there are groups with malicious plans for the rally that is planned for Monday,” the Governor said Wednesday afternoon, and several alleged members of white supremacist groups have been arrested in Maryland, Delaware, and Georgia.[5] Somebody thought it was a brilliant idea to have a gun rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the former capital of the Confederacy, and others jumped at the opportunity to orchestrate another Nazi revival after Charlottesville.
Michelle Alexander writes,
The centuries-long struggle to birth a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy — a nation in which every voice and every life truly matters — did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. The struggle is as old as the nation itself and the birth process has been painful, to say the least. My greatest hope and prayer is that we will serve as faithful midwives in our lifetimes and do what we can to make America, finally, what it must become.[6]
And it’s bigger than America, but this is where we are. Jesus asks us, “What are you looking for?” and he invites us to come and see. To come and see who he is, and who we are. To come and see how he rests completely in the movement of God, and to rest and move with him. To come and see the power of his love at work in the world, and to be part of that work. To come and see the promise of God’s reign fulfilled.
[1] Bono, Concert April 29, 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(song)
[2] https://www.redbirdnashville.com/blog/2019/2/15/how-long-to-sing-this-song
[3] Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 21-22.
[4] Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and The Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford, 1995), 269. I changed “Mike” to “Martin” to avoid confusion about introducing another character. I don’t think “Mike” is a typo, but “Martin” works just as well.
[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797041211/fbi-arrests-3-alleged-members-of-white-supremacist-group-ahead-of-richmond-rally and https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/17/us/fbi-alleged-extremist-group-arrests-georgia-virginia/index.html
[6] Michelle Alexander https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/opinion/sunday/michelle-alexander-new-jim-crow.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share