Psalm 149
“Sword Song”
November 7, 2010 - All-Saints Sunday

         The song “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” hit number 1 on the Billboard chart in 1943, in the midst of WWII. During the attack on Pearl Harbor a navy chaplain supposedly put down his Bible to man a gun and fire at oncoming enemy planes. It didn’t actually happen, but during the attack there was a real chaplain who walked up and down an ammunition line, patting men on the back, and encouraging them saying, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”

         As  we turn the corner from verse 5 to verse 6 in Psalm 149 and come on the startling phrase, “May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands,” it seems the Bible itself has wandered into the same territory inhabited by the legend and song created around that WWII chaplain.

         It’s particularly startling for us as we read this Psalm paired this morning on All Saints Sunday with our Gospel lesson from Luke 6:27, in which Jesus says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” It’s hard to reconcile what our Lord said there with passing the ammunition or wielding a double-edged sword.

         There is no way at all in a brief sermon to deal with the complexity of the division among Christians between those who are pacifists and those who believe war may be just in God’s eyes. Both sides are in our own congregation. Personally I find my heart moved and inspired by Christian veterans like those being celebrated this Thursday, people like some of you who took up arms for the sake of freedom and resistance toward cruel enemies. Yet I am also inspired and convicted by Christians who refuse, despite the consequences to themselves, to fight back when they encounter evil in the world.

         However you and I sort out the difficult debate about war in our own hearts and minds, what Jesus says in Luke 6 is the norm and standard for our everyday lives. “Love your enemies…, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

         As I said at the beginning of the year when we delved into holy wars recorded in the book of Joshua, Jesus Christ has made a difference in the way we must view our own participation in conflict and violence. It’s impossible for we who follow the Lord who chose not to fight when His own enemies arrested and murdered Him to believe that violent resistance is the primary and only way to solve our problems.

         So what are we to make of Psalm 149? We cannot any longer easily be Old Testament saints who took up double-edged swords singing God’s praise, singing for joy that they could go out to battle against the Lord’s enemies. We live in a time, we live in a faith in which we believe that the Lord Himself told His disciples to put away their swords and then Himself died to save His enemies, died to save us.

         How then are you and I to put song and sword together? How do we sing the praise of God as verse 6 says and at the same time take up that double-edged sword? How do we live “to inflict vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings with fetters, their nobles with shackles of iron, to carry out the sentence written against them—this is the glory of all his faithful people.”

         And what are we supposed to do with all those feelings that rise up inside calling us to fight for what is good and true and beautiful? Even in the New Testament there is a sense that Christians, the saints of God, are to be an army. In Matthew 10:34, Jesus said He did not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword. Paul talks about fighting the good fight. At the end of Scripture in Revelation Jesus comes as Captain at the head of a great army of the redeemed with songs of praise surrounding His arrival.

         Not only Scripture, but Christian literature puts song and sword together. One of the most moving moments in the last book of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the end of chapter 5, when the old and feeble king of Rohan leads his warriors out to battle and suddenly finds his strength renewed to meet the challenge of the evil of Mordor and ride to the aid of their allies in Gondor. We read:

For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.[1]

         How can we do that? How do we put song and sword together? How do we praise Jesus our Savior who taught us to love our enemies and still go to battle in His name? The only way I know for Christians to sing and slay in any way consistent with our faith is to choose our Sword carefully. We interpret this Psalm through the rest of Scripture and turn to Hebrews 4 verse 12 which teaches us that “the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword.” We go the end of Ephesians 6, verse 17 and read about “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” We look at those pictures of Jesus in Revelation and realize that the sword He carries comes from His mouth. Our sword is the living, active, deeply cutting Word of God.

         Grasping the right Sword, we realize Psalm 149 makes perfect Christian sense. We sing God’s praise and confront the evil around us with the double-edged weapon of God’s truthful Word. Song and sword belong together in a beautiful and wonderful way. But there’s one more thing to grasp as we grasp that spiritual sword.

         As Augustine reads and explains this psalm, he fixates for a bit on the fact that the double-edged sword was to be “in their hands.” If our Christian sword is God’s Word, that’s not a bad fixation. Jesus blessed those who both hear His word and do it. James and John repeated that formula. The Word of God is not just words on a page or in our mouths. It’s meant to be taken up in our hands and put into practice. It’s not like the pot-metal sword replica hanging on my daughter’s bedroom wall. It’s meant to be taken in hand and swung through every action of our lives.

         Saints of God put song and sword together by praising the Lord and living such good and holy lives according to the Word that they pierce the hearts and minds of those around them. You are probably sitting here today, a saint among the saints, because you saw someone live for Jesus in a way that pierced your own soul, made you want to be more like that saint. That’s exactly how the sword of the Word brings God’s judgment on this world.

         Over and over as Christianity took off and spread in the Roman empire, men and women were converted by watching Christians live out the things they preached. There are many stories of how one or more believers would be led out to die for Jesus and someone standing by the judge or the emperor would be moved by the peace and serenity with which Christians accepted death. And that Roman noble would declare “I too am a Christian” and take his or her place alongside the other martyrs.

         The Orthodox church loves to celebrate the forty martyrs of Sebaste in Armenia. Just after Christianity became legal in Rome, there was still persecution. In Sebaste in 320 A.D. forty soldiers who confessed Christ were condemned to stand naked one night in winter in a freezing lake. To tempt them to give up their faith, a warm bath house was set up on the shore. Any of them could renounce Christ and save his life in a warm bath. All night they stood in the lake and sang hymns to encourage each other. Finally, one of them gave up and ran for the bath house. But one of the guards was so overcome by the courage of the rest, that he threw down his weapons, took off his clothes and walked into the lake to bring the number of the martyrs back to forty. That’s song and sword in action.

         You and I will probably take the Sword, the Word, in hand in less dramatic ways, but we are still called to pierce hearts around us with good and faithful lives. Payne Stewart was a golfer who started out as a surly, arrogant player. But Stewart’s heart was pierced by a fellow golfer who battled cancer with Christian grace and faith and Stewart was saved.

         Just before the end of his own life Stewart played against the British golfer Colin Montgomerie. They ended up battling for second place while American fans heckled the British contender unmercifully.  Stewart asked his own fans to quit tormenting his opponent, but they kept up. Finally on the last hole, just when he could have sunk the winning putt, Stewart instead picked up Montgomerie’s ball, handed it to him and conceded the game. That’s the Word of God cutting down pride and convicting a heart.

         This past week I heard fellow Covenant pastors talking about all the negative advertising that went into last week’s election. One of them told about hearing Jay Phelan from our seminary talk about candidates, Christian candidates, who say something like, “Well if I don’t do it, I can’t win. Then I won’t be able to do any good once in office. I have to run ads like that.” Jay said, “No. If that’s what it takes to win, then you ought to lose.” That’s the Word in action. That’s the sword of the Spirit cutting to the heart.

         For our own congregation here, we are committed to hosting the Egan Warming Center once again this year. Frankly, we’re not even sure we can pay the gas bill for Sunday mornings, but when the weather turns cold we’re going to unlock the doors, turn the thermostat up and trust God when the bill comes. That’s one way we together take the Word in hand and thrust it out into the world as God’s sword, shaming and convicting those who have more but do less.

         A song in their mouths and a sword in their hands. That’s the saints of God. That’s you and I when we are faithful to praise our Lord and do what He says, even when it hurts, even when it costs. That song and that sword are the way God is bringing justice to this world. That song and that sword are the glory of all God’s people. If we raise that sword of love and goodness and sing the praise of Jesus as we swing it, then the sound of our singing will come even to that City where He is bringing us all.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj