Sing a New Song

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, April 4, 2021, Easter Sunday, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.

                Text: Mark 16:1-8

Early yesterday morning, as I climbed the stair to my writing chair, the light of a waning moon shining brightly, a single, solitary bird’s voice sang: sing it out, sing it out, sing it out, will you? The melody is familiar, though one I’ve missed. It hibernates, or migrates—I don’t know birdsongs well enough to know which bird was belting out her bright song in the dark—but it appears this time of year, a herald of spring in its fullness, announcing a new moment, a passage from one season to another.

This image reflects my experience through this year of pandemic, singing my song in a defiant, determined commitment to hope in a new moment, new life—all the while, surrounded by the night and shadows, within and without. It may come as a surprise to some, but my cynicism can be as sharp as any. I call my cynicism Shirley (not referencing anyone except the play on words: as in, “surely, you don’t believe that.”) And with each new reflection gone viral on the interwebs early in the pandemic about how we were going to come out of this thing renewed, changed, chastened, wiser and better, I found myself in a near-constant dialogue with Shirley. She really is a broken record of “don’t get your hopes up” ditties. On days when I’m caught between my hope-filled, prophetic self and my Shirley self, I simply flip on autopilot, put up buffers and compartmentalization systems for grief, uncertainty, and trauma, and try to just get through this thing unscathed and doing as little damage as possible.

With each new challenge, each new loss, assault, tragic headline, new number of cases, deaths, shootings, each new instance of injustice over the past year…with each new revelation of how truly broken things are in our lives and relationships and churches and institutions and nations and world, whether I’m in “God’s up to something good,” “we’re doomed,” or “put your head down and get through it” mode I still root about trying to discover what Spirit wants to share. It’s kind of a habit. This past year, a consistent theme is summed up in John Wesley’s last words: “Best of all is, God is with us.”

Some may roll their eyes at so simple a statement, because, after all, what difference does it make for God to be with us when things continue to be so jacked up? Shirley asks that question on the regular, joining the chorus of the Israelites in the desert who complained saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” (Numbers 21:5) Shirley sings alto in the chorus of the disciples who woke Jesus from his sleep on the boat in the storm yelling, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk 4:38) And she would have wondered the same thing as the Marys and Salome that early morning in the cemetery—“Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” (we’re probably on our own!)

Of course, in each of those jacked up moments of wilderness, storm, and the heaviness of death, God was there, leading out of slavery, providing manna and wellspring waters from a rock, soothing the storm with a word, and rolling the stone away so that life might emerge. That’s the story we tell, anyway. Are you buying it? 

Casey Gerald, in his beautiful, painful, artful memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here (a book I read at some unidentifiable moment in the haze of the COVID pandemic) shares this:

It’s hard enough to get used to a crappy life. But once you do, you see that even crap can be cozy and the coziness becomes important to you. And even the slightest change—in the name of progress or healing or uplift—feels like a threat to your existence, so you ignore it as long as you can…The story has to change, you see, and that’s not only a great deal of work to undertake, but also a real risk, as the new story might not be as