Songs of Liberation

We continue our Advent journey through the darkness, a journey of learning again how to hope. This Sunday, let’s wonder about how we find words for hope. When the prophets of the Old Testament wrote about the problems of inequality, injustice, and despair in their times, they did not write essays, op-eds, or even sermons. They wrote poetry. They wrote with a language that reaches for something deeper and higher in us than the bits of our brains that deal with car payments and Christmas lists and international trade policy. They wrote things that were not about conveying an idea but about transporting you to a different place, a wilder place. They wrote the kinds of things you can only really get if you set them to music and sing them.

In the service this Sunday, we’ll wonder together about how the prophetic tradition of song influenced the last of the prophets, John the Baptist.