See if you can guess what the following cities have in common: St. Petersburg (alternately named Leningrad), Berlin, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Jerusalem. Others could probably be added to that list, especially ones you might be intimately familiar with if you were alive and living in them in Europe or Japan in the 1939-1945 period. War, and utter misery. That’s the common theme, and for those of us who watch the History Channel (some call it the War Channel), this probably wasn’t too hard to guess.
Jerusalem had an eyewitness 2,600 years ago, and he wrote some words that we sing today. Yet, these words don’t sound a lot like someone witnessing horror…in fact, they sound like words of hope and glad tidings. What was the prophet Jeremiah thinking when he wrote the words ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…’? As he watched the shockwave reverberate in Jerusalem in 586 B.C., Jeremiah found the words to describe the misery in the book of Lamentations, but amidst them he also wrote the words in chapter three (verses 22-24, Revised Standard Version) that we sing cheerfully. It’s a measure of his faith, that the prophet was able to summon these words while observing an abject nightmare. It’s like stumbling upon an oasis in the middle of a vast desert. Unexpected is too tame a word to describe this phenomenon. One would think the composer must have lost his mind, and indeed many spectators through history probably did think prophets were a bit unbalanced – doomsday predictors bent on disturbing the calm, usually. In this case, Jeremiah is doing the opposite, glimpsing the world through rose-colored glasses while all around is utter despair. How’s he do it?
Today, Jeremiah’s unavailable for interview (maybe I’ll see him in heaven?), but maybe there’s some contemporary insights from other wars that can instruct us. I watched with fascination the movie ‘The Pianist’ a few years ago, a true story of how a Polish classical pianist – a Jew – survived in Warsaw in World War II (see picture of city above). He scratched, he clawed to live in 1944-45. One of the last scenes during the war shows him performing for an audience of one, a compassionate Nazi officer who lets him live, and even gives him his winter coat and some food. It’s as if the tide has turned at that moment, when the bottom has been reached, and one human being helps another because he recognizes beauty - the Jew’s piano playing - amid the ruin. Maybe that’s Jeremiah’s secret, that he was captivated by something beautiful, despite the devastation all around him. That’s God. He’s the beauty I can see, the oasis I encounter when there’s nothing else left to sustain me. In May 2008, someone asked the music-writer of “The Steadfast Love of the Lord”, Amy Bessire, to comment on her contribution to this song. Her humble response sounds strangely similar…‘it was all God’. (She was visiting the Four Lakes Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin at the time). He’s the oasis, He’s beauty, and He’s music, all metaphors that Jeremiah’s and Amy’s song calls to mind as I sing about His steadfast love.
The following website contains a comment by the composer who put the prophet Jeremiah’s words to music: http://www.fourlakescoc.org/052908/971web.pdf
Jerusalem had an eyewitness 2,600 years ago, and he wrote some words that we sing today. Yet, these words don’t sound a lot like someone witnessing horror…in fact, they sound like words of hope and glad tidings. What was the prophet Jeremiah thinking when he wrote the words ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…’? As he watched the shockwave reverberate in Jerusalem in 586 B.C., Jeremiah found the words to describe the misery in the book of Lamentations, but amidst them he also wrote the words in chapter three (verses 22-24, Revised Standard Version) that we sing cheerfully. It’s a measure of his faith, that the prophet was able to summon these words while observing an abject nightmare. It’s like stumbling upon an oasis in the middle of a vast desert. Unexpected is too tame a word to describe this phenomenon. One would think the composer must have lost his mind, and indeed many spectators through history probably did think prophets were a bit unbalanced – doomsday predictors bent on disturbing the calm, usually. In this case, Jeremiah is doing the opposite, glimpsing the world through rose-colored glasses while all around is utter despair. How’s he do it?
Today, Jeremiah’s unavailable for interview (maybe I’ll see him in heaven?), but maybe there’s some contemporary insights from other wars that can instruct us. I watched with fascination the movie ‘The Pianist’ a few years ago, a true story of how a Polish classical pianist – a Jew – survived in Warsaw in World War II (see picture of city above). He scratched, he clawed to live in 1944-45. One of the last scenes during the war shows him performing for an audience of one, a compassionate Nazi officer who lets him live, and even gives him his winter coat and some food. It’s as if the tide has turned at that moment, when the bottom has been reached, and one human being helps another because he recognizes beauty - the Jew’s piano playing - amid the ruin. Maybe that’s Jeremiah’s secret, that he was captivated by something beautiful, despite the devastation all around him. That’s God. He’s the beauty I can see, the oasis I encounter when there’s nothing else left to sustain me. In May 2008, someone asked the music-writer of “The Steadfast Love of the Lord”, Amy Bessire, to comment on her contribution to this song. Her humble response sounds strangely similar…‘it was all God’. (She was visiting the Four Lakes Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin at the time). He’s the oasis, He’s beauty, and He’s music, all metaphors that Jeremiah’s and Amy’s song calls to mind as I sing about His steadfast love.
The following website contains a comment by the composer who put the prophet Jeremiah’s words to music: http://www.fourlakescoc.org/052908/971web.pdf
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