Broken Haplelujahs
A recent sermon on Isaiah 7, Matthew 1, and Psalm 80, along with some thoughts from last week's newsletter.
Perhaps like you, the season of Advent brings with it a fair amount of contemplation.
This last week, I found myself thinking about the last couple of Christmases: I thought about a year ago, when I tested positive for Covid three days before Christmas and spent the next 10 days isolated in the guest room. I thought about the year before, when the whole world isolated from one another during the holiday season; a new puppy named Rufus became our joy when everything else felt turned and shaken upside down.
As contemplation often goes, I thought about previous years as well, including Advent 2016, when my family moved from Oakland to Seattle for twenty months. My husband had been offered a promotion, and for all intents and purposes, the move looked really good on paper. We’d be close to my extended family. He’d be in a promoted position. I’d be back in the Pacific Northwest, in a place I knew and understood, close to some of my best friends from high school and college.
Soon after we moved, an old friend offered to babysit the boys for a couple of hours. They were little, not much older than two and four, if I’m doing the math correctly. When her time ended, all four of us – the babysitter, the boys, and me, hopped in the car to drop her off. She was without a car, or perhaps she didn’t drive: I can’t remember. Whatever it was, when we were nearly back home from dropping her off, I realized that she still had the keys to the corporate apartment we were living in at the time. So, we turned around; we retrieved the keys; we started driving home again.
But by that time, the sky had started to grow dark. Traffic quadrupled. Rain started pelting down from the sky, because, Seattle, and the boys started getting hungry. They screamed for gold fish crackers, for apple juice boxes, for anything to feed their ravenous bellies. The more they screamed, the more the elements around me seemed to increase.
Pretty soon, all three of us were bawling, me behind the wheel, them in their carseats behind me.
It was in this moment that my littlest began singing along to a song on the radio:
Haplelujah, haplelujah, haplelujah, haplelujah…
It was a two-year-old’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” with an added “p” sung by the most earnest and innocent of voices.
Within seconds, all three of us were singing Haplelujah. The chaos dissipated. Calm ensued. I can’t explain the mechanics of that particular moment, but this I know: even though we were in a wild state of hurt, when that song started played on the radio, something changed.
Maybe we knew we weren’t alone. Maybe we knew we’d someday be okay. Maybe we knew, in our heart of hearts, that singing broken hallelujahs is sometimes the only thing we can do.
I thought of this story when I sat with the text this last week, when God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and asked, “Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary God also?” Still, God gave them a sign, a sign made clear by the words of the One who would someday come: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."
And I saw this in Matthew 1, when an angel of the Lord visited Joseph. He was getting ready to dismiss his fiancé quietly, because how was it possible that they had not lived together yet “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit”? Then, the angel spoke words over Joseph: do not be afraid. “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” The angel fulfilled the words spoken 700 years before by the prophet Isaiah.
The angel, one might say, helped Joseph sing a broken hallelujah. Hope, after all, had not arrived. They were still in the mess of it all. Hope was still a looming unknown on the horizon.
Sometimes, in places of broken hallelujahs God most makes God’s self known. God most shows up. God most sings a song over us.
Psalm 80 adds to this notion: “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” Three verses pass. “Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” Yet another three verses, still: “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”
In each of the repetitions, a word or words is added: “God” becomes “God of hosts,” becomes “Lord God of hosts.” In each of the repetitions, hope increases. In each of the repetitions, the hearer is invited to rest our eyes on God, on the one whose faces shines so we may be saved.
This, of course, is both the beauty and the terror of Advent: we wait in eager anticipation for the one who is to come. Make no mistake that the four weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas – the birth, the arrival, the victory of it all! – is also marked by the darkest days, in the calendar year and sometimes in our personal lives as well.
I think about that “haplelujah” moment in Seattle: I was broken because my heart was somewhere else, back in Oakland, back in a city that had captured my heart, in a place that spoke my language, and with a people that had become my people.
I think about the darkness that marks some of our lives right now too. Some of us, many of us, perhaps all of us, feel caught up in broken hallelujahs. We yearn for light in the darkness, for the reprieve of Christmas Day to just get here already.
We are alone. We don’t know if we’re going to be okay, because everything we’ve got rides on hope alone. Will hope win out in the end?
Regardless, one thing is true: it’s in this place, when our hearts are broken and we do not know what will happen on the other side that the holiest of choruses are sometimes sung. The most broken of hallelujahs start to squeak out and make itself known.
This happened in an insignificant village called Nazareth, when “God’s peace was unfurled where life wasn’t working, where people hurt most, where hope was on the run.”1
Here, peace was given permission to bloom. Here, broken hallelujahs were sung with gusto. Here, a new kind of hope was born.
Perhaps it will be the same for us too.