ArticleBlog | How do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
How do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 09.12.19
This great question, asked by the Psalmist in exile in Babylon (Psalm 137), followed in 1975 by Boney M, has taxed me recently. In what might well be the Lord’s calling and yet could still be a midlife crisis, or possibly both, last year I joined the Royal Air Force. Moving from theological education, when I taught at Cranmer Hall, to military chaplaincy is not perhaps a standard move, but I like to surprise. In a quest for adventure, and with a thirst for the new, off I went into a strange new land. The question of how to sing Lord’s song has been pressing because the territory has been so unfamiliar. We have a song of hope, of love, of possibility; a song of faith and forgiveness; Jesus’s song of life from death, sung by a choir that has room for the poor, the dispossessed, and the stranger, room for the sinner, the fool and the saint. So how do we sing this song? That’s the nagging question. In what follows I want to reflect on my experiences in military chaplaincy to see what light they shed on this question of tuning our voices.
Last year I completed three months basic training at RAF College Cranwell. This involved marching, learning drill, precision ironing, room inspections, sleeping out under a blanket of snow, cold ration packs, and running about carrying stretchers (though not carrying a weapon – I hasten to add.) It was GI Jane meets The Vicar of Dibley. I graduated in May 2018 as a newly minted RAF Chaplain. I now work at a busy unit in Oxfordshire and often take services in rural Oxfordshire churches. Both are, to me, strange new lands. How then to sing this song?
