I’ve had a song stuck in my head all week. It’s the song that has been sung by millions of protesters in Hong Kong in recent days, Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.
Watch this vid from Time Magazine to hear protesters singing over the last few weeks.
I remember singing it as a kid in my dinky 80s Baptist church but I had completely forgotten about it until these last few days. It was a stroke of genius by church leaders in Hong Kong to start singing the song at the protests.
For one thing, religious gatherings are exempt from the definition of a “gathering” or “assembly” under Hong Kong’s Public Order Ordinance and are thus more difficult to police. So, you might say, they figured out a loophole to prevent the protest from being clamped down on by government forces. They turned it into on enormous worship event. In this, the churches were gifting the community their religious freedom - which is a word for Australians in our cultural moment.
For another, the conspicuous presence of churches at these protests seems to have had a soothing influence on the masses. Unlike the Umbrella Movement of 2014 it seems the protests have been largely peaceful. The ABC story interviewed one Christian protester who said, "Christians started turning up at protests to sing 'Sing Hallelujah To The Lord' in case there was the chance of violence when police wanted to disperse protesters," Mr Leung said. "But once they started singing, everyone became calm. "Their singing turned a clash into a chorus. But there’s a third reason that this was the perfect song to choose for these demonstrations.
Think about the song itself for a moment. It only has five words.
Sing Hallelujah to the Lord
Sing Hallelujah to the Lord
Sing Hallelujah
Sing Hallelujah
Sing Hallelujah to the Lord
The first line surprises, because though it extends an invitation to worship the Lord, it does so in a minor key. There is real empathy in that first line - things are not as they ought to be, the discontent is legitimate. And yet the invitation is made to sing to the Lord in the midst of that discontent, and then repeated. By the third line a note of hopefulness enters the melody. Things could be different, things will be different. The song guides our hearts to the the Lord worthy of the Hallelujah. But this hope is not pie in the sky - the final line returns to the same place as the first as if to say, “our hope does not wallpaper over the present crisis - but it does help you navigate it.”
I love this choice because it is the exact experience of the Christian life. We begin in holy discontent, we dare to look upwards to Christ - the one worthy of our hallelujahs and hear him say, “I will rescue from your pain and I will undo your shame” and then we continue to struggle in our present age, but now equipped with a hope that helps us traverse even the most difficult pressures. Pray for the churches in Hong Kong.
Pray that in the midst of their pressures they would remain faithful. Pray that the multitude of people (somewhere between a third and a quarter of the population of the island) who marched and sang would have been forced to reckon with the Lord we are invited to sing to.
grace and peace,
Steve