On Singing the Lord's Song

There's a thread running through our worship readings this summer that I didn't notice when I planned The Story We're In. It runs through Naboth's vineyard, Micah's stolen fields, and the exiles weeping by the rivers of Babylon. The thread is one Hebrew word: nachalah, inheritance. Land held in trust, passed down through generations, belonging finally to God and not to us. So these aren't three separate Sunday stories. They're one story in three parts: refusal, indictment, and exile. And they sound a lot like our own moment.

In First Kings, Naboth won't sell his land even though King Ahab offers a fair price. Naboth tells Ahab he can't give up what his ancestors handed down (1 Kings 21:3). This isn't stubbornness. The land isn't a thing to be sold. It's nachalah, not his to give away. So Ahab sulks, Jezebel has Naboth killed, and the vineyard is taken.

The Prophet Micah shows the same theft, but bigger, as a system instead of a single crime. "They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away" (Micah 2:2). Micah names how it works: they do it "because it is in the power of their hand" (2:1). They take because they can.

As I read these stories it was that line that changed who the story was about for me.

When we hear a Bible story, where do we put ourselves? Most of us stand with the one who was wronged. But the prophet isn't talking to Naboth. He's talking to Ahab, and to the people who lie awake scheming and get up in the morning to grab what they planned. Micah isn't scolding a whole generation, some vague bad group we can all cluck at. He's naming the people with the power to take and abuse.

So the honest question isn't "am I the one being wronged?" It's a harder question.  We need to ask, where does my own power let me take what isn't mine, and call it a fair deal?

I think about this daily. Whose water and air and quiet and future is my use of AI spending? Whose life is changed because of my garbage? But the sharper question isn't what I consume so much as it is what my position lets me protect. The vote to defend what's already comfortable. The rally I talk myself out of because I am sure it won't matter if I show up. And underneath those, the more pointed one: the words I soften before anyone asks me to, and the line I already decided not to cross before anyone's even drawn it. Obeying in advance before a demand has ever been made.

And yet the story assumes something hopeful about me and many of us: that we can still choose. The prophet's sharp word only stings people who still have that freedom. There’s a strange kind of dignity in that.

But, here's the part we'd rather skip. Naboth's refusal fails. He isn't rescued. Judgment falls on Ahab, but it doesn't raise Naboth or give the vineyard back to his children. He says no, it costs him everything, and nothing changes. To call Naboth a hero is to call him a hero who loses and stays lost.

We need to be able to say that, because it's true, and because the people we're called to stand beside are so often right there. Standing with people who refuse can't depend on them winning. If we only honor resistance after it succeeds, we abandon almost everyone right when they need us most. The historian Tad Stoermer, in A Resistance History of the United States (2026), asks it this way: what makes people accept the cost of resistance when they can see it coming? That's Naboth's question. It might be ours.

To go a little deeper, I’d like to explore the three kinds of resistance our summer texts reveal. None dramatic. All costly.

Refusal. Naboth's kind: he won't hand over what isn't his to sell. I think of Ona Judge, who escaped George Washington's household and refused every effort to drag her back, choosing a poor, unsafe freedom over comfortable slavery (Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught). And of the water protectors at Standing Rock in 2016, whose whole point was that the land isn't a commodity to run a pipeline through.

Naming. Micah's kind: describing the theft plainly. Ida B. Wells did exactly this. In her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors, she counted and documented lynching and named it for what it was, against every official story that called it something else. But naming gets softened fast. We remember Rosa Parks as a tired woman who kept her seat. She was really a trained organizer, active for decades (Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks). Telling the truth about her is itself naming.

Memory. Psalm 137's kind: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither." The exiles won't sing their sacred songs on command for their captors. They won't blend in, won't perform, won't let exile erase them. In our time, we see this at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which won't let the lynched go nameless. Remembering truthfully is resistance.

Now the hard part, so I don't make this sound easy. If resistance so often fails, if Naboth stays dead, why not go all the way with Ecclesiastes? Everything is vanity, vapor. Why not decide nothing holds, the powerful always win, and the only sane move is to look after your own?

But look at what the texts actually do. Lament isn't despair. Despair has no one to talk to. It’s a blank wall.  The exiles are still talking to God, still asking "how can we sing here?" The refusal to stop crying out is already a no to despair.

So, I find hope in that uncomfortable place. Not that resistance secretly pays off; Naboth proves it doesn't. But Naboth is remembered, and Ahab is condemned. For three thousand years, the tradition has kept this story and kept its verdict: the theft was wrong, full stop. A the people who keep telling that story have already decided it matters.

For me, that is what it means to stay open to grace. Not that grace shows up and fixes the ending. For me, grace is the openness itself: the refusal to declare the story over, to decide for God that nothing here can be redeemed. Despair says nothing works, so close the book and walk away. Staying open is harder. It says, I can't see how this gets made right, and I don't get to say that it can't be.

We've been practicing this as a congregation ever since I’ve been here, trusting the Spirit through grief and hope alike. That's not naïveté. That's Naboth's posture exactly: we refuse because it's right, not because it always works.

We are both, a people being indicted this summer, and a people asked to stand with those who say no when the cost is high. Both are true. I don't think we're meant to resolve that tension. I think we're meant to live inside it, refusing, naming, and remembering, and asking honestly, and out loud to God, how shall we sing the Lord's song in this strange land.

May we keep finding the notes that our ancestors sung and add our own harmony.

Pastor Robin