Yesterday

7-7-19 Sermon NotesYesterday”

This coming Sunday, I will start a really “different” kind of sermon series. It’s called Rock-n-Roll Summer, and each week I will look at a different rock song and how it might tie in to a biblical passage. I’ll look theologically at the message of the song, and hopefully we all will learn and grow from the experience! Our focus for July will be the Beatles. Yep…the Beatles. You don’t have to be a Beatles fan to get something from this series!

We will start with Paul McCartney’s haunting ballad, Yesterday. To say it has been a popular song would be an understatement. It was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio poll, and was voted the number one pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine in the year 2000. In the song, you can feel the anguish of the man who longs for yesterday, when he and his sweetheart were together…before he “said something wrong” and she went away. If only he could go back to yesterday…

Yesterday a lament, really. It reminds me an awful lot of the lament in Psalm 137…

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
3 For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How could we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy. (Psalm 137: 1-6 NRSV)

When your “today” is painful, it’s natural to look for and long for yesterday. Two problems come along with “yesterday” thinking. (1) We don’t always see “yesterday” clearly. (2) While we can learn from yesterday, we can’t go back there. We will talk more about that Sunday.

See you in church!
Pastor Sam