“Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken, but endures forever.”
Psalm 125:1
Real quick, name a song you learned as a kid that you still know by heart. Go ahead - take a beat and really think about that one. I bet there are many more lyrics sitting on a shelf inside the dusty attic of your brain than you realize. There are things you did and said yesterday that you have no ability to recall, and yet, if someone played the first couple of seconds of some catchy song you passively heard and sang as a nine-year-old, you could dust off that ancient relic and sing every last phrase without breaking a sweat. What is up with that?
I am a child of the 1980s who was a teenager in the 1990s, which means I was there when hip-hop took off, when Top 40 contemporary easy listening was eclipsed by blockbuster pop country, when Disney breathed new life into musical show tunes, and when alternative rock and grunge obliterated everything else on the airwaves. Right now, if you found yourself on a crowded subway or in a sports stadium with enough people around my age, you could just start the first couple of lines to certain songs, and people like me would mindlessly take over from there without any preparation or advance warning. Just kick off that Aerosmith song from “Armageddon,” start the first few words of “Ice Ice Baby,” or basically any sitcom theme song like “Saved by the Bell” or “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and you could pretty much mind-control a bunch of Gen Xers for three or four minutes.
Why does your brain work like that? Why do people my parents’ age struggle to remember their meds but never forget all the words to “Land of 1000 Dances”? Well, it has to do with the way memory is built in the brain. First of all, music has structure that makes it memorable and sometimes even inevitable. Songs have rhythm and rhyme, and those kinds of patterns are cookies and milk for the brain. Not only that, but a song you learned as a kid probably got repeated tons of times in short bursts throughout your experience. Also, many of those tunes and lyrics are associated with emotional moments - times when you felt safe and secure at home. Loads of repetition, aided by familiar patterns and weighted with emotional energy, made those musical memories incredibly durable. Yesterday’s lunch menu, on the other hand, was encoded only once, and it is competing with the interference of all the thousands of other unremarkable lunches you’ve eaten.
This is one of those places where you really see the genius of the biblical authors. The Scriptures are loaded with thematic connective tissue that tells your brain what to remember, what to look at, what to think about, and sometimes even how to feel. This week, we talked about how the author of the New Testament book of Hebrews was encouraging people not to give up on their faith in Jesus even though their lives were hard. The plea did not promise surefire proof that everything would be okay. There was no assurance that all the resources needed to meet the moment would be provided, but rather a reminder of a deeper reality they were already a part of. The author of Hebrews says that we who believe in Jesus are already so much closer to God than we know because, right now, we are participating in an invisible reality that is somehow so much more real than anything we can see or touch in this world. The thing is, the author delivers this spiritual punch with a pretty powerful brain-chemistry hack: It’s a sermon gift-wrapped with a classic kid’s song. Checkmate.
God’s people used to travel to their capital city three times a year for huge, weeklong religious and community festivals. The entire country would pour into the same place and celebrate the same thing. It was like having Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July with everyone in your entire state every year. And they would travel together on foot from every village. Imagine the roving pilgrimage of hundreds of thousands of people several times a year, every single year of your life. Think about the years of memories of setting up camp along the way with all your friends and relatives, neighbors and strangers on your way to Jerusalem.
One thing we know about these journeys is that people sang songs. Night after night, year after year, generation after generation, they sat together on the way to the festivities, singing songs they had learned from their grandmothers and uncles, their rabbis and their children. Psalms 120 through 134 became a kind of greatest-hits album passed down through the generations. They were known as the “Songs of Ascents” because they were associated with going up to the holy city.
So, when the author of Hebrews wanted to tell people why they shouldn’t give up on Jesus, what was the trick? Simple. Get them singing one of their favorite old songs. Hebrews 12 says, “But you have come to Mount Zion,” which would easily trigger their old familiar song, Psalm 125 which says, “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.” And before you know it, mentally and emotionally, you’re around the campfire once again - surrounded and safe, just like you always are with God Himself.