... that will not heed the tune of the charmer, however skillful the enchanter may be. – Psalm 58:5

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 2, 2013): Psalm 58

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a story about a piper (a man who plays some sort of musical pipe) who lures a group of children away from the city of Hamelin in Germany never to be seen again. In one of its many versions of the story, the Piper was someone who was skilled at leading rats away from the city using his music. In the Middle Ages, rats were a significant problem, not just because there were a lot of them and they were a pest – but they were also the carriers of disease and the reason for the many plagues that infested this period in time. So, in this version of the story, the Pied Piper is actually a necessity – the people need him. But in the tale of the Pied Piper, the townsfolk refuse to pay the Piper (and yes, this is where the phrase “paying the piper” comes from) and the Piper takes his revenge on the town by turning his music on the children. The story actually would seem to have a dual moral. The first is that bad things will happen if we refuse to pay our debts (somehow, we all have to pay the piper.) But there is a second moral warning within the pages of the story, and that warning is that it is dangerous to be influenced by other people.

For our Western culture, we have taken this second moral and raised it to impossible heights. We take pride in the fact that we are independent – which really simply means beyond influence. We have trained ourselves and our kids to be deaf to the music of the piper – to be not influenced by others around us. Often we explain this by simply saying that we are a people who make our own decisions. And this brings us into direct conflict with the Bible story.

The Biblical story is based on the idea that we should live in community – and be influenced by community. We are told within its pages that it is good to bring up our children in the Lord – and that means that we as parents should make the commitment to be an influence for God on our kids. Repeatedly we see the conversion experience of the Bible being a community experience - because the community was committed to the influence  of each other.

Part of our problem is that our starting point is evil. If we become the independent person that we seem to believe that we need to be, then we will be forever evil because we will be the only influence on our life that we will ever know. The psalmist sees the plight of men and he recognizes that what we really need is a reverse Pied Piper – each one of us needs the Piper that will come and lead us into good. And that the real difference between people that are committed to the good that they can do and people who do evil is that the ones who do evil are deaf to the charmer – the good piper. In the imagery of the psalmist, they are like the adder snake – which because it is deaf cannot be charmed and led into good.      

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 61