First Sunday after Christmas

Sunday, December 28, 2008

St. David’s Episcopal Church, DeWitt NY

The Rev. James C. Bresnahan, Interim Rector

“Others’ Songs to Sing”

 

It is a great gift that each Sunday we step into the midst of Christian community and have songs to sing, the tunes of which we did not compose, the words of which we did not write.

 

We enter into the singing of others and into songs by others.

 

The martyred pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “It is not you that sings, it is the church that sings, and you, as a member of the church, join in its singing.”

 

When we are not here, the singing goes on without us.  It does not need our voice.  But here, we are drawn into it, so that the church’s praise becomes our praise too. The hymns of all ages, most written long before us, will be here long after us also.  They do not need our singing. But while we are here, we join in singing them.

 

What gift it is, then, that we can enter into the singing of hymns written over nearly two millennia, from the chanted psalms of early Christians, to Syrian, Greek, and Latin hymns, through the hymns of the Reformation and post-Reformation, down to modern times. We have been gifted by every Christian era with words and tunes to carry our prayers and praise to God.

 

And today, though we did not sing it, we entered into the joy of hearing a hymn from Sudanese Christians.  Perhaps, one day, when the energy enters our more sedate bodies, we may sing that song too.

 

In this Christmas season, I am especially grateful to the writers and composers of the carols we sing and for how they let the Christmas joy in our hearts come to loud expression. I have a hard time imagining Christmas worship apart from the carols I’ve known and sung since childhood.

 

Today we sing “Joy to the World,” written by Isaac Watts, with music by Georg Friedrich Haendel.  Hearts need such words, and lips such sounds, to express the joy of Christmas. And what sweet words and melody belong to “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” which carried our first praise to God this morning, and which rehearses the Christmas story, including us in its last verse, as we, along with all the saints, join angels, shepherds, and sages in praising God.

 

Church leaders and individual Christians have not always appreciated new hymnody.  St. Ephraem, in the 4^th century, bemoaned how heretical Christians “clothed the pest of depravation in the garment of musical beauty."  So he countered with hymns of his own, sixty-five of which included condemnation of Gnostic beliefs.

 

When hymns in Europe departed from Biblical texts and spoke of human feeling, and when others after introduced what was deemed an excessive concentration on using words and tunes to stir up emotion, there was great uproar.

 

And when have you not heard or spoken the complaint, “Why can’t we just sing the old, old hymns”?

 

But, if we can set aside focusing on our own particular likes and dislikes, we can see and appreciate what a great heritage is ours of hymns of all Christian times and all Christian places, including hymns from the far east and the lands of Africa and lands to our south that are now making their way into northwestern singing. What range of expression and of musical style there now is to convey the prayers and praise of heart and mind!

 

I want to encourage you, just as you would memorize the times table or the valences of the atomic table, that you commit to memory all verses of ten or so hymns of the church; some hymns expressing joy and gratitude; some expressing trust and hope; some expressing peace or harmony.  For what purpose: so that when you are alone lying in a hospital bed, you have words of faith for your soul to hold on to; so that when you are ecstatic over good fortune, you have words to say other than Yippee" to carry your gratitude to God; and so that when catastrophe hits, you have words to give expression to comfort and hope.

 

I had a remarkable professor of systematic theology in seminary, who was a deep and critical thinker, and a Kierkegaard scholar.  Every so often, in the midst of a heavy lecture, he would quote from memory a verse or more of a hymn, which made what he was lecturing as much a matter of the heart as of the head. The hymn verses that he spoke were his testimony that we don’t grasp God when we talk about God but when we relate to God in conversation out of our heart and soul.

 

Today’s Gospel reading is not a hymn, but it soars, like a song.  It has a rhythmic quality to it and mystical as well.  In reflecting on the Creation story in Genesis, the Gospel writer imagines us back at the beginnings of heavens and earth.  And God said, Let there be light.  And God said, Let there be swimming things and creeping things.  And God said, Let there be vegetation.  And God said.  What is this ‘saying,’ this speaking of God, the words that come from the mouth of God.  It is Christ, the Gospel writer answers - the eternal word, the eternal speaking of God.  He is the word that spoke God’s will and accomplished God’s purpose in creation, and the very word that fulfills it now.

 

He is the word made flesh in Jesus.  And we have seen his glory, the writer concludes, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

 

That same word, incarnate in Jesus, addresses us each Sunday – in words of Scripture and hopefully in sermon, in the words of hymns of all centuries, and in words like “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven; the Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation.

 

Some words challenge and provoke us, as they should.  Some comfort and console.  Some inspire and lift up; some humble us and make us bow.  But however the word comes to us, it is always to bring us to where we hope more, trust more, forgive more, rejoice more, love more; and to know more how loved we are.

 

May that word abide in our hearts, as it comes to us in song or spoken, so that our words and our whole life may be a hymn to God and a response to God’s deep love.