The Wesleyan Way, Part 4: Singing God’s Love
The Wesleyan Way, Part 4:
Singing God's Love
August 25, 2024
Ordinary Time
Luke 2:8-15
***
"This only do I seek... to behold the beauty of the Lord..." (Psalm 27:4).
God is beautiful. To be in God's presence is to be in the presence of beauty. To know God's love is to know that beauty has touched you, claimed you, and lives inside you. Sometimes the beauty of God is hidden, as when we enter the holy darkness of not-knowing, or as Jesus hangs broken and bloody on the cross. Yet beauty shines from these places, too. The beauty of silent mystery; the beauty of total solidarity.
We are made in the image of God. This must mean that God has made us to manifest beauty. The Hebrew psalmist wanted nothing more than to come to God's house, the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and gaze upon God's beauty. The New Testament says to the Church, "You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house..." (1 Peter 2:5). Through Christ, the beauty we so desire, the beauty of God, is not out there awaiting our pilgrimage but latent within and between us; it is waiting to be unleashed through our attention. While meditating on the union of God and humanity in Christ, the early church father St. Irenaus wrote that the glory of God is man fully alive. God has made us to have beautiful lives, beautiful vocations, beautiful homes and neighborhoods, beautiful economics, politics, and art.
Wherever the Spirit of God is at work in the world, you will find people who are making things beautiful, and people who are making beautiful things. You will find people engaged with beauty through the work of restoration: mending what is broken, reconciling those who are estranged. And you will find people engaged with beauty through the work of creation: poems, gardens, paintings, and, unfailingly, music.
***
Music.
The good news of God is meant to be sung. This has been true from the beginning. We can't help ourselves. Song records the story; song stirs the heart; song binds the community together.
Our most ancient fragments of the Bible are verses of Hebrew song.
There is the song of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, who, with tambourine in hand, danced and sang of God's victory on the far bank of Red Sea:
Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15:21)
There is the song of Deborah the judge, who celebrated the downfall of Sisera at the hands of Ja'el:
Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
of tent-dwelling women most blessed.
She put her hand to the tent peg
and her right hand to the worker's mallet;
she struck Sisera a blow;
she crushed his head. (Judges 5:24, 26).
The good news of God is meant to be sung. It was true, too, at the beginning of the Christian Church. Songs of worship and ancient poetic liturgies came first. The letters and the Gospels of the New Testament, which record some of these songs and liturgies, came later.
The Philippian hymn:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself... (2:5-7a)
The Johannine prologue:
In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
Revelation's heavenly worship of martyrs, saints, and strange creatures:
To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might
forever and ever! (5:13)
And, of course, the songs of Christmas. Mary's Magnificat. Zechariah's Benedictus. The angelic choir:
Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. (Luke 2:14)
Even then, when God had entered the world in almost complete hiddenness and humility as a newborn child, there were songs.
***
The history of Christianity in America contains one of the most powerful and enduring examples of the union between Holy Spirit, human spirit, and song. When Africans were taken by force from their homelands and forced onto the slave ships, they were shorn of their cultures, languages, and families. The intent of slavery was to commodify the bodies of men, women, and children and turn them into tools of economic production. Slavery works by taking somebodies and making them nobodies.
But song is the opposite. Song takes nobodies, takes anybody and everybody, and makes them a somebody. African and African American slaves were reborn through the songs that they discovered and made together. We now call these songs spirituals.
They were an entirely knew and unprecedented art form. More than an art form, they were and are a living power. They carried secret messages of freedom. They took the oppressive Christian language of the white master class and restored it to its true purpose. As the black liberation theologian James Cone once wrote, these songs undermined "the heresy of white Christianity. ...The spiritual, then, is the spirit of the people struggling to be free."[1] Strangers sang and swayed together in secret meetings; they became communities of resistances. Whipped, exhausted, dehumanized bodies danced and sang for a God who saw them, who knew their pain, who would one day set them free.
The good news of God is meant to be sung. Slavery was bad news, but the slaves had discovered that the crucified and resurrected Christ was on their side, and they refused to let slavery dictate their inner destiny.
When Israel was in Egypt's land, Let my people go;
Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go;
Go down Moses, 'way down in Egypt's land;
Tell ole Pharaoh, Let my people go.
...
O children let's go down, let's go down, let's go down,
O children let's go down, down in the valley to pray.
...
It's me, it's me
It's me, O Lord,
Standin' in the need of prayer.
...
Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere,
Go tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born.
...
We shall overcome, we shall overcome.
We shall overcome someday.
Deep in my heart, I still believe,
We shall overcome someday.
At the same historical moment but from a very different social location, John Wesley was instructing his own people: "See that you join with the congregation [to sing] as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing." In other words, singing -- really singing -- takes us as we are in our weakness and makes us strong.
***
The good news of God cannot help but be sung.
The Wesleyan revival caught fire in eighteenth century industrial England in large part because of the hymns written by Charles Wesley. Charles was John's younger brother. Like John, he was an ordained priest in the Anglican Church. Charles had traveled with John for the ill-fated Georgia mission in the American colonies. He was a founding member of the Oxford Holy Club. Shortly before John had his Aldersgate experience and received an inner assurance of God's love for him, Charles had had a similar experience. The two were spiritually united.
We've seen how John brought to the Methodist revival his skills as preacher, theologian, advocate, and organizer. Charles brought the art. Charles knew the power of song, and of beauty more generally, to solidify, inspire, and energize a people. He knew that the good news needed to be sung.
He also understood the formative power of singing. People could learn and remember theological truths better through songs than through sermons. We teach our children numbers, colors, letters, and animals through simple songs. In college, I memorized the Greek and Hebrew alphabets by setting them to melodies.
And songs don't just help us remember. They also become something like prayers living inside us; they attach themselves to memories and feelings. They remind us of who we are and where we've come from. They orient us.
Charles wrote hymns that spoke of God's deeply personal love, God's immediate forgiveness and mercy, and God's presence in the community. For his time and place, these songs were radical. They were personal rather than abstract; they were written to be sung in intimate small groups as effectively as in large gatherings. By singing them, ordinary working-class people came to trust that God really did care about them.
Charles wrote 6,500 hymns. And though they've been set to different melodies over time, some of them have had remarkable staying power in the Church.
O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise,
the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace!
...
Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set they people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.
...
Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the newborn King;
peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinner reconciled!"
...
Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
...
Jesus, lover of my soul,
let me to thy bosom fly,
while the nearer waters roll,
while the tempest still is high.
...
Rejoice, the Lord is King!
Your Lord and King adore;
mortals, give thanks and sing,
and triumph evermore.
Lift up your heart,
lift up your voice; rejoice;
again I say, rejoice!
All of these verses came to -- and then from -- the heart of Charles Wesley. All were written out of his own profound experience of God's love, which is beautiful, and God's beauty, which is love.
***
Beauty always accompanies great revivals of the human spirit. There is no single formula to beauty, art, and song. Often the imposition of a formula can get in the way.
It is good to take the songs of scripture and set them to melody -- power will always linger there. It is good to sing the African American spirituals -- to really sing them, with proper feeling, as a part of communities of resistance. And it is good to sing these songs of Wesley: they orient us to who we are and where we come from, and many of them have been inscribed on our hearts to the point that they are not just songs but prayers.
But the pattern across time is what's most important: The pattern of beauty and song entering the world through human communities that have been touched by the spirit of God.
God wants to make us beautiful as He is beautiful. God wants to make us fully alive as He is fully alive. God wants us be creative as He is creative. Sometimes this means, as the scripture says, that we must "sing to the Lord a new song" (Psalm 96:1).
We will always receive another email from another cause asking for our money, our vote, our volunteer hours. But God invites the Church to be a community with delight and wonder at its heart. God invites us to be a people whose activity springs from beauty, the beauty of divine love reaching out to us. God invites us to be a people whose activity is aimed at beauty, the beauty of the coming Kingdom of right relationship and peace. God invites us to be a people whose activity is all along sustained by beauty, the beauty of the community worshipping, serving, and reconciling.
For these reasons Wesley spurs us on from across the centuries: "[S]ing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength... [S]trive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound. ...Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing."
And the people of God say together: Amen.
[1]James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NW: Orbis Books, 1997), 23, 30.