Why do we sing?

Mark 1:9-15

“O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” Psalm 96:1

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.” Colossians 3:16

Some of my earliest memories have to do with singing.

Listening to tapes and singing with my family – especially when drying dishes which was me and my siblings’ job in the days before dishwashers.

And so we’d sing together and I remember that made the work a lot more fun.

Sunday evening Bible studies were something my family enjoyed hosting even before we moved to Acworth.  And they’d always begin in song – my Dad playing mandolin or guitar and we’d sing songs like “Joy is a Flag Flown High” and “Surely Goodness and Mercy Will Follow Me” among others.

I remember learning Bible verses as they were put to song.

And I remember singing hymns.

I remember my Dad would always sing the bass part loudly

And as I learned to read music and found out that I was tenor, I began learning to sing the tenor part.

Music has always been a big part of how I expressed myself –

Music allows words to say more than they can say on their own.

And so it only makes sense that so much of our church music is prayers and praises of God.

Words of praise like words of love contain so much more beyond the words themselves

and music helps to bring out that “so much more.”

The words themselves speak highly, but they gain depth of feeling when set to Bach or Beethoven or R. Vaughan Williams.

Theologian Karl Barth wrote: “The praise of God which constitutes the community and its assemblies seeks to bind and commit and therefore to be expressed, to well up and be sung in concert.  The Christian community sings.  It is not a choral society.  Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings.  Singing is the highest form of human expression.”

Hymns have been a part of my own experience since very young, but it wasn’t until moving to Acworth when I really became schooled in singing hymns from hymnbooks on a regular basis.

Hymnbooks contain the faith of former generations.

When we open our hymnbooks, we find hymns from all different times and people.

Some hymns tell the story of Jesus, some are full of praise of God and God’s works

Some hymns are prayers like “Just as I am”

Some are more somber reflections on the difficulties of life, songs of pilgrimage as they’re sometimes called.

I think it’s helpful to think of hymnbooks as a link from our faith of today to our parents and grandparents  faith of former days.

There’s a timeless aspect to so many hymns –

And I think it’s the way that they combine truths of faith with experience.

My favorites are those like Great Is Thy Faithfulness that combine poetic description of the beauty of God’s works with heartfelt experience.

“Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me”

And while they will never be the only aid in expressing our faith, hymns give us a connection to a deeper tradition, to former generations who like us struggled to believe, to love, to understand and to praise.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found hymns helpful in times when I’ve felt alone and afraid, dwelling in the silence of not knowing why I was having to go through this hard time.

I remember one such time in high school.

I learned the hymn, “Be Still My Soul” by heart and would sing it to myself often.

“Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake

To guide the future, as He has the past.

Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;

All now mysterious shall be bright at last.

Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know

His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.”

The spiritual life is not monochrome and we need songs for all times and all seasons.

There are times that are full of confidence and assurance, of feeling like we know where we’re going or what we believe.

And then before we know it, like Jesus in today’s reading, the Spirit sends us into the wilderness.

I was in the wilderness then in high school, and I’ve been back many times since.

We read that the angels took care of Jesus and he came out after forty days and began to follow his call,

I think there are many ways that God takes care of us in our wilderness.

And one big asset in my experience has been the family of God,

Sisters and brothers in the faith who have spoken an encouraging word,

Shared with me something true that they see in me or that they believe about the world.

Sung with me and shared a sacred moment.

Hymns can be like that – words shared from generations past about the world as they see it,

about God as they’ve come to know God, about Jesus and his grace

About the power of love, the hope that peace will come.

When we sing together, together we await God’s renewing grace, God’s reassuring direction –

those of us in a more stable place sing alongside those of us who are struggling

We sing together the praise of God, the power of grace and love.

Weaker voices join stronger voices, bass joins alto, soprano joins tenor

And we make a harmony of voice sharing in life and its joys and its pains

And most of all we share together in a hope, a faith, and love

that seems more truly expressed by the diverse choir of God’s beloved.

We together devote ourselves to God and to one another – in our song we embody the togetherness by which God will grow and support us, we become for one another like the angels to Jesus in the wilderness.

We slow down and listen and hear and speak profound truths to one another and give thanks and praise to God our help in ages past and our hope for years to come, our shelter and our home.