Our short text from Ephesians today opens up with apocalyptic urgency:
“Be careful how you’re living!” “The days are evil!” “Make the most of your life!” “Seize the day!” “Don’t get drunk – because that’s debauchery!”
When you start hearing this passage you might think that you’re in for a whole long list of warnings of how bad things are out there in this world and how you need to get it together. Or maybe you start listening when you hear the word “debauchery” and you’re like…whatever that means, it sounds like a whole lot more fun than careful living.
As humans it seems like we’re always trying to find some way of making it through uncertainty. And there are varying approaches for how to live when the world around us feels out of control, maybe evil even.
Some people double down on fear and moral certainty, living as if nervously prepping for the end of the world and isolating from their neighbors. Another approach when things seem bad, is to inebriate ourselves. Alcohol is one thing that can bring a measure of detachment and fun for a little bit, and we humans have all sorts of creative ways to numb ourselves to the sadness and beauty around and within us, all out of a desperation to feel less sad and more free. I don’t need to rattle off the list of chemical intoxicants and stimulants and all the behavioral coping patterns that can be used to alter our perception of reality.
“BUT – be filled with the Spirit! …. as you sing!,” the writer of Ephesians encourages!
What is it about singing that helps us understand better the will of God? What is it about singing that frees us to lead lives of wisdom?
In Ephesians framework – it is the Spirit that moves the church to sing. And in song we offer our whole selves and our full voices in praise to God. The Spirit’s movement within us helps us inhabit these bodies of ours more fully.
I wonder if that same yearning is also related to substance use because it’s often really hard to inhabit our bodies mindfully. For lots of folks if you’re chased around by negative thoughts and anxieties, substances like alcohol falsely promise a measure of release and the hope of returning to inhabit oneself with ease and joy.
When God’s Spirit moves us to sing – it’s something we can only do with our whole selves. Different than talking or reading, when we make meaning through singing the divisions between thinking and feeling, body and mind collapse.
I am struck by how the first step in any music, singing included isn’t the sound itself. It’s not the melodies and harmonies and rhythms and words… But the first step in music making is that silence, that holy silence of the breath before the sound. It’s the inhale before the first note is sung.
It’s the pause before the guitar strum or the thump of the bass drum or the bow’s first stroke on the cello’s taught string. It’s the curved fingers ready to press the piano key.
When we make music, we listen to that holy pause, that holy silence and we are connected back to the God who made us and is as close as our own breath. When we sing with rhythm, we are reminded that the first rhythm is the pulse of our own heartbeat, the pulse of God’s love.
Ephesians warns of how excessive indulgence in the wrong desires is a foolish of our times and bodies. And the wisest way to inhabit these beautiful bodies of ours is to welcome the outpouring of God’s Spirit in our lives. Singing then, is one way for us to respond in a fully embodied act of praise. But I do recognize that not all of us are good at singing!
My grandpa Kreider, was hard of hearing for as long as I knew him. He’d had a really bad fever as a child and lost hearing in one of his ears. And so he wore a hearing aid in the other ear, an ear that didn’t hear all that well itself, and he’d tilt that ear towards you while listening. In his later years around the dinner table he relished interjecting with an intriguing question, even though he struggled to hear the conversation that ensued in response.
And even for all his hearing struggles he loved music, not so much making it, but the mere fact that music was happening and that he could be a part of that happening. At the beginning of family meals before we ate, he would say, “Let us sing, so-and-so hymn.” And then he’d just wait – because he couldn’t start the song or sing the right pitch himself. And he’d just wait until someone else able to confidently sing would set us off launching into song.
“But be filled with the Spirit,” says Ephesians, “as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves…” My grandpa was drawn to this “among yourselves” quality of singing, even though he never did sing well himself.
Singing draws us together with other people, uniting us in breath and rhythm and word and melody. When we sing together we are acknowledging the work of the Spirit “among ourselves.” Joining in song with other people to offer praise to God blurs the line between the personal and the collective.
I hope that when you come to worship and we sing together – that using your voice is a moving and personal experience of connection to God. Whether your voice is high and bright, low and gravely, quiet and delicate, full and warm or unsure and wavering – I hope that whenever you use that voice to, as Epehsians says, “make melody to the Lord in your heart,” it is a personal act for you. I hope that singing in worship is a way for you to give gratitude to God. Singing is deeply personal.
But it also moves us beyond ourselves to notice and listen, connect and find shared rhythm with one another. And sometimes in our singing as a church community – we use our voices to support those who find words to sing. I’m moved by the Adam Tice song in our hymnal, “Hold On” – which begins, “When pain or sorrow is too much to bear; when your heart feels numb, unable to care, when faith seems so pointless that you cannot pray, when no one knows quite what to say, then hold on, hold on, to find a way to get through. And when your hope is gone and you can’t hold on, we will hold on to you.”
For me singing together is a profound way to hold onto one another and to our shared faith in Jesus. There have been points in my life when I have come to worship with others, but I have not been able to sing. The words of a hymn cannot rise up out of my choked up throat. But to be among others who could sing and let those words and melodies wash over me has bgeen beautiful.
And I wonder if for some of you – if there are times you show up to church – and you don’t have the words to pray or are too wounded or jaded or tired to find much enthusiasm in singing – and then the singing of another buoys you up or prays over you the word that you yourself could not offer.
Singing leads us to an encounter with God’s wisdom, because it leads us into the wisdom of our own body and breath and soul. The Spirit moves us to song, connecting us to one another, in an expression of the faith in Jesus we share in common.
The last verse of our text from Ephesians is perhaps the most difficult. When we’re filled with the Spirit, it says, we will “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among [ourselves], singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I’m on board for poetic psalms and hymns and worship songs and heartfelt melody making. But my hang up here is the whole giving thanks to God “at all times” and “for everything.” Really? All the time and for everything we’re supposed to sing out our gratitude to God in the name of Jesus?
I think as Christians in general, and certainly as Mennonites of a relatively progressive and sometimes academic persuasion here in this congregation, we sometimes sing things that we don’t always believe in a cognitive heady sense. But when theology is set to music, when theologies find a groove and cadence, they hit our hearts differently than ideas just written or spoken out loud. I’m not advocating for dangerous theologies to be smoothed over with pretty harmonies – but I do think that music can offer us a way to proclaim rich truths, often in a more genuine way than we might otherwise just speaking or writing.
And I wonder if in this sense – it is possible to always give thanks to God in song. Music is a gift of the Spirit that allows us to pray without ceasing.
That means that even though we live in a climate-changed world, where storms of our own making continue to buffett and crash against the most vulnerable, together, we can still sing, “No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging.”
Even when we and loved ones face surgery and recovery, decline and death, separation and loss, even still the Spirit moves us to proclaim, “Since Love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep singing!”
Even though our days are packed with activities of work and school and home, we discover that singing isn’t a distraction from life’s burdens, but an opportunity to more deeply connect with the Spirit at work in ourselves and this community of faith.
So in the words of the hymn we will now sing together (Voices Together #83 – “When in Our Music God is Glorified”):
“Let every instrument be tuned for praise! Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise! And may God give us faith to sing always! Aleluia!”