Singing the Counter-Culture
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
In our Methodist congregation we recently sang the hymn, “Maker, in Whom We Live” (United Methodist Hymnal, 88). Even though the lyrics were written by John Wesley, it was a new hymn to me. The hymn is a wondrously symmetrical expression of praise to the Trinity:
First stanza: “Maker in Whom We Live”: The Father
Second stanza: “Incarnate deity”: The Son
Third stanza: “Spirit of Holiness”: The Holy Spirit
Fourth stanza: “Eternal triune God”: The Trinity
Given our general careless theological illiteracy, I imagine that not very many congregants recognized that we were lining out the Trinity, in praise, referencing each “Person” and then the community of the Trinity.
The wording of the first stanza caught my eye and caused me to linger:
Maker, in whom we live, in whom we are and move,
the glory, power, and praise receive for thy creating love.
Let all the angel throng give thanks to God on high,
while earth repeats the joyful song and echoes to the sky.
The first word, “maker,” pertains to the creator, some rendering here the address as “father.” “Maker” is a good way to avoid nominal specificity. “Are and move” alludes to Acts 17:28 wherein Paul preaches before the Aeropagus in Athens:
For in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets
have said.
The reference to “even your own poets” suggests that the phrase was one already known by Paul’s audience as a citation of the mystery of the creator God. The phrase bespeaks indwelling amid the wonder of God.
Our singing, we assert in the verse, is the offer of glory, power, and praise to the creator God in response to God’s “creating love.” This singing offer of “glory, power and praise” is part of a contestation, even if we easily take the phrasing for granted. I suggest that the practice of loud singing to God has its original setting in a contest between gods wherein each good empowered and enhanced by the vigorous singing of praise, not unlike a contest between “cheering squads” at a game. Each God is made greater and enhanced by the vigorous singing of praise, so that the louder praise evokes a greater or more powerful or more beloved God. Here the church asks that God the creator should be receptive to our loud singing of praise. The mystery of the creator God eludes us. That mystery does not invite explanation. It invites awe, reverence, and gratitude. The church (or humanity!) has few resources or tools with which to uphold its end of the transaction between creator and creation; singing is one such tool. And while such singing may have a salutary effect on the ones who sing, the intent is that such singing will somehow enhance—or at least please—the deity.
The remainder of verse 1 one, moreover, reflects more fully on the wonder of praise that is evoked by the unutterable mystery of God’s creative will and energy. The words recognize (or imagine) that the angels “on high” are engaged in such singing. It is remarkable that a 21st century congregation can sing such words without notice or objection. The words conjure that there is “another world” (beyond our own) “on high” (in heaven) that is peopled by many angels, messengers, godlets, seraphim, cherubim, and of whom are creatures of the creator, all of whom are gladly obedient to the creator, and all of whom spend their extra time (eons of it!) in praise and adoration. (“Heaven” is not where our dead go, but the arena where God rules fully.) Verse 2 in praise of the Son, moreover, can more fully imagine the singing of the “heavenly choirs” and can even conjure what these heavenly choirs are singing:
“Salvation to our God.
Salvation to the Lamb.”
The first of these lines perhaps refers to the Father in all majesty; the second refers to the Son as the Lamb, the One who will be sacrificed because of the Father’s love, troublesome as that formulation has now become. In the third verse, the singing is done by “all the saints,” and in the fourth verse, by “all the hosts above.” The angels do their best singing, but even angel tongues are scarcely adequate for,
love’s ecstatic heights,
that is, glorious joy unspeakable,
that is, the beatific sight (verse 3).
The angels who surround the throne of God lack adequate words for the wonder of the creator, but they continue to sing because their vision of God evokes awe that will not be properly articulated until their singing is full and complete.
Taken all together, the hymn imagines a singing world out beyond ours, all of which is joyously devoted to the enhancement of the creator God. The words of the hymn strain to articulate the extravagance of that world of the transcendental mystery of God, while at the same time gladly affirming the immediacy of the Son and the saving work done through his life and death. The singing is breathtaking!
And then, here we are in Traverse City, daring to reiterate this unspeakable vision given us by John Wesley. We sing his words, mostly without noticing what we sing. We plod through the page while fully mindful of what comes next in the bulletin. We sing while we variously are preoccupied with the snow that has just fallen, the Final Four without either the Wolverines or the Spartans, or the chaos of our world today. Our minds, hearts, and eyes are completely here and now earth-centered, even while we sing of soaring Otherness.
It is impossible for thoroughly secularized people like us to enter into the holy urges offered by the hymn. And yet we sing, wistfully grabbing an image or a phrase here or there, hoping for a whisper of transcendent mystery that will reposition our lives. But then, once in a while, in a fleeting moment or more, we notice what is being affirmed by that singing chorus of heaven and earth. We notice that our haphazard congregational singing is an echo of the angelic throng, angel tongues, and saints above. No, our singing is not an echo. It is a joining in the singing that goes day and night in unspeakable joy in that fully governed alternative. As Wesley knew so well, congregational singing requires our best imagination, itself a gift of the Spirit. And via our imagination we enter, for a short or longer season, into another world where the governance of God pertains without limit or flaw. We enter that other world; we enter into its joy. We may sign on for its work. We know and trust that the force of this other world does not evaporate when we close our hymnals. It persists. Our signing into that other world may also persist. We return to our more mundane worlds close at hand. But the singing persists and so that world persists among us, deabsolutizing the world in front of us, permitting us to host that other world and sign on for “a more excellent way” marked by faith, hope, and love.
Caveat: So many new hymns in the church are not more than love ballads of God one-on-one with “me.” In such singing the world of the gospel is made small, flat, and excessively local. And so we must insist that the God of the great hymnal tradition of the church has not given in to the domestication of our present yearnings for intimacy. Thank God for pastors, church musicians, and congregations who continue the bold, daring work of imagination in order to keep before us the expansive world of God’s good governance. We may believe, on a good day, that the angels and saints above were not engaged in wishful thinking. Rather, they are celebrating the access they have been granted to the unutterable holiness of God, an unaccommodating holiness that permeates all the world around us. The work of singing such hymns is to insist that the vacuous world of fear, evil, and violence is not the truth of our lives. That is why Charles Wesley affirmed that we would rather have a “thousand tongues” to sing that other world into palpable reality. We have so many urgings to the contrary:
a domesticated sense of who we are,
an affection for the world we treasure as unchangeable,
a refusal to see that death may be mocked, and
an eager abandonment of our proper obedience.
Amid all of our fearful reasoning and our endless capacity for idols, we are nonetheless left able to sing otherwise, full of free, energetic, imaginative trust!
Walter Brueggemann
March 28, 2023
