I love listening to Iris DeMent sing a song. She’s written a few of her own, but she’s also recorded some of the songs she grew up with in the Pentecostal church, like Sweet Hour of Prayer and Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. I’ve heard others sing those songs, and all I wanted to do is run for the doors. When she sings them, she takes me to places I’ve never been, and I fall in love with them and the people who live there. She said, a “thing that I learned from my parents, who had pretty difficult, challenging lives, to put it mildly: I saw my parents use music to survive. They had to have that music. My mom had to sing and my dad had to go to church and he had to hear that music washing over him and through him. It wasn’t a, “Oh, this is nice”; it was a, “I’m not going to make it if I don’t have that.”[1] He needed that music like bread. It was medicine for his weary soul.
When my dad died, we met at the house where my siblings and I had grown up and where my mom still lives, and the pastor came, and we sat around the table in the dining room. I don’t remember any of the details of the conversation or what time of day it was, but I can still see the surprise in his eyes when he asked about songs for the funeral, and we said, In Dir Ist Freude. It’s a Reformation hymn from the late 1500s, and we regularly sang it in worship, and Bach had written a chorale on it that my brother and I had sung a few times with the choir.
In dir ist Freude in allem Leide,
o du süßer Jesu Christ!
Durch dich wir haben himmlische Gaben,
du der wahre Heiland bist;
hilfest von Schanden, rettest von Banden.
Wer dir vertrauet, hat wohl gebauet,
wird ewig bleiben. Halleluja.
Zu deiner Güte steht unser G’müte,
an dir wir kleben im Tod und Leben;
nichts kann uns scheiden. Halleluja.[2]
We loved this song and thought it was very appropriate for a funeral. There’s an English version and it goes like this:
In Thee is gladness amid all sadness,
Jesus, daystar of my heart!
By thee are given the gifts of heaven,
thou the true Redeemer art!
Our souls thou wakest; our bonds thou breakest.
Who trusts thee surely has built securely
and stands forever: Allelujah!
Our hearts are longing to see thy dawning.
Living or dying, in thee abiding,
naught can us sever: Allelujah![3]
On the day of my dad’s funeral, we did sing that song or rather most of the people who gathered outside the cemetery chapel that day did. I didn’t. I stood there with my eyes closed, crying and swaying, and the song washed over me and through me, and the waves of grace and joy lifted me up and carried me. I don’t remember a word the preacher said that day, but the song they sang was consolation and hope and the communion of saints, that song was the gospel.
It doesn’t happen often that I lose myself in a song. “Doxology is difficult for the overly analytical,” says Thomas Steagald. “Even a mild case of scepticism affects the vocal cords, pinches the nerve of praise, makes it hard to stand and sing.”[4] And who doesn’t have at least a mild case of scepticism? It doesn’t happen often that a song becomes a world I enter without asking questions at every turn, and I let go and let the Spirit lift me up and hold me. It doesn’t happen often, but often enough for me to think I know why Iris’s dad had to go to church.
There’s something about singing together that can’t be recorded, mixed, and played back, and it’s just one more thing I miss terribly these days, more than I thought I would. For the next few weeks, there will only be three or four of us in the sanctuary for Sunday worship, and so beginning today we’re following an even humbler liturgy. A humbler liturgy means there will be less singing; perhaps you wonder why. Just about all of us can sing like nobody is listening but God when we’re standing amid the congregation and many others are singing with us. And it’s wonderful to sing like nobody is listening when you’re out in the middle of the lake by yourself early in the morning and you can safely assume that nobody can hear you but God and the ducks. But singing in an empty sanctuary with just two or three others, with a camera running and mics recording, is probably about as awkward for us here as trying to sing along at home with your tablet or phone is for you. So what do we do?
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. The passage we heard from First Peter begins,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Even those who believe they can’t carry a tune in a bucket want to shout their Alleluias in a crowd, because the great mercy of God calls for our joyous and grateful response!
Even though you do not see him now, writes the apostle, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy!
God has raised our brother Jesus from the dead! God revealed that nothing will get between us and the life for which we have been created — neither fear, nor guilt, nor shame! God’s desire for life in communion with us is not limited, neither by the number of years we are given on earth, nor by our falling short of the glory of God, our failure to love God and our neighbor faithfully. God’s desire for life in communion with us even reaches beyond the ultimate horizon we perceive death to be. We want to sing, we want to shout, we want to clap our hands — good God, we may even want to dance a little with the saints in glory in indescribable and glorious joy… but not yet… and until then, until we will gather again, let’s practice the songs that rise in solitude: let’s name each ordinary thing we once took for granted and now recognize as essential; let’s join the doxologies of the hills and trees even from our windows and our decks; let’s behold the lilies of the field and the lilies in the pot; let’s greet the loons that left for the north, the owls that stayed, and the hummingbirds that have started to return; let’s hear the manifold witness of all living things, reminding us how we’re all connected in the miracle of one creation. One Easter song is to let our praise of God burst forth, another is to let creation’s praise of God sink in and astound us.
Our ancestors have given us the psalms, songs that have been chanted and sung, spoken and quietly read, listened to and meditated on by multitudes, generation to generation. The psalms, like few other texts in Scripture, remind us that even when we cannot come together in worship, we live and pray and sing with a great cloud of witnesses. And the words our ancestors in the faith have passed down to us show that they have been where we are – in seasons of profound disorientation and uncertainty, seasons of fear and isolation – and that in those seasons they discovered new dimensions of God’s fidelity.
Today’s psalm contains a single petition, “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” Then unfolds, in line after line, the relationship between this refugee and the God of Israel, a relationship of deep trust and intimate knowledge between the divine You and the human I.
You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.
Because you are at my right hand,
I shall not be moved.
I am particularly drawn to the closing verses, where trust blooms into fullness of joy:
Therefore my heart is glad,
and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.
This is what those who seek refuge in the God of Israel may hope to find: gladness and joy and peace. At the end, the psalmist affirms,
You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Fullness of joy, that is the life into which Christ rose, the life into which he draws us. Fullness of joy is not somewhere, sometime, somehow, but now and forever in the presence of God. And that fullness does call for songs of loudest praise as well as words of quiet joy, found and practiced in solitude.
Notes:
[1] Iris DeMent on Fresh Air https://www.npr.org/2015/10/21/450521621/for-iris-dement-music-is-the-calling-that-forces-her-into-the-spotlight
[2] Text: Cyriakus Schneegaß 1598 / Johann Lindemann 1598; tune: Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi 1591. The second verse: Wenn wir dich haben, kann uns nicht schaden Teufel, Welt, Sünd oder Tod; du hast’s in Händen, kannst alles wenden, wie nur heißen mag die Not. Drum wir dich ehren, dein Lob vermehren mit hellem Schalle, freuen uns alle zu dieser Stunde. Halleluja. Wir jubilieren und triumphieren, lieben und loben dein Macht dort droben mit Herz und Munde. Halleluja.
[3] Translation by Catherine Winkworth https://hymnary.org/text/in_thee_is_gladness_amid_all_sadness The second verse: Jesus is ours! We fear no powers, not of earth or sin or death. He sees and blesses in worst distresses; he can change them with a breath. Wherefore the story tell of his glory with hearts and voices; all heaven rejoices in him forever: Allelujah! We shout for gladness, triumph o’er sadness, love him and praise him, and still shall raise him glad hymns forever: Allelujah!
[4] Feasting, Year A, Volume 2, 391.