How can I keep from singing?

In the beginning of Romans, Chapter 1, Paul makes a rather remarkable statement after his notorious inventory of the world’s moral chaos — envy, murder, strife, deceit, gossip, idolatry, sexual perversion. Why this bad behavior? Although any of these might be given as reasons for moral malaise, Paul gives none of them. Rather Paul says, people gave glory to the world, and to human creations, that they ought give only to God.

“They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal beings, or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Rom. 1:23). More true to the actual Greek, “They sang doxologies (glory = doxa) to creatures that only ought to be sung to the Creator.” In other words, bad behavior begins in bad doxology.

It is a fascinating view of ethics. Bad behavior begins in bad music. We start out singing a tacky hymn to the accompaniment of an accordion my apologies to Lawrence Whelk, and the next thing we know we’re getting intimate with animals! Paul is making some kind of connection between the way we sing and the way we live.

Isaiah does much the same in today’s scripture. The people have been busy at worship, honoring God with a fast. Isaiah tells Israel, don’t bother. God will not take notice of all your liturgical gyrations. The worship God wants is to “loose the bonds of injustice...to let the oppressed go free.... to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house....” (Isa. 58:6–7). Isaiah is not, as is sometimes claimed, playing off our ethics against our worship. Rather, he is connecting our work and our worship, our worship and our work. The word “liturgy” means literally “the work of the people.”

What we do in worship is to make God happy not first us but God. Now the happiness of God is tied to the flourishing of people. When we sing in church it’s first not for you or me but for God. This is hard for us modern, self-concerned types who tend to judge everything on the basis of the almighty me.

Worship first off isn’t for any of us. It’s for God. We call it a “service” of worship, the service we render to the God who has given so much to us.We serve God by giving money for God’s work, by working at pads, teaching church school, confirmation, by standing up for justice. On Sunday, we serve God by telling God what’s on our mind, by attempting to sit quietly and listen to what’s on God’s mind, but mostly we serve God in song.

A favorite Quaker hymn:

My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentations;
I hear the real though far off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging;
while love is Lord o’er heaven and earth how can I keep from singing?

Augustine said that anyone who sings, “prays twice,” praising God in both word and music. God is the great music lover, having created not one bird to sing, but millions, creatures who spend their days doing nothing more than singing, would do so even though none of us take note.

Musicologists talk of breathing in and out, as the origin of our human love of rhythm and syncopation.

I can tell you exactly where I was when the Beatles sang Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I was running a coffee house in Clear Lake Manitoba I was in high school it was a Friday and I can’t remember how many times we played that song . No one really knew who Lucy was..

Where were you when you heard Bob Dylan whine, “Come fathers and mothers throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand...for the times, they are a changin’.” It was like one world began and another ended..

There’s a reason that no army goes to battle without a band. When we get to music, we have peeled away the superficial from our lives, and we get down to the deep, the primordial, that which is most truthful.

Some of you may remember Alex Haley’s Roots, Kunta Kinte lies on the dirt floor of his slave cabin in the New World where he has been brought from Africa. The horrors of slavery have about obliterated any infantile memory of his native land, of who he was as a free person there. Until that night he hears a woman singing, singing a song in a tune now strange to him, strange but irresistible. It was a song from Africa and its tune awakened long suppressed memories. He remembered that he once had a home. He remembered who he was.

Sometimes on Sunday, as we’re busy praising God, we hear our name called in the music. Something stirs in us and we sing, “This is who I am and am meant to be.” When we sing the word, the word of God burrows down deep in our being. You can’t sing the Messiah and have all that scripture just roll over you for three hours and not be different afterwards.

In praising God, we began to want what God wants, we see the world as God sees the world, as a place beloved, created, still being created, moving closer to that final great shout of praise called the Kingdom of God. As we praise God, we are formed into God’s likeness. Paul says it’s like we’re seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, and we, looking into that mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (II Corin. 3:18). If we get good enough praising God here on Sunday, in a hymn, we’ll be better able to praise God on Monday in a board room or wherever our work takes us. In the end we’ll become what we have previously only professed, we will be a hymn.

Revelation says that heaven, Where God’s Kingdom comes, is a place of great singing, in which not only the Saints gather about the throne, but all God’s creatures, those who make music in sky, and earth, and sea, all creation singing praise to the Lamb who now sits enthroned at the center of heaven.Revelation is saying that you and I have been created for praise?
God has made us, from the first beating or our hearts, to join in creation’s great song to the One in whom we live and move and have our being. One day, on that day, all those things that keep us from singing—the pain, the heartache, the shame, the oppression, all that which keeps people quiet—will be by God defeated.

The Lamb, the one whose birth caused the angels of heaven to break forth in song, will enable all the world to sing. The rift between the singer and the song shall be healed, saints on earth and saints in heaven will lift up their voices in unison.

Our restless hearts shall know why they have been restless, because God has created each of us for no better purpose than to praise with all that we are, to give God, in our work and our worship, honor, power, glory, and blessing forever, singing, “How can I keep from Singing.’”