GPC Sermon 8/15

 

“Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, 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.”

 

Don’t get drunk, but spend your time singing. You should all join choir. Paul’s command in this morning’s epistle seems straightforward, and if we were to walk away having only heard that attending a hymn sing is better than getting smashed at a bar, that would be fine advice.

I’d like to dig deeper into what exactly Paul means when he commands us to sing. We’ll need to think about what singing was in Paul’s culture and what singing is in our own time. What assumptions do we bring to this passage? If we name those assumptions for what they are, how do they color our understanding of Paul’s call to sing? This is a task he gives throughout his letters, and one that we have to assume is intended for us as well. Why singing?

Let’s think about what singing is in the modern world. Among many other things it is a form of self-expression, a way of transmitting culture across the globe, a spectacular money-maker for the popular recording and performing industries, a less than spectacular money-maker for opera companies, a way to reach emotional catharsis, a binding agent for sub-cultures (country, punk rock, Swedish folk music) to make their identities and define themselves. Above all singing in the modern world is two things—it is intensely individual, and it is one of our leisure arts.

For most us the prospect of singing in public (especially alone) is terrifying. It’s literally the stuff of nightmares. Singing is something you might do in the shower (where you get some nice reverb off your bathroom tiles) or alone in the car when you don’t think anyone is watching, but you wouldn’t dream of volunteering to sing in a waiting room or a restaurant, unless you had been born with unusual natural gifts (the sort that shows like the Voice and American Idol are always digging around to find) or had spent many years practicing and refining. And even if you were a naturally gifted or a highly trained singer, you still wouldn’t sing in a waiting room, right? Because singing, as a leisure activity, is restricted to certain appropriate times and situations. A child’s birthday party, a church service, a musical recital, or a karaoke bar while heavily intoxicated are among the few domains left where singing is expected and allowed. (I make no judgement on whether this is a good or a bad thing.) Singing, like chess-playing, archery, and horseback riding, is a hobby. It’s for private people (only a small set of the general population) and for very specific settings. But singing in Paul’s world didn’t work that way.

Before we get into what singing was in the ancient world, I’d like to point out one quick aspect of the singing voice that normally escapes us in modern churches. A sung (or chanted) word carries further and clearer than a spoken word. We haven’t had to think about this since the arrival of modern sound systems (thanks to our sound team for the excellent job they do), but there was a reason why medieval church services, in those massive unelectrified cathedrals were all chanted. You can hear the proclamation of the word much more clearly when that proclamation is sung instead of spoken.

If singing in the modern world is private and a leisure activity, singing in the ancient world (both Jewish, as in St. Paul’s context, and Greek, where he was doing his ministry) was very much a public activity and one of such high importance that it could be called an essential service. To put this in perspective I’d like to look at a man who actually gave a critique of music in the ancient world—a man condemned to an unjust death by the state after raising the ire of the religious leaders of his city, and who went to his execution willingly in order to uphold the principles that he lived by throughout his controversial public career, and who was widely commemorated and imitated by his disciples after his death despite leaving no primary texts of his own. And no, it isn’t Jesus of Nazareth.

The Athenian philosopher Socrates died in 399 BC, and what he said against singing and music throws the assumptions that St. Paul was making about its importance into sharp relief. Socrates was accused and condemned on two charges—asebia, or impiety against the gods of Athens, and corruption of the youth of the city. These charges (and the narrow margin of conviction) remain difficult to understand to this day despite thorough documentation by Plato and Xenophon of all of the events leading up to the trial, the trial itself (full of long speeches), and the events of Socrates’ final days up to his death by drinking a cup of hemlock.

The manuscripts of the Socratic dialogs (especially the Republic) plainly show a philosopher who takes the existence of the Greek gods for granted and treats them with great reverence. He was well-regarded by the youth of the city, and his teaching practices were not any different than the other notable philosophers of the day. Socrates was unusual in his teaching only in that he refused to take payment, which certainly isn’t a crime worthy of a death sentence. Socrates died because he attacked Greek music.

Singing in the ancient world meant a number of things that it no longer means to us. First and foremost, it was a form of memory. The setting of text to song and melody makes the task of passing it on immensely easier. Not many (or any of us) can remember the geometry formulas that we spent hours trying to memorize in high school (except maybe those that use math in their careers now), but how many of you can instantly recall the soap, toothpaste, and gum jingles you heard on TV in your youth and never made any effort whatsoever to commit to memory? In a pre-alphabetic society, a culture must pass itself on to generation to generation through strength of memory alone, and the best aid for this is song—the type of song that we now call epic poetry.

Before the Greeks inherited an alphabet from the Phoenicians, they had already established a national identity, one that was rooted in several enormous poems about the wrath of Achilles, the homecoming of Odysseus, and the story of the gods. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and to a lesser extent, the works of Hesiod.

To be Greek was to know these poems, and these poems were sung—sung in an easy-to-internalize dactylic hexameter so that each generation could hear these poems every year at the great Greek festivals and memorize thousands of lines of poetry, thereby becoming true Greeks and sharing in the common culture. But these poems were more than just “books that everyone liked.” Even comparing them to the significance of the Bible for medieval Christians falls short, because not only were the stories (which are wonderful stories, and remain interesting to this day) culturally important, but the poems themselves were the society. The Iliad and the Odyssey were a tribal encyclopedia.

Listen to a passage for illustration. Calypso is helping Odysseus build a raft to escape from her island. The story of the Odyssey is advancing in this passage, but listen to how it is also a piece of education—you’re going to learn how to build a raft. “She gave to him a great axe, well-fit to his hands, sharpened on both sides. And in it was a beautiful handle of olive wood, securely fastened; and thereafter she gave him a polished cutting tool. Then she led the way to the borders of the island, where tall trees were standing, alder, poplar, and sky-reaching fir, long-dry and well-seasoned, which would float lightly for him…he fell to cutting timbers, and his work went on apace. Twenty trees in all did he fell, and trimmed them with his axe, and then he cunningly smoothed them all and made them straight to the line.”

The passage goes on to describe how he bores the trees out and fits them with pegs and mortices. It’s the sort of knowledge that we could find in a Youtube video or in a library book. For a Greek child in the days before widespread alphabetic writing, memorizing this part of the story (with its rhythm just as catchy as the Kit-Kat jingle) is his education—his paidea—in how this process works.

Other passages show the proper prayers before a funeral sacrifice, the respectful ways in which an unmarried young woman should address a stranger, how to properly plead your legal case to the ruler of a citadel, how to beach a ship in a semi-open harbor or to avoid a reef in a headwind, or even how to flay, season, and roast a sheep. The Iliad and the Odyssey are the stories of the death of Hector and the homecoming of Odysseus, but they are also the Bible, hymnal, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Youtube of Greek society. They would have always been sung, and they would have always been regarded as an essential column of the Greek paideia—the education. In fact, the way to cinch an argument in Greek society, even for Socrates, who was openly skeptical about the poets, was always to quote the appropriate verse from Homer.

So let’s return to Socrates, who in the Republic is asking “What is the ideal paideia/education for the ideal citizen in the ideal state?” and three times makes progressively more vicious attacks against the Greek poets and the tradition of Greek singing. Socrates was put to death because at the end of the Republic he displaces that tradition. He declares that “philosophy is the supreme music” and banishes the poets (Homer) and the singers from his ideal city entirely. We don’t need to dig into why he comes to this conclusion (broadly, that philosophy is a better way to do paideia than the Greek poets), but once we acknowledge how central to ancient culture the practice of “singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is we can understand what it is that St. Paul is summoning us to do.

Let’s think about the epistle reading again. St. Paul is not instructing the Ephesians to engage in some private hobby that he happens to like particularly (as if he wanted the whole church to take up stamp collecting because he thought it would be a good way to keep them out of the bars on Wednesday evenings), but to engage in corporate singing because it is the process by which a community in the ancient world clarifies itself, passes on its learning from one generation to the next, internalizes an enormous length of text, and describes the world in which it lives over and against the competing narratives of outside cultures. He is not asking for a private leisure activity—he’s calling for a public essential service.

Throughout the New Testament, including Revelation, the minor epistles, and the gospels, there are endless passages that demand to be sung, and to be sung corporately. Take the book of Ephesians itself. It was a piece of mail, from the apostle Paul to a local house church. But it was a piece of mail that was clearly meant to be proclaimed out loud with the community standing around and physically present, and at least at the end of chapter 3, the quotation of a Psalm in chapter 4, and the quotation about Sleepers Awaking in chapter 5 (Paul several times quotes pagan poets in his speeches and letters) the gathered community could have and would have broken into song together. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Christ hymn in Colossians. Imagine that you are sitting in a house church listening to the letter being read aloud. Immediately after Paul makes his trademark overlong greeting and opening prayer for the Colossians, the whole community would have burst into a hymn about Christ <sing> “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶ for in^[h] him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 

None of us have any idea what the melody or rhythm ought to have been, but again and again we find in Paul a community gathering around and doing something more than just singing by singing together.

My favorite explanation and analogy for this comes from Tom Wright, who compares corporate worship to an angled mirror. That mirror reflects the glory of the Creator god out into his creation, and it also reflects the praises of that creation back up to God. We, as the church, are the halfway people where heaven and earth are united—this being the promise of new creation inaugurated in Jesus’ resurrection. We sum up the praises of earth and sing them to our God, and we sing out the story of our God’s saving actions to the earth he plans to heal and redeem.

There are two more features of this process worth pointing out. First, much like the performing of the Odyssey and the Iliad, this type of singing is deeply mimetic. Mimesis (meaning imitation, from which we derive mimicry) is the process of emotional and spiritual imitation by participation in what is being enacted. This was why the Greeks loved their (sung) dramas so much. The audience would participate in the story mimetically—the tragic scenes feel heartrending, the battle scenes make your blood boil, and the comedies double you over in laughter. To participate in Christian corporate singing, whether we tremble with the awful majesty of an organ hymn commanding our praise to the Most High, or plaintively lament the sorrows of a broken world, or get sent forth in joy and cheerful mission, we participate mimetically by perceiving and taking a share in the God’s story for the world.

Secondly, corporate singing is uniquely suited to performative utterance. The classic example of performative utterance in individual speech is a minister saying aloud “I pronounce you man and wife.” That sentence, just as a statement, can be diagrammed and analyzed traditionally with the subject and verb and objects and whatnot. But the sentence is more than just an indicative statement. The act of saying the words aloud imbues them with special meaning on top of the literal meaning of the sentence—there is a legal and spiritual reality to the words that necessitates them being publicly spoken and heard in that moment. You can’t have the best man say those words, and they don’t count in the same way at the wedding rehearsal as they do on the day of the wedding.

That same kind of public necessity runs through our hymnal. The angled mirror demands that we lift our voices together, and when we sing “on earth as it is in heaven,” “to God by the glory,” “forgive us our sins,” and “all glory, laud, and honor to you redeemer King,” we participate in those truths becoming reality in the same way that a minister “makes” the couple become “man and wife.” Just this morning when we sang the opening hymn we publicly declared that God made the mountains rise, spread the flowing seas abroad, and ordained the sun to rule the day. In a moment we will summon all creatures of our God and King to lift their voices, calling even the sun and the moon themselves to sing praises. We do that with the authority to say, “I pronounce you man and wife.”

To sum up, why does Paul command us to be filled with song instead of filled with drink? Not as a private hobby, but as an essential mark of our community, and intrinsic to our life-changing and world-renewing vocation. Corporate Christian singing is our cultural memory, our tribal encyclopedia. It is what binds us together, and it is the angled mirror by which we reflect both the good creation and our living God, repeating his story into the world with mimetic fervor, making performative utterances, and living in obedience to our call to sing. May God bless the singing of his word.