“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.
