Hymns

In a deeply disturbing scene in the television series “The Crown,” Prince Philip recounted to Queen Elizabeth his moving experience at a funeral for 81 children who had died in the tragic mudslide in Aberfan. (During a heavy rainstorm in October of 1966, a massive pile of accumulated coal waste positioned above the town of Aberfan turned to slurry. The massive flood tragically overwhelmed a school and a row of houses).

The dialogue went like this:

The Queen: How was it?

The Prince: Extraordinary. The Grief. The Anger – at the government, at the coal warden…at God, too. 81 children were buried today. The rage behind all the faces, behind all the eyes. They didn’t smash things up. They didn’t fight in the streets.

Q: What did they do?

P: They sang! The whole community. It’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever heard.

Q: Did you weep?

P: I might have wept. Yes. Are you going to tell me it was inappropriate? The fact is that anyone who heard that hymn today would not just have wept. They would have been broken into a thousand tiny pieces.

The mourners who gathered at the funeral at Aberfan sang the hymn “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”

Jesus, Lover of my soul,

Let me to thy bosom fly,

While the nearer waters roll,

While the tempest still is high.

Hide me, O my Savior, hide,

Till the storm of life is past.

Safe into the haven guide;

Oh, receive my soul at last.

Other refuge have I none;

Hangs my helpless soul on thee.

Leave, oh, leave me not alone;

Still support and comfort me.

All my trust on thee is stayed;

All my help from thee I bring.

Cover my defenseless head

with the shadow of thy wing.

All cultures seem to have at least one thing in common—they write music and sing. But why? Music baffled the evolutionist, Charles Darwin. Humanity’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates. Other scientists were skeptical. That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing.

In recent years, scientists have analyzed the acoustic properties of thousands of songs recorded in dozens of cultures. One researcher offered the following guess for why we sing: “Maybe music was needed to improve group cohesion.” Or maybe sharing choruses and melodies, could have brought people together whether as a community or in preparation for a battle. Or maybe it helped parents bond with children.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The fact is, these are all guesses, but the Christian knows the best reason for singing—because the Living God is worthy of our joyful worship. He puts a new song in our mouth.

Thomas A. Dorsey’s song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” is one of the most beloved gospel songs of all time. The song’s power comes from profound personal tragedy. In August 1932, Dorsey, a Black band leader and accompanist, was on top of the world. He had recently been hired as director of the gospel chorus at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, and he was about to become a father for the first time.

Dorsey was nervous about traveling to a gospel music convention so close to his wife’s due date, but she gave her blessing. While he was in St. Louis, Dorsey received word that there had been complications with Nettie’s childbirth. He raced back to Chicago, but both mother and child died.

The double funeral took place at Pilgrim Baptist Church. Dorsey later said, “I looked down that long aisle which led to the altar where my wife and baby lay in the same casket. My legs got weak, my knees would not work right, my eyes became blind with a flood of tears.” Dorsey fell into a deep depression. He questioned his faith and thought of giving up gospel music.

Dorsey’s friend and fellow chorus director Theodore Frye persuaded him to accept a dinner invitation. After dinner, Dorsey meandered over to the grand piano and began to play the hymn “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” with its lyric “There’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me.” Dorsey began to play variations on the hymn’s melody, adding new lyrics. He called Frye over and began to sing, “Blessed Lord, take my hand.” Frye stopped him: “No man, no. Call him ‘precious Lord.’” Dorsey tried it again, replacing blessed with precious. “That does sound better!” he told Frye. “That’s it!”

Dorsey returned home and finished the song “in the next day or two.” Dorsey debuted “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” for the Pilgrim congregation at a Sunday worship service. The lyrics filled the sanctuary that morning: “Precious Lord, take my hand / Lead me on, let me stand / I am tired, I am weak / I am worn.” Dorsey was shocked to find congregants out of their seats and in the aisles, crying out in prayer. His song of deliverance from unbearable pain touched the heart of a congregation of Black Americans with testimonies of their own—of illness, death, poverty, or the daily indignities of discrimination.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, later set to music. It was written over the Christmas of either 1863 or 1864, in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history.

The carol’s first verse is familiar and peaceful:

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play;

In music sweet the tones repeat,

“There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”

But the carol is not cotton candy; it is a beating heart, laid bare. It’s a carol that still rings true today. By the third stanza we sing:

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Longfellow wrote to his friend Henry Ingersoll Bowditch in 1866, “The death of the young men in the war . . . makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. How much I have felt for you. Particularly on that cold December night when I came back with my son, and saw you at the station and knew that yours would come back to you no more.”

This is the landscape in which Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells.” We aren’t currently entrenched in a literal civil war, but the cracks in our country’s foundation are splitting wider. People with power abuse it; people without it suffer. Day after day, the news cycles through horrors. Many days, it feels a little bit like the end of the world—like an apocalypse.

But then Longfellow brings the gospel to bear in the final triumphant stanza:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing his kingdom to us. The last thing we see in the Bible is an image of “a new heaven and a new earth,” with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:1, 4). The world is always ending, but one day, it will end. Justice is never done, but one day, it will roll down like a river.

In 1779, a British pastor published a hymnbook titled Onley Hymns. It became an immediate bestseller. The public largely ignored Hymn #41 in the collection, titled “Faith’s Review and Expectations.” The author of the hymn made no further mentions of it in his diaries during the remaining 30 years of his life. For the next 120 years it never caught on with churchgoers, or with anyone else. Hymn #41 only made one appearance in all the other hymnbooks published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a hymn without honor in its own country.

But when Hymn #41, originally written by the pastor and former slave trader John Newton, jumped over the shores to America, it quickly rose in popularity. After someone renamed it, a singing instructor from South Carolina set the lyrics to a new tune. During the 1850s, the hymn added some lyrics from African American worship. On December 10, 1947, the famous singer Mahalia Jackson recorded a version of the hymn.

Eventually, this obscure hymn, which is known today as “Amazing Grace,” has become what one person has called “the spiritual national anthem of America.” It’s original author, the pastor and theologian John Newton, would have been astonished by the universality today of the hymn he wrote 250 years ago for his local church worshippers. What he composed to illustrate a village sermon has developed into a global anthem.

Enrique Rodriquez from Central Jersey, left behind a life of crime and violence after turning to religion. He is now a phlebotomist at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where he’s become famous for his musical talent.

In 2009, Rodriguez started getting involved in gangs to fill the emotional void left when his eldest brother went to jail. In search of what he calls “the wrong kind of family,” and easy money, he joined the local Bloods gang, where he remained a member for three years.

Rodriguez said, “The gang lifestyle is pure manipulation. They make you feel like they care about you, that they’ve got your back, that you are family; but all they do is use you so they don’t have to get their hands dirty.”

Criminal life began to lose its luster for Rodriguez after he crossed the “wrong person,” which resulted in two attempts on his own mother’s life by a rival gang seeking retribution. The assailants were eventually detained, and his mother survived—a fact Rodriguez attributes to God.

He said, “I have done a lot of bad things and mixed with a lot of bad people. I’m just grateful God looked out for me and my family. He has given me the opportunity to start a new life, and music is a huge part of that.”

The former Bloods member quickly sought out a job working at the hospital, where in 2012, he got a housekeeping position. After a year, he finished care training for patients in ICU. He is now a phlebotomist shuttling virus and blood samples to labs. Over the course of his nine years working at the hospital, he revealed his hidden musical talent, teaching himself to play the piano and the guitar.

After he started singing, playing the piano, and the guitar for critically-ill patients in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, he started recording his music sessions. He started posting his video hymns on TikTok, where he has garnered over 80,000 followers.

The Trinity almost never comes up in the songs sung by American Christians, according to a new study from Southern Wesleyan University. In worship songs churches mostly sing about Jesus (68%), with only occasional references to the Father (7%), and few (if any) mentions of the Holy Spirit (5%).

The relationships within the Godhead only rarely make an appearance in the 30 most popular hymns or the 30 most popular worship songs. Michael Tapper, professor of religion at Southern Wesleyan says, “In the music we sing, it seems like we’re not as Trinitarian as we think we are.”

Christian leader and writer Russell Moore recently overheard a young man complaining how much he disliked Christmas. But his anti-Christmas mood wasn’t centered on holiday stress; it was all about the music. At first Moore thought he was in the presence of the Grinch, until the young man explained why he found the music so bad. “Christmas [music] is boring because there’s no narrative tension,” he said.

Russell Moore commented:

For him, the [shallow] lyrics of our Christmas songs couldn’t encompass [the world’s heartache]. Simeon the prophet never wished anyone a “holly-jolly Christmas” or envisioned anything about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. We ought to make sure that what we sing measures up with the “narrative tension” of the Christmas story.

In a time when we seem to learn of a new tragedy each day, the unbearable lightness of Christmas seems absurd to the watching world. But, even in the best of times, we all know that we live in a groaning universe. Just as we sing with joy about the coming of the Promised One, we ought also to sing with groaning that he is not back yet (Rom. 8:23), sometimes with groanings too deep for lyrics.

We have a rich and complicated and often appropriately dark Christmas hymnody. We can sing of blessings flowing “far as the curse is found,” of the one who came to “free us all from Satan’s power.” Let’s sing that, every now and then, where we can be overheard.

Christians have joyful, stirring songs that celebrate the wonder of our relation with God. This is especially true during the Christmas season with songs such as the spine-tingling Handel’s Messiah. In contrast to this, in 2011 comedian Steve Martin performed a song on The Late Show with David Letterman that he called “the entire atheist hymnal” (on one page of paper). He called it: “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs.”

Christians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nagila’s for the Jews,
Baptists have the rock of ages,
Atheists just sing the blues.

Romantics play Claire de Lune,
Born agains sing “He is risen,”
But no one ever wrote a tune,
For godless existentialism.

For Atheists there’s no good news.
They’ll never sing a song of faith.
In their songs they have one rule:
The “he” is always lowercase.

Of course, his humor is meant to entertain us—and does. But what a contrast to a piece of music that moves hearts and masses across the board. Handel’s Messiah is arguably one of the most mellifluous expressions of Christian doctrine ever produced.

In fact, I think it makes all the sense in the world that both inexplicable tears and profound joy accompany the words and sounds of Handel’s Messiah. For this Messiah brings with him an invitation unlike any other: Come and see the Father, the Creator, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Come and see the Light, and the Overcomer of darkness, the One who wept at the grave of a friend, and the one who collects our tears in his bottle even before he will dry every eye. Christians, let’s sing our songs!

Strangely enough, the 'wrath of God' became a news item. Here's what happened: A Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) committee wanted to add the contemporary hymn "In Christ Alone" to their new hymnbook. But only under one condition: they wanted to remove the line "the wrath of God was satisfied." The authors of hymn refused to grant permission and the committee rejected the hymn.

Russell Moore followed the controversy and wrote an article in which he said, ‘I'm hardly one to tell Presbyterians what they ought to have in their hymnals. But the Gospel is good news for Christians because it tells us of a God of both love and justice. The wrath of God doesn't cause us to cower, or to judge our neighbors. It ought to prompt us to see ourselves as recipients of mercy, and as those who will one day give an account. If that's true, let's sing it.’

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Despite recurring mental illness, he wrote hymns on God's providence.

William Cowper's poetic achievements are remarkable in light of the fact that mental illness plagued him all his life.

The son of the chaplain to King George II, William worked as a lawyer for several years. At age 32, he was nominated to a position that required a public examination. He grew fearful of that and tried to commit suicide three times--and nearly succeeded. During his stay of eighteen months in the asylum at St. Albans, however, Cowper was converted while reading Romans.

After his release, Cowper resided in Huntingdon with the family of a Reverend Unwin. Upon Unwin's death, John Newton came to comfort the family, and he convinced Mrs. Unwin, her children, and Cowper to move to Olney where he lived.

The period at Olney was a time of healing and spiritual growth for Cowper. Newton urged Cowper to serve Olney's poor, probably in an effort to take Cowper's mind off his depressions, poor health, paranoia, and fears of damnation. He also convinced Cowper to write hymns for the parish's prayer meetings. The result was Olney Hymns (1779), which contained 348 hymns--68 by Cowper, who suffered a relapse and was unable to finish his work.

Three of his best-known works are "There Is a Fountain," "Safely through Another Week," and "O for a Closer Walk with God." His famous hymn "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" was written about the time of another bout of mental illness, during which Cowper again attempted suicide. Despite this, John Newton said of him, "I can hardly form an idea of a closer walk with God than he uniformly maintained."

Cowper did not begin his literary career until age 50. His translations of Homer and poems such as "John Gilpin" placed him at the forefront of English poets, and it is the literary Cowper now listed in reference books.

But perhaps Cowper's most meaningful works were the hymns written during fits of despair. It is said that on his deathbed he stated, "I am not shut out of heaven after all."