Living in Tune

Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs? Where did that come from, and why all of this talk about music and singing? Please, oh please don’t tell me that the Apostle Paul was addressing some sort of skirmish in the Ephesian worship wars all those years ago. Why is he telling us, Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:19-20)?

Do you think Paul is just one of those musically inclined people, one of those sunbeams for Jesus? You know the type: radiant. enthusiastic. prone to spontaneous singing at weird moments. One of those people for whom you say, “Bless his heart,” because you can’t for the life of you figure out what else to say.

I’m not trying to be mean. I’m sure there has to be a reason for Paul suddenly breaking into song in the middle of his letter: Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (5:14). Doesn’t that sound like one of those sunbeam folks? Where is that music coming from?

Who knows? Maybe Paul was musically inclined. Perhaps he wrote all of his letters with ear buds in place, iPod set to random shuffle. Maybe. That doesn’t diminish his stature as an apostle, a theologian, a pastor, does it? Just the sheer volume of his church correspondence making it into our Book has to count for something, so perhaps we’re being too tough on him. After all, seriousness of purpose does not require heaviness of manner. Just because he was a Really Important Bigshot, the Apostle to the Gentiles, doesn’t mean that he had to go around looking like some sort of sad dork all of the time! Maybe with all of the significant, weighty concerns of the faith and the ongoing welfare of the Church pressing heavy on his mind, Paul just thought from time to time a little music would help. Maybe that’s all it is.

Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks . . . maybe a little music from time to time would help. People seem stressed, depressed, tense. Doesn’t it seem to you that there are all sorts of folks who lose their Amen at times; they’re just missing out on the joy? I mean, how long has it really been since you last heard the song beneath the task that you are doing?

I read something by Tony Campolo not long ago; he was talking about this joy deficit many of us seem to be experiencing. Listen to what he said:

I was in New York--there’s a joyless place. I got on an express elevator; it was full of dead, joyless people. They were just standing there with attaché cases. And when I got on I did my thing. I waited for the door to close--you know how people stand and look at the door and look at the numbers. And as soon as the door closed I turned. I thought I might bring a little joy. I smiled at everybody and in New York they can’t handle that. You see, they kind of backed up away from me. And I said, “Lighten up guys, lighten up. We’re going to be traveling together for quite awhile. What do you say we sing?” And these suckers were so intimidated by me, they did. I mean you should have been there. They were holding their attaché cases going, “You are my sunshine, my only . . .” I got off at the seventieth floor and this guy got off with me. I said, “Are you going to the same meeting I am going to?” He said, “No, I just wanted to finish the song.”1 It seems we’re all out of joy.

Sing and make music in your heart, Paul says. But I think it has to be deeper than simply trying to reclaim the joy. Paul is not just making a case for background music. He’s not just proposing that we push play to fill the air with some Gospel Muzak to soothe, console, encourage, and comfort a bunch of stressed, anxious folks. Our text is embedded in something bigger than that. The context makes this plain. All of Paul’s talk about singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is not just sermon filler, a rhetorical placeholder, the kind of fluff, preacher material you would use when you are aiming to turn a 15 minute sermon into a 30 minute sermon so the nursery attendants have enough time to change all the messy diapers before church lets out. Paul doesn’t write his letters like that. The context makes it quite clear that Paul is dealing with something bigger than whistling a happy tune.

Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, but watch what came earlier in our text. Go back to verse three and following, where Paul starts to talk about some hot potatoes for the Church: But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure, or greedy person--such a man is an idolater--has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God (5:3-5). This is the context in which all this music is located. We’re talking about a holiness ethic. We’re talking about faithfully demonstrating who and Whose we are in the way we act. Songs? Sure, but also depth and substance where it really matters. You think music is a tough issue for the Church? Now we’re talking sex and entertainment. It’s hot potato time!

Not even a hint of sexual immorality, Paul says. You’re covenant people, he is telling us. People whose sexual ethic demonstrates faithfulness to God and integrity in dealing with others. Sex is holy, a gift of God. Because it is God’s good gift, our sexuality must reflect thanksgiving and care. We belong exclusively to God, and we give ourselves exclusively to one another. This is our vocation, because the love of Christ has become the key to our identity. We don’t try to use, manipulate, or exploit our own bodies or the bodies of others because the love we’ve known in Christ has shown us what real holiness looks like in human flesh: Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (5:1-2). That’s our ethic. Even our sexuality becomes a place to practice our worship, a place for self-giving and sacrificial love offered up to God!

No shabby forms of entertainment, says Paul. You are not the kind of people who need to engage in obscene and foolish talk, coarse and profane humor. Words are holy, a gift of God. Because we want to treasure and sanctify God’s gift of speech, we will not profane our hearts by taking the wrong words into our minds. We do not want to live poorly, badly, because we cannot imagine any better way with the words we have chosen to live in. This is our ethic. Even our vocabulary and our choice of entertainment can be a place to practice our worship, a place to honor God by offering our best.

Can you see what Paul is doing for us? He’s borrowing the language of worship to describe our covenantal identity. Who you really belong to is always demonstrated publicly, visibly by what you do. You’re covenant people, the ones for whom Christ gave himself up “as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (5:2). Salvation is physical, and our redemption has to occur in flesh-and-blood. No matter what we may say, our bodies never lie!

At first, as I recall, it sounded like a really swell idea. The associate pastor had collected all of the palm leaves used by our kids in the procession on Palm Sunday the previous year, and now he planned to burn those dry stalks to prepare for the imposition of ashes at the conclusion of our Ash Wednesday service. As I recall, he had heard me say that’s how parish churches used to do it in the old days, a very frank confession that the same people who welcome Jesus with Hosannas remain all too ready to deny Him later. But still, it had been his idea to keep the drying palm leaves out in his garage all year long, stuffed in a plastic sack along with who-knew-what that managed to blow in whenever the garage doors were open. I mention this small detail only because of what happened in the days following our Ash Wednesday service. Everything had gone so well. The crowd was large, the service went smooth, even the sound system worked on Ash Wednesday. At the conclusion of our evening, congregants streamed forward to have the sign of the cross smudged in ash onto their foreheads as our pastors gave the liturgical formula: Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, repent and believe in the Gospel. It was moving! appropriate. perhaps even beautiful. Right up to the moment my phone started ringing after the service when our people began to suspect something had gone dreadfully wrong with the cross shaped smear of ash on each of their foreheads. There was some itching and some burning. Some reported angry red welts in the shape of the cross right between and above their eyes for the next several days. Allegedly, and I want to point out that none of this was ever finally proven in a court of law, some poison ivy must have inadvertently mixed in with a plastic sack full of drying palm leaves that looked like weeds for the burn pile to kids at play in a pastor’s open garage. And the only thing that I could think was that if I ever get to invent my own religion, this is how we’re doing Ash Wednesday! Why bother with discreet little smudges on your brow when you can have an indelible, permanent cross on your forehead? visible. public. It still makes sense to me, because I am telling you that our bodies do not lie!

How deeply are you involved in this Jesus life? Is the holiness to which you aspire merely skin deep, or is this identity and vocation to be a saint something bone-marrow deep within you? Paul certainly seems to be trying to go deeper. Whether he’s talking about singing and making music in our hearts or reviewing an ethic for holy living in the most intimate and personal dimensions of our experience, Paul is addressing us at our core not the surface. He wants to make certain that the public face and the private face consistently remain the same face! no discontinuity, no dissonance, no discord. We have unbroken praise, uninterrupted worship day after day in the real world because we are living in tune, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, “always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:20). How long has it been since you could hear that song beneath the task you are doing?

For some folks, of course, the music long ago became fairly garbled and indistinct. Paul seems to acknowledge this is a possibility, for he seems to know that some are simply living out of tune with resurrection realities. “Wake up, O sleeper,” Paul sings, “rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you” (5:14). Apparently there are even some in the Church who manage to sleep through the revolution, so Paul lifts his voice in song. Apparently it is still possible, even in the Church, to fall flat. Apparently you can be part of the Church but still be badly out of tune. I know you’ve probably never encountered anybody in your congregation whose life is just off-key! I’m sure it must be rare to run into someone whose song is simply one sour note after another. But doesn’t it seem like the Apostle Paul must have run into someone capable of ruining the very best music? Heard any klinkers lately?

Paul has. You can hear him trying to get everyone to sing in tune, the way he wants to make sure the Church comes across pitch-perfect every time it interacts with the world. Listen to the way Paul appropriates and mixes the language of Apocalyptic with the wisdom tradition of Israel, the way he articulates three successive contradictions to make sure everybody can hear the one and only true note they are to sing: Be very careful, then, how you live--not as unwise but as wise . . . Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine . . . instead, be filled with the Spirit” (5:15-18). Can you hear the contrasts? Can you see the bright, clear lines Paul is drawing between the ways of both darkness and light, the old life and the new, the reign of sin and death and the inbreaking of resurrection power? Can you hear him pounding the right note, drilling his finger into the keyboard time after time so there will be absolutely no hesitation, no uncertainty, no faltering slide away from the tone Paul wants to hear? Three successive contrasts using the same grammatical form, “Not . . . but, not . . . but, not . . . but,” until everyone can find their note. Not unwise living, but wise living, as Christians are “making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil” (5:16). Not foolishness, but clarity of understanding and discernment regarding the Lord’s will (5:17). And finally Paul plays the right note for yet a third time, now calling the Ephesians not to drunken debauchery, but instead to be filled with Spirit of God (5:18).

Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, why all this talk about music and singing? I can hear the contextual cues. I know we’re addressing the issues of core ethical concern. I recognize his rabbinical method as Paul once more shows the Ephesians that holiness is structured into creation itself, part of the blessings of life itself associated with God’s wise governance. Somehow Paul is connecting being filled with the Spirit with singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. That is how his argument runs, the logic Paul has chosen to make his point: Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:18-20). But why?

Maybe it has to do with the accessibility of this music Paul describes, for music tends to be something just about everyone can do. Is the rhythm of your own heartbeat at all familiar to you? Well, that’s precisely where music begins, for each of us is an entire symphony orchestra of sound and rhythm. The percussive sounds of blood pulsing through your veins. The bellows of your lungs filling and emptying, literally an entire wind section responding like some sort of metronome is keeping time deep inside. And then there is your voice, your speaking and singing and whispering and crying, an instrument so finely tuned and diverse in its timbre, range, and intonation that no musician would dare to challenge its supremacy. What is more human, more elemental and familiar to us than the music surrounding us from before the moment of our birth? Each of us has music to share.

Be filled with the Spirit. Sing and make music in your hearts. Paul is telling us something here, connecting these two phrases. The Spirit-filled life is not elitist, not exotic, not just for folks who have advanced degrees enabling them to navigate through Greek verb tenses and participles. Do you have any music in you? Can you sing? Anybody drawing breath can get in on this. Holiness is not distant from any of us; it is something all of us can do from our earliest days. The connection between Spirit and music is part of our essential repertoire of human experience. We are made for this!

Dean Gregory Jones of Duke Divinity School was giving the opening statement of welcome at a conference I attended a few years ago. He told of attending a denominational assembly with his young family in tow, waiting through long hours of meetings until he could gather with family and friends for dinner in a local restaurant. When food arrived at table, the adults fell into a feeding frenzy quickly and gratefully, beginning to inhale their meals while continuing the usual small talk about church politics and politicians. But Greg said he began to hear something odd in the background, a small voice persistently humming with some suggestion of rising eagerness to be heard. “Hmm,” came the voice from somewhere at the table, and then again more loudly and insistently, “Hmm.” It was his 18 month old daughter, apparently distressed by a violation of dinner table protocol by the adults in attendance. “Hmm,” she said, lacking both the vocabulary and proficiency as a speaker to explain her interruption to the ongoing conversation. Then it hit both Greg and his wife, they knew what was wrong with their daughter. She was remembering something her family tries to practice each meal, the sharing of Wesley’s “sung table grace” giving thanks to God the Father for yet another meal. For her, it could only sound like, “Hmm.” But even at 18 months of age, she knew the proper tune. I’m pretty sure Paul would agree. Be filled with the Spirit, he said, sing and make music in your hearts. Anybody can get in on holiness. This is a life available to everyone.

Do you suppose this is what Paul is getting at? That he wants us to see how we are formed for the life of the Spirit in the world? We don’t start the process of spiritual formation by assembling and reviewing copies of our Manual, committing proper procedures and policies to memory. We enter more deeply into the holiness of the Jesus life by practicing what Jesus does: Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (5:1-2). Do you hear the language of Hebrew worship that Paul is drawing upon? fragrant offering. sacrifice to God. Jesus gives himself up for us, the consummate sacrificial offering fulfilling the deepest aspirations of Temple worship. It is this worship of Jesus, a consecrated life literally “lifted up” before God, that brings us into the gift of redemption.

And now at the end of our text, Paul is also using the language of worship. Filled with the Spirit, Paul says we are to speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs as we make music in our hearts, always giving thanks to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus (5:19-20). We enter more deeply into the holiness of the Jesus life by practicing the very same thing that Jesus does. What He did for us is foundational; it is the way we are formed. Now we repeat these same actions of worship, cultivating the grace of receptivity and gratitude, acknowledging the care and mercy we have been given by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From beginning to end, our text has been saying the very same thing. The central, formative act of spiritual formation is worship. Daily we practice living as a holy Church to the praise of God in the world! Worship forms us.

Tom Long of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology tells a very similar story, remembering Grace Thomas, a Southern Baptist woman who gained a good deal of notoriety during Long’s childhood in segregated Georgia. Grace was the daughter of a Birmingham, Alabama streetcar conductor and his wife, and she moved to Atlanta to begin working as a state government clerk after marrying in the 1930s. Eventually, Grace developed a taste for law and politics, enrolling in night classes at a local law school. When she graduated from law school, her family wondered what Grace would do once she was admitted to the bar. They didn’t have to wait long to find out, for Grace announced in 1954 that she was running for governor of Georgia. Long says:

There were nine candidates for governor that year--eight men and Grace--but there was really only one issue. In the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka earlier that year, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that racially “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional and thus paved the way for the integration of the public schools. Eight of the gubernatorial candidates spoke out angrily against the court’s decision. Only Grace said that she thought the decision was fair and just and ought to be welcomed by the citizenry. Her campaign slogan was “Say Grace at the Polls.” Not many did; she came in dead last, and her family was relieved that she had gotten this out of her system.

But she had not. Eight years later, in 1962, she ran for governor again. By then, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, and her message of racial harmony was hotly controversial. She received death threats, and her family traveled with her as she campaigned in order to provide protection and moral support. She finished last again on election day, but her campaign was a testimony to goodwill and racial tolerance.
One day, Grace made a campaign appearance in the small town of Louisville, Georgia. In those days, the centerpiece of the town square in Louisville was not a courthouse or a war memorial but an old slave market, a tragic and evil place where human beings had once been bought and sold. Grace chose the slave market as the site for her campaign speech, and as she stood on the very spot where slaves had been auctioned, a hostile crowd of storekeepers and farmers gathered to hear what she would say. “The old has passed away,” she began, “and the new has come. This place,” she said, gesturing to the market, “represents all about our past over which we must repent. A new day is here, a day when Georgians white and black can join hands to work together.”

This was provocative talk in the Georgia of 1962, and the crowd stirred. “Are you a communist?” someone shouted at her.
Grace paused in midsentence. “No,” she said softly. “I am not.’
“Well then,” continued the heckler, “where’d you get those blankety-blank [sic] ideas?”

Grace thought for a minute, and then she pointed to the steeple of a nearby church. “I got them over there,” she said.2

Whatever you do, don’t underestimate what we’re doing here. We are practicing our identity, learning our vocation, allowing ourselves day by day to be pulled more deeply into the redemptive, sacrificial life of Jesus Christ. His offering becomes the pattern for our offerings. What we have seen Him do, we repeat. All of this is derivative. We don’t make it up on our own; we don’t come up with a nifty plan because we decide one day to be smarter, more compassionate, or even more holy than we had been the day before. He acts, and then we follow. He gives, and something about the way He shows that the giving itself is possible and even to be preferred causes us to uncurl the very fingers that had been clenched around the life we had been trying to protect. So don’t think that it is all pain and sacrifice and earnest moral exertion. It is a life of love, “just as Christ loved us and gave himself up . . . as a fragrant offering” (5:2). There is great music! We share psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making music in our hearts with thanksgiving. Then there is the presence of the Spirit who comes to fill us, a Spirit who apparently comes ready to provide such an inexhaustible supply of inner peace and joy that the best comparison Paul can provide is to tell us that being filled with the Spirit is a far sight better than getting drunk. So do not underestimate the power of what we’re doing here. Our worship shapes us.

I like the analogy I heard once from Barbara Brown Taylor when she was describing this formative, shaping effect of the worship we experience:

When I was a little girl, like many little girls I took ballet lessons. The paraphernalia was fascinating to me: the satin slippers, the stiff net tutu, the pink tights. It would have suited me to spend the whole hour admiring myself in front of the mirror, but my teacher kept insisting that I come away from there to learn the basic positions essential to ballet. Under her tutelage, I learned to bend my feet this way and that, sometimes straining so hard I feared my knees would pop from their sockets. I arched my back, I held my head up, I made perfect O’s with my arms. I stretched and sweated over the positions until my bones ached and my muscles yelled out loud. Then one day I got to put them all together, bending and rising and sweeping the air like someone to whom gravity no longer applied. I got to dance.

That memory sustains me in worship, where I practice the basic positions of faith. They are named gloria, kyrie, credo, sanctus. They are named the prayers of the people, the peace, the breaking of the bread. Each one requires my full attention and best efforts; each one teaches me a particular way to move, so that when God invites me to put them all together, I may jump with joy to join the dance.3

I know I’m changing the imagery just a bit, but I don’t think Paul will mind. Whether you want to talk singing or dancing, you’re still likely to be waiting for just the right kind of music. I’m just wondering if you can hear it, or whether it has been fading for some time until you can barely make out the tune. If it has faded, then let me tell you the Good News. You are never responsible to create the music all by yourself; that has always been God’s responsibility. The music does not originate in you, but the music can get inside you, just as Paul said: Be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord (5:19). If your song has fallen silent because you think you lack the proper instrument, worrying that someone else is a beautiful guitar while you are only a rumbling tuba, let me put you at ease. Jesus knows what He is doing, and He does not ask you to be holy just like someone you admire is holy. Trust that He knows the score. Practice the positions He will show you, listen carefully to the music you hear in His life. You are not the guitar you admire, but only a tuba? It is still His song. Play your own note!Notes:

1. From “Children of the Kingdom,” by Tony Campolo, in Sermons From Duke Chapel, William Willimon, ed., pg. 297. Copyright 2005, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

2. A version of this story is told in Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004, pp. 133-135. All rights reserved. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Click here to access John Wiley & Sons, Inc. website.

3. A similar version of this story is told in Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1993.

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