You Are What You Sing…
03.27.22. It’s often said, “you are what you eat.” But “you are what you sing?” Not so much.
I (Pastor Rich) have been thinking a bit about Pastor Ben’s message on perfection. Perfect love drives out fear, says 1 John 4:18, which connects well with the command to love our enemies. If love drives out fear, then when we truly learn to love our enemies. What’s it look like to take a step in loving our enemies? And what does that have to do with singing?
When I first became a pastor, I hadn’t spent much time in church, let alone sing in church. I found myself pastoring a church that once a month, would have a service on Sunday night where we would ask people to recommend hymns. For this inexperienced pastor/song leader, it was enlightening. I was forced to learn and lead songs I’d never heard or sung.
I learned to appreciate most of them. The theology, the power, and the heritage. The poetry, and sentiment were evident.
As with all genres of worship music, there are also patterns.
One pattern is something that could be called “escapist theology.” In a nutshell, escapist theology focuses on “escaping” this world for the next. Hymns like, “When We All Get ToHeaven.”
Sing the wondrous love of Jesus,
Sing His mercy and His grace;
In the mansions bright and blessed
He’ll prepare for us a place.
When we all get to Heaven,
What a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus,
We’ll sing and shout the victory!
Note the focus. When we “get to heaven” there will be rejoicing. It seems innocent enough. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to sing about heaven. However, we weren’t just saved for heaven. We were also saved for here. For example…consider (I know I’m playing with fire here) the beginning of the last stanza of “How Great Thou Art,”
When Christ shall come,
With shout of acclimation,
And take me home,
What joy shall fill my heart.
Theologian N.T. Wright suggests a different phrase…
And heal this world, What joy shall fill my heart.
I like that. It lines up with the prayer Jesus taught His disciples to pray. “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The “goal” of the Christian life isn’t to survive this world long enough for Jesus to snatch us out of it. The “goal” is, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount:
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The reason this got me thinking about Pastor Ben’s message that tied perfection to loving our enemies is that, it seems, if our focus is on escaping this earth, it makes it a lot easier to pass by Jesus’ most difficult interpersonal commands. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.”
In our world of division and evil rhetoric, spewed on social media at the expense of meaningful dialogue and relational integrity…escaping our enemies seems to be the rule of the day. Instead, in Jesus we have a model of not only loving our enemies but giving ourselves up for them. Not as many songs about that one.
This Lent, as we venture closer and closer to the cross of Good Friday and the resurrection of Easter, let’s not forget that the song we sing with our lives is not one of leaving this world—but living in it. Our lifesong is one of transformation not escapism. And transformation comes at the hard price of living the tough commands of Jesus…even the commend to love our enemies. And yet, when our lives embody that, it sounds a lot like the perfect love of Jesus. A much-needed tune in the world we live in.