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I hope you have all rested well and are prepared for another morning of adventurous ideas in faith. My name is David White and I'm the C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Associate Professor of Christian Education here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. It's my

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privileged this morning to introduce our first speaker of the morning, our Jones lecturer. But first, I'd like to make a couple of observations about our conference so far. You will notice, as have I, that this year's lectures have shone a bright light on worship, including its liturgical and musical settings and preaching tasks. And if you've listened closely, you've heard, as I have, the assertion that worship is not merely one among many of the church's activities that we staple on to the end of the week.

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It is the centerpiece and the font from which grow our commitments to pastoral care, evangelism, and Christian education. Meaning that some of us, with commitments, for example, in Christian education, perhaps came thinking that we might listen with half an ear, but we have been drawn fully into this conversation and have been enlivened by it. We've also heard another thing this week.

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We've heard that Christian faith requires close attention to, indeed, an education in aesthetics, in beauty. that the beauty and glory of God as met in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is not such that it can be exhausted by our words, that faith requires for us to learn, to see, and to respond to God's beauty in making our lives and the world more beautiful. In his first lecture, Dr. Westermeyer reminded us of the power of music to educate our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies, to form us as communities

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before God. He reminded us of the ways in which church music is often marginalized and underutilized. He reminded us that music, even a single piece such as a Bach cantata, can be an endless source of study, can open us to edification in such fields as history, sociology, theology, biblical studies, and a good deal else. He also sparked our imaginations for the possibility that music and music education can be more central in our lives, especially in the education of pastors.

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In his second lecture, this lecture, Dr. Westermeyer promises to explore more deeply what it means for us to be taught by the church's song. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Paul Westermeyer to our pulpit once again.

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Thanks very much. It always strikes me, as I just said to Ted, that a set of lectures like this has all sorts of intersections. The three of us have all kinds of intersections going on here, spoken and unspoken. And it's interesting that we have not collaborated.

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I mean, sometimes we are assigned collaboration. There's no such assignment, so far as I know. Mel and I, maybe the Holy Spirit, but Mel and I, and Tom and Mel and I, have not worked these out together. But there are all sorts of links that join them.

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I'm standing here where I hope I'm not in the sun, so you can actually see me. All right, today the topic is being taught by the church's song. Church music is not generally perceived as having much to teach the church beyond the normal teaching of music itself. Or perhaps one can add to that the technical facility that's required for music.

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But beyond that, Music is not thought to have anything that it teaches the church especially. Church musicians obviously do that kind of teaching, teaching of music and musical techniques. But the song of the church has much to teach us beyond that.

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Church music teaches us about the life and work of the church much more broadly. And church musicians turn out to be partners in the work, in the council, in the understanding of the church, as the church takes up its vocation in the world. So what follows here will be some of the ways in which that is true. I don't normally do lectures like yesterday and today, which I discovered from Tom's comment yesterday at the question and answer session.

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are episodic, so I'm really with it. These are episodic. I'm going to list a whole bunch of points. The lecture for PAM is more characteristic of what I try to do to run out a given theme, and it runs out the prophetic one, which Mel is going to do later today.

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But this is episodic. I have a whole series of points, so you can drop out. space out wherever you would like, and come back in wherever you would like. They are clustered in two sets, however.

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I can't help but cluster them. So the first set is music and theology. Point one, theory and practice. Church musicians live on two levels, theory and practice.

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Church musicians, because of the very nature of church music, have to study topics, as I indicated yesterday, like theology, the history of worship, music history, music theory, et cetera. But they also have to do very, very practical things, the things that music demands, like practice, right? You have to practice, and you have to practice not only on your own, But a church musician has to practice with the community.

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If they are responsible, church musicians are constantly living between these two poles and working with them in a kind of creative polarity. The church musician, therefore, is a particularly vivid embodiment and illustration of the church's being. in that theory and praxis pervade the life of the church at almost every point. All along the road, theory and practice are present, but you see it perhaps embodied, I don't know about most vividly, but very vividly in the church musician and in church music.

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Point two, narrative and synthesis. Music and musicians highlight for the church the importance of narrative and synthesis. One way to get at that is to call to mind the Old Testament and its traditions, the people who represent those traditions, and how it lives itself into the life of the church. So, if you look at the Old Testament, you immediately realize that four kinds of persons come into view: prophets, priests, sages, and psalmists.

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The prophetic and the priestly traditions can be most easily construed in systematic ways, and they tend to gather communities around them across long trajectories So, for example, Protestant, small p, Catholic, small c. Protestant ones tend to be more prophetic. Catholic ones tend to be more priestly.

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The wisdom literature of the sages is less easy to systematize and less likely to gather communities around it, except in the sense of schools, within the broader community of the church's prophetic and priestly strands. And I suppose you could describe the wisdom tradition as more aphoristic than systematic, though obviously it has systematic pieces in its schools. The tradition of the psalmists is the least easy to systematize.

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Like the Psalter itself, which begins with wisdom and then encompasses both priestly and prophetic and moves to doxology, it is related to David and to the royal tradition, which tells the story of the monarch's victory. But this is a strange monarch because this is a monarch who cares about the poor and the oppressed and wins the battle on their behalf.

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This narrative can be less easily systematized because it relates to all of life before God, all of life in its lament and praise, and it finally turns into doxology. Like the Psalms, it cries out to be sung. And as soon as you add music to this mix, it gets more messy, less systematic, more swampy. The nature of the musical beast is swampiness.

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That's not a bad thing. I'm not attacking that. That's not a bad thing. That is the nature of the beast.

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Now, what that means is that musicians have been among the most ecumenical people in the church, the most ecumenical people in the church. What do we do? We play for all bunch of different traditions, and we have to figure them out, much more than any other group. Musicians tend to be about narrative and synthesis that calls into question two easy systems.

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So if the musician is in a prophetic community, it's likely to indicate by the musician's doing and being that something else is there. Musicians say, and by their music demonstrate, that life is more than little systems that have their day. and that life before God is a rich mosaic of praise and lament that sings. Or, to say the same thing in another way, the church is not only defined by pulpit, font, and table, which does, in fact, define it, but not only.

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It is defined by people who gather around pulpit, font, and table, and sing. Right? Now, let me make clear what that suggests. That does not mean that music is a bearer of grace like word and sacraments.

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It does not mean that. It affirms word and sacraments by singing around them. It also does not suggest that the systematic is a bad thing. It affirms the systematic as it affirms the synthetic, and it reminds us that everything is not one thing, and that health

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means many things working together for the good of the whole. Point three, community. What I just said already suggests something about community. Let me say something more specifically about that.

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Music and musicians point to the nature of the church as community. The church sings not as soloists, but it sings as community. Solos have their place in that community, certainly.

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Solos have their place. But precisely in that community, they have their place. They do not have their place as separate from it or as Trump's on it. And church musicians know this instinctively.

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because they know they have to help a whole people sing. And if they are to do this well, they have to get out of the way. That's why church musicians discover quickly they can lead from the back, or the front, or the side. And they do it with rhythmic and musical means.

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But they have to get out of the way. They will teach, they will direct, they will help, they will encourage, they will do whatever it takes to help enliven the song, but ultimately they know that the people will do it. The people will do it or not. I mean, the people can say we're not going to do it too.

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All sorts of things are possible. But they know that the people will do it, and they, as musicians, cannot substitute for it nor force it, either one. That is different from the prophet who preaches, it is different from the priest who prays, it is different from the sage who speaks wisdom.

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Those people are all related to the community in profoundly important ways, but they can do their work alone in a way that the musician cannot. The musician is always dealing with the sounding form of the body of Christ, which in a way, a very curious way, she or he embodies. If I help you sing, there is a certain sense, by my voice I mean, there is a certain sense in which the sound of the community is embodied in me.

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there is also a sense in which the sound is not embodied in me. Both of those things are true. That is, that kind of thing is not true for the prophet, the priest, or the sage. It is true for the musician.

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That is why the best church musicians are often the people who are little known, who go about their business hidden in their communities. We don't know about those people. What we hear about is all the fights.

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The stuff that's really happy, that's going on in healthy communities. We don't hear about those musicians so much. And they are not the American idol.

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They are not. They are not. They are not the concert star. Unlike the prophet or the priest, as I said, they don't even have to be seen to leave their communities.

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They can do their work from behind, from within, by means of sound, by means of rhythmic sensitivity. Four. Church music and the church musician point us to another set of poles, the stuff of the folk and the stuff of the highest art. I talked about this yesterday.

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Let me try to unpack it a little bit more here, and I'll come back to it in another point later. There are these two pieces of the church's music historically. the stuff of the folk, the congregation, and the choral part, with all sorts of interesting histories. Your tradition has emphasized the congregational at the expense of the choral, but you've changed your mind about that, as I've said.

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But when you look at the whole history of the church, you have these two pieces. The folk part is the singing that is part of the health of the whole human race. It is greater than the sum of its parts.

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The choral part is what amateur and professional musicians practice to help the congregation, as I said yesterday, and to sing what the congregation cannot sing. The folk stuff is the deeply communal lore of the human race. And for the church, that means the deeply communal lore of the church. It is tested and shaped by time, like water flowing over rocks, and it is accessible to all.

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The stuff of the highest art is the most polished work of the finest practitioners and artists who bring us craft, beauty, and insight. which only the hard, disciplined work of extensive practice makes possible. Church music is a particularly vivid embodiment of those two parts of the church's life, the stuff of the folk and the stuff of the practicing craftsperson. We are always tempted to choose one or the other, but church music tells us

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It is a faulty choice. It is not a question of one or the other. It's each and the other which feed one another. So, as Mel suggested yesterday in her comments, it is not a question of only a Bach cantata or the congregation's song.

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It is both. And the nature of the folk hymn, however you understand that, is not to be judged by a Bach cantata. The same as a Bach cantata is not to be judged by a folk hymn.

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There are two strands here, each of which has its integrity, each of which is important. And there are musical criteria for both. It is not a question of the absence of criteria for one or the other, or applying one set of criteria to the other. It's both and.

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And there are musical criteria. For example, for the congregation's singing, ask yourself this question, at the base of all of our traditions, what is there? The congregation's song stands alone without accompaniment. If a piece of music can stand without accompaniment, it probably has a shot at being congregational, but just think about this.

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Gregorian chant, the congregational strand, is for voices in unison alone. Genevan Psalm tunes, voices in unison alone. Lutheran chorals, voices in unison alone. John Wesley, voices in unison alone.

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Now, he lived at a different time. And he didn't always have that, and he's very interesting to figure out what's going on. But his ideal is unison singing. John Bell.

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What does John Bell do with the congregation? He sings. The congregation sings, right? Nothing else is needed.

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That does not rule out instruments. Of course instruments are fine things. Your tradition at one point said they weren't. You change your mind about that one, too.

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Okay. I'm not trying to rule out instruments. I'm just saying what's at the heart of the matter. What we have argued about recently is instrumental styles.

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They're secondary. Instrumental styles are not the issue here. The congregation's song is at issue, and there are musical things going on there that you can talk about and we can figure out. Another question is, Is it worth learning?

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What seems immediately accessible may not be worth learning. Our lives are short. And really, I mean, we've got to say, what's worth learning?

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And the question Mel asks about at the end of your life, whether you can still sing it, is a very interesting question. Two illustrations. A woman in a church, she's attended all of her life, lives across the street from the church. She goes blind.

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She still can move, talk, think, speak, sing all those things. And she goes across the street to church. She cannot sing anything because they have changed everything. Completely changed everything.

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She cannot sing anything. Another church. An old man with Alzheimer's, in a wheelchair, can hardly talk. The church has not changed everything.

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They still sing a whole hunk of stuff that he sings. They sing a hunk of other stuff, too, that he can't sing. It's a big mix, but he sings, even though he can't always talk. You all know John Wesley's directions for singing.

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Learn these tunes before you learn any others, and then other ones you want. Why? Because you want a core that a congregation can sing. Sing them exactly as printed here.

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That can sound arrogant, but what Wesley realized is you can't have a billion different versions of the tune and expect us to sing. You've got to make a decision. This is where the tire hits the road. Sing all.

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See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can, that not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing. Sing lustily and with good courage. Sing.

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But notice the next one. Sing modestly, do not bawl. B-A-W-L. So as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation.

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Sing in time. Above all, sing spiritually. What is going on there? Well, it's clear

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that there are some criteria, there are some musical criteria by which you can make judgments about the congregation's singing. So then, you make them. And there are two pieces here. There's high art and there's the congregation's piece.

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And people like John Wesley have figured out something about that, and we can all learn from it. Fifth, This is a more complicated one. Jeremy Begbe is among those who have brought to consciousness theological and musical intersections.

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If you want a title for this piece, it's Relationships, maybe. Some of these may seem abstruse, and they sometimes bear on things that may be abstruse. But they also do bear on things that musicians know and do by instinct. And they have profound implications when you begin to articulate them.

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Here's one of them. And as I say, this could be understood about relationships. Unlike things in space, like this pew, right? Unlike things in space, which we see, music exists in time.

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When a pitch sounds, however, you can speak metaphorically about the space it inhabits. So as Begbe says, we do not only hear a pitch in one zone of that space, we hear a pitch in the entirety of that oral space. If you play a second pitch,

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You don't hear the second pitch in one zone of the oral space. You hear both pitches in the entirety of that oral space. Unlike the things we see, which cannot be, two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, two pews can't be in the same place at the same time, right? Unlike that,

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Sounds can simultaneously occupy the same oral space, do occupy the same oral space. Now, it is our tendency to think with our visual minds that two opinions cannot coexist, that one has to drive out the other. So we are perpetually in our individual persons and in our traditions, trying to force our opinion, our will, on the other, trying to drive out the other one.

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But what if our oral sense, A-U-R-A-L, modified that perspective? What if, like two pitches living together, we realized that two or more opinions or two or more traditions not only can coexist, but they might even be enhanced by the other. I suspect that something like that is what Bernard of Clairvaux had in mind when he said, Hearing will restore vision to us.

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Hearing will restore our vision. It's a very interesting comment, I think. Now, I realize this can be construed in wrong ways. The church can make no peace with oppression.

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Period. End. Punct. No peace with oppression.

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There are some things which are just plain wrong. Period. And mindless celebrations of diversity can easily be chaotic tolerance, which is little more than hidden hostility. Right?

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All this diversity talk among us, which is not bad. The diversity piece is a good idea. But it can mask hidden hostility and be very, very dangerous, I think. But I don't think we have to construe this reality that Begbe is getting at in those ways.

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We can and should construe it as the essence of community, where each individual pitch, each part of the tradition, shares with all the other ones and is affirmed and made more whole by all the rest. So as Tom suggested yesterday, your tradition and mine, the Calvinist and the Lutheran traditions, tend to want to say, the way we will operate is to think things out. And when we get them thought out, we will worship.

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Right? That's the way we tend to operate. Cyril Richardson, one of my wonderful profs at Union Seminary, when he was talking about different traditions, said, as Tom indicated, about the Anglican tradition, Christianity is to be prayed before it is to be thought.

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Christianity is to be prayed before it is to be thought. Do those have to be either/or? Or is it possible that we each have some insights and that we can figure this out in some kind of way together? Is there a time for presence?

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Is there a time for the teaching moment? To use Tom's categories from yesterday, I think there is. And I think the reality of music points us to something about that. Sixth, music has ecological implications because it is about sound.

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Every sound, every musical pitch, as you all know, has within it or above it a harmonic series. which is built by God into the natural order. Whether we like it or not, when you make a sound, there is this harmonic series above it. One implication is that order is an ecology which relates to what?

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Our architecture, to the spaces we inhabit, to the way we use or misuse the stuff of nature, to our common life generally, and to how we treat one another. There are ecological implications in our musical being and doing. Seven. As David said before, music relates to beauty and the beauty of holiness.

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That has often been interpreted as meaning one style, one dynamic level, one rhythm, one tempo, or something like that. That is not the point. Beauty has something to do with the ordering of musical materials, their crafting, and their practice breaking into something beyond themselves, which we call beauty.

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If Luther is right, we are to craft the gift of sound into this amazing reality where one voice sings around another, and where an order, a beautiful order, points beyond the quotidian, points into the quotidian, but beyond it. It points into, yet beyond, speech. It points into, yet beyond, human life.

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Since sound is embedded in the creation, the next thing to be said about that is that it is for everybody. You can't classify it according to classes, although classes have tried to do that. It is for everybody. The whole works is for everybody.

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The crafting is for everybody. And parenthesis here, it also has implications for us who lead it. It means that a beautiful phrase needs to be given its shape. We

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to give the congregation its breath, right? There's beauty there. It's not that what the congregation sings is just this drab stuff, and what somebody else does is beautiful. No! There's beautiful stuff inherent in both.

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And let us be clear about this as well. Beautiful congregational singing is not about the St. Olaf choir. I love the St.

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Olaf choir. I love the Robert Shaw Chorale. I love great choirs. I've been a conductor and I love to conduct them.

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The sound of the congregation is not determined by that ideal I have in my head for my choir. No. It's determined by these people who are here at this moment and sing. Old, young, middle-aged, whatever.

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This sound, this sound, this embodied incarnational sound is the ideal. As soon as we superimpose upon it some other ideal, we're in trouble. No, no. God comes among us in the flesh, in this flesh that we inhabit and we sing.

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Or to say these things a little bit more precisely theologically, as Robert Jensen, one of your former lecturers, said them, God is beauty. The Trinity sings, and our enjoyment of God is that we are taken into the triune singing. God is beauty, the Trinity sings, and our enjoyment of God is that we are taken into the triune singing. There is a lot of profound stuff there that we can unpack.

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That whole cluster is about theology and music. Now I want to talk about hymnody and the church. Hymn, text, tune, hymn tune, music. We tend to put them together because they get understood as a package.

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But a hymn is a text, a hymn tune is music. Now I'm moving to something that's broader. I'm going to talk about hymnody, especially with reference to texts. But then not only texts, it also involves music.

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But just realize the distinction. As some of you realize, as Ted said yesterday, I'm working on the Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship. So I'm writing up a little commentary about every text, every author, every translator, every tune, every composer, and some arrangers in the whole book.

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So that's 650 entries. In the process, I am relearning what hymn that he teaches us about all sorts of stuff. Let me now try to detail what some of those things are. So if you're with me, this is number eight in this list.

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The hymnony of the church points to the center of the Christian faith and its worship, God. That may be obvious, we don't always act as if it's obvious. The hymnony of the church points to God. Let me indicate three ways in which this is true.

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One, in the text, in the hymns of the church, the words are about God. And a symbol of this is the Trinitarian doxology, which tends to follow so many hymns. The hymnody moves toward doxology. The texts themselves within the text are already about God, but doxology comes at the end.

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Two, you realize there are some remarkable partnerships that are not about the havoc that is created by the jerks among us, but about some remarkable partnerships. Calvin, encouraging, Moreau, Bazin, and Bourgeois. And you realize Calvin also got Bourgeois to jail, right?

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when Bourgeois out Calvin Calvin, or the community out Calvin Calvin, by putting Bourgeois in jail for messing around with the tune, right? And Calvin got him out of jail, right? Okay. So that's one partnership.

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In my tradition, Gerhard and Krieger, or among us today, until recently, Vida and Schock. Vida just died. So there are wonderful partnerships there. Third, actual musical singing.

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This is not only from my work in the Companion, but as a church musician and as the director of my program. I visit all my students. I visit many, many churches. And I can tell almost immediately, as soon as I walk in, what the relationship is between pastor, musician, and people.

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I can't tell you how, but I can tell. And if relationships are healthy, It is more rather than less likely that the congregation will sing. There are...

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communities across this country, rural, urban, suburban, doesn't matter where, where congregational singing happens. And the congregations that are happy, that are healthy, happy in the deepest sense, are ones that sing. And what is the nature of that song? It points to God, not to the leaders.

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The characteristic is that the pastor and the musician know how to get out of the way and let the song happen. So, the point here is that hymnity points to God at the center. Nine. Hymnity teaches us about our confessional identities

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and the ecumenical whole to which they relate. I mentioned this yesterday. Let me try to unpack it a little bit more. The confessional flavor of a given group is present in its hymnody.

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The ELW about which I am writing this companion is clearly a Lutheran confessional book. Anybody who looks at it will see that immediately. Your work on the Presbyterian hymnal that Mel is working on here will make a Presbyterian book. That's what you will do.

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Those are good things, as long as we embrace our various traditions with bold humility and regard them as the gifts they are to the whole ecumenical mosaic, not as weapons to destroy one another. And what I want to say here is that our various traditions make an amazing mosaic. Think about this.

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The Eastern Church has John of Damascus and a massive hymnological treasury. The Western Church, before the Reformation, has Ambrose, breviaries, sequences, lizen. From the 16th century forward, we have Moravians, Johann Horn through Zinzendorf and beyond. Lutherans have Luther through Gerhard and Beyond translated by Winkworth.

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Calvinists have metrical psalters and watts. Anabaptists have martyr ballads. After the Reformation, Methodists have John Wesley's little book of experimental and practical divinity. Anglicans have John Mason Neal and hymns ancient and modern.

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Groups to numerous dimension have more and more and more and more. And the whole treasury is available to us in our hymnals. You realize the whole treasury is available to us in our hymnals.

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That is amazing. So what I'm doing here teaches me again about our confessional identities and the ecumenical whole, the two. Ten. The hymnody of the church points to the fullness and integrity of the big themes as they encompass smaller ones.

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The hymns of Advent, for example, hold together what? Announcing, rejoicing at, waiting for Christ who is to come, or who came, is present among us and will come again, and who brings justice, peace, truth, freedom, love. 11. The themes of the various sections of hymnals join together many other themes from other sections.

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And the totality, as for individual hymns themselves, transcends both the parts and the whole. Hymnody, again, is synthetic, not systematic. And by its very nature, its individual parts and its whole draw together many connections.

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And they draw these together in a totality about the Christian faith that is fundamentally doxological and cannot be easily systematized, guess what, like the Psalms. Twelve. The song includes various ethnic materials. In addition to the German, Slovak, and Scandinavian ones that are native to Lutherans and to the book I'm working on, the ELW, just in the Advent section, includes Yiddish, Korean, Cameroon, French, Italian, Basque, and Catalonian contributions.

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The Christmas section includes Irish, Chinese, Native American, French, African-American, Malawi, and Catalonian ones. Hymnody reminds us that the faith is expressed in many ways in many different cultures, and it guards us against seeing our ethnic envelopes as if they were the only one. Hymnody guards us against idolatry if we treat hymnody with its fullness. And we can interpret it to mean only us, but that's a disaster, an idolatrous disaster.

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Thirteen, back to the point I made before, I want to just unpack it a little bit more. To work on the hymnody of the church reminds us that there is this whole choral and instrumental stream, as well as the hymnic one. And this other stream includes composers like Hildegard, Machaut, Palestrina, Bach, Brahms, Messiaen, et cetera, where the mystery of the faith can be explored in lengthier ways than hymns can do.

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It also reminds us of the oratorio tradition, Now, this does not mean any one of those streams is better than the other. It points to their complementarity and to the rich mix of the church's being. It points to the church's rich mix of art, theology, and life together, which cannot be comprehended as one thing,

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but in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think one of our problems is to make category mistakes. Tom suggested it yesterday at the question and answer session. What did he say?

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We have tried to make worship evangelism. All right, now, worship and evangelism are not unrelated, granted, but they are not the same thing. And to force one on the others to make a category mistake. Another category mistake,

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Confusing the oratorio tradition with worship. Worship, I just wrote an article about this for cross accent. The worship tradition involves participants, a community. We know what we're doing.

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I mean, all sorts of different things happen as well, but we participate. The oratorio tradition assumes spectators. That's the nature of the oratorio tradition. To superimpose one on the other is a category mistake.

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Third category mistake, to make the choral tradition the congregational tradition, or the congregational tradition the choral one. There are a whole series of category mistakes, I think, here, which get us into trouble. If Scott is right, they're sort of like over-steering, maybe, as well. And it behooves us.

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The church will find its way. It takes a long time to do that. We'll find our way. But it would be helpful if we would think this out carefully.

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14, hymnody reminds us that the church is not only about our time and place, but about a long trajectory across long stretches of time and place. So hymnals are filled with many contributions from people who are active among us today. As one should expect, God addresses us now. But they are also filled with contributions of people from many other times and places, since we are united with the baptized who have gone before us and who have given us their gifts.

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For Advent, the ELW, which I'm analyzing, includes at least eight centuries and 17 countries. For Christmas, at least nine centuries and 14 countries. That reminds us that we have not invented the Christian faith We have received it.

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We are responsible to live it out and pass it on without our blinders as the control. Or to change the metaphor, we surely need to clean out the brush from time to time, surely. But the spring is much bigger than we or any time and place can possibly understand. To stop the spring as if we had the whole spring is a huge mistake.

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15. Hymnody reminds us that the church is made-up of all sorts and conditions of people. Men and women of high and low degree are contributors to the church's hymnody, and they come from many stations and many walks of life. Many.

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16. Hymnody teaches us that a wide variety of talents, vocations, and abilities is welcomed. Some of the church's finest hymn writers, translators, composers, and arrangers are represented with their tunes and their hymns. For some of these people, hymnody can be seen at least as a part of their vocation.

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Take Charles Wesley, for example. Now, Charles Wesley, I don't know if he would say his vocation was him writing, but in some sense, you have to say that's his vocation. Partially, at least, it's his vocation. But there are other little-known people who have made one single contribution whose primary vocation is not hymnody.

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Howard Haughey, for example, who translated Cold December Flies Away. That's the only one he's done. He did it as a college student, all right? He's a computer programmer, right?

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He's not primarily, his vocation is not writing hymns. He has made one contribution, a very valuable contribution. 17. What the church has found enduring is present in our hymnity along with newer expressions.

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The newer ones may or may not last, which teaches us about the durability of the faith across long stretches of time, as well as its incarnational reach into every time and every place. 18. Him and he teaches us about the Church's struggle for vernacular which is just. and by extension, how this relates to our common life.

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It is about the struggle to find language in our generation which will express the mystery of the faith. And it is about inclusivity, which also respects the memory bank. It's about a variety of musical styles, and we do not agree about these things. Let me tell you my surprise a few years ago.

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As you know, I run the Master of Sacred Music Program at Luther Seminary with St. Olaf College. Every second year I teach a course for undergraduates at St. Olaf, a course in hymnity, the music of the church for undergraduates.

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Several years ago when I was teaching that course, I assumed, and I should say this, I assumed that we had figured out At least the question of inclusivity with reference to humanity. And we could not use gender-exclusive pronouns for the human race. We can't call the whole human race him.

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I thought. A few years ago, and I tend to circle pronouns that are used that way on papers, students' papers. They don't have to agree with me when I circle them because I tell them I think this is an important issue. Okay.

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Several years ago, I realized my class was getting antsy. And I said to them, OK, what's going on here? And the women said, get off our backs.

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The women! For the men, it was fine. They weren't rabid about it, but it was fine. Just before, though, I had been a plenary speaker at a Roman Catholic conference in which I had said something about inclusivity. And a young woman who was a college-age woman came up afterwards at the question session, sort of, and said, will you please stop talking about inclusivity?

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It is not important. There was a woman just behind her who was considerably older, maybe twice her age, who overheard it. And she said to me, as soon as the young lady left, will you not stop talking about inclusivity? Because she doesn't know what we fought for.

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OK. Now, here you go. I mean, I think language programs the computer. I mean, I think it's really critical stuff, but we don't agree about this.

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And here's the puzzle. When you edit a hymnal, you have to make decisions. In my class, I can talk about that. I love it.

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I mean, we can disagree. We can argue about it in all sorts of ways. It's wonderful. But for hymnal and for the congregation singing, you have to make a decision.

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You realize there are some congregations who have come to a halt over this issue. One group said, We will not sing if you change the pronouns. The other group said, We will not sing if you don't change the pronouns, right? Okay, and they stopped.

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You have to make a decision somehow. A hymnal represents the checks and balances of our current state of the conversation. And it teaches us that nobody gets his or her own way. But in the process, it also does teach us about justice.

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You cannot avoid-- it seems to me, at least-- you cannot avoid the requirements of justice among us, whatever that is going to mean and however we're going to figure it out, 19. Hymnony represents an amazing variety and diversity among us, not only of styles, but of the ephemeral and the experimental, as well as the durable and the well-worn, what is fundamentally congregational, pushed here and there, to what is choral and soloistic, pushes all over the place. It teaches us, I think, that we have a wide variety of theological and liturgical opinions and traditions among us.

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And it teaches us that most of our disputes have little or nothing to do with the substance of the faith that are inconsequential. Not all of them. Justice is important, for example. But a whole bunch of our disputes are pretty irrelevant when you start to look at the stretches of the Church's history.

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Further, the Church's hymnody, when it's allowed to sing in its fullness, has the unique capacity to pull together many strands so that in the richness of the Church's evangelical and Catholic being, things somehow are harnessed. In hymnody, this is done poetically and musically, but it suggests that pulling this whole thing together has implications for the life of the Church in a much wider context. Studying the churches. hymnody teaches us the mystery of people who have created the church's hymns and its tunes are faithful Christian witnesses with all the same foibles we've got.

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Huh? They're faithful Christian witnesses, but they're also as broken as we are. It's an incredible stream of witnesses. It's a question of how you handle this.

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Grundwig, built on the rock, the church, the stand in my tradition, I discovered, was a tutor in a house where the husband was gone for long stretches, and he was tutoring the child, and he got interested in the hostess. The hostess attracted him. He apparently never acted on the impulse, but he realized something was going on here. Do I include that?

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I said to the campus pastor, Do I include this? He said, Yeah. People have to know that normal human beings were writing these hymns with all the impulses that all of us have, good ones and bad ones. That was 20, 21.

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The church is often rightly criticized for doing awful things that do not fit its being. for not witnessing to what God has done, for not carrying out its mandate to care for the individual neighbor, for not worrying about communal requirements of social justice that hurt or help different people depending on how they're construed, for disenfranchising the poor and the oppressed and all the rest of it. That's true. We need to admit that candidly.

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The study of hymnody, however, reveals that things are not quite so simple, at least in some measure. The criticisms are often more related to superficial glitter and pseudo-church than to substantive living in the Church itself. In the Church's song, those who have made it possible indicate that the Church has been proclaiming the words, celebrating the sacraments, praying and caring for the other at individual and systemic levels. In all sorts of ways, all over the place, a study of hymnody and worship teaches us more generally that the community of the church is a community of faith that gathers in song around word, font, and table, and then embodies its song in words and deeds that, like a grain of mustard seed, are often unseen.

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Often unseen. Let me give you some illustrations. Ambrose, the father of church song, right? Latin hymnony, at least -- when he became Bishop of Milan, gave some of his property to the Church, adopted simple clothing, cultivated prayer, defended the Church against paganism and Arianism, devoted himself to study, writing, preaching, and the discipline of the clergy, cared for the poor and the oppressed, and the instruction of catechumens, one of whom was Augustine.

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Gregory the Great, known as the father of chant, not only supported the liturgy singing in the School of Cantorum at Rome, but donated his money to charity, wrote a book on pastoral care. Percy Dearmer not only wrote hymns, was the general editor of the English Hymnal, and with Vaughan Williams' Songs of Praise, wrote his handbook. He also opened a canteen. At Westminster Abbey in 1931, we became canon.

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Susan Sherwin, one of our best hymn writers among us, went to New Orleans with her church to help build a church. rebuilt a house after the tornado. James Montgomery not only wrote hymns like Angels from the Realms of Glory and Hail to the Lord's Anointed, but was convicted and imprisoned for a poem commemorating the fall of Bastille and for reporting on a riot in a paper he edited. He spoke out against social injustices like the slave trade and child labor, and he supported foreign missions in the Bible Society.

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Shirley Arena Murray not only wrote Touch of the Earth Lightly, but was religious affairs coordinator for Amnesty International. Marian Pope has not only translated Korean hymns into English, but was a missionary to Korea from the United Church of Canada, and since her retirement has worked with and advocated for the marginalized through Trinity St. Paul's United Church in Toronto. All those examples pop out at you.

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22. The church sings praise and lament. Alleluia, Kyrie, Psalm 150, Psalm 22, Psalm 133, how good and pleasant it is to dwell in unity. And Psalm 137, by the waters of Babylon we wept and wanted to dash Babylon's infants on rocks and wanted to do it happily.

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All right, you've got to be careful. If we don't sing that, we're going to have high school kids shooting people because we repress it. If we do sing it, we better be careful that we don't become a mob.

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The checks and balances of the whole song help. We sing the Lord is in my light and my salvation, Psalm 27. We sing Psalm 88. Darkness is my only companion.

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Sing the whole thing. We sing Fiesta and Lisbon. Fiesta and Lisbon. We may be afraid to sing praise,

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and lament in its fullness. But the hymn of the church teaches us that's what the church sings. That is what the church sings for 20 centuries. Last point.

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Final hymns suggest the seriousness of the church's purpose. Hymn singing is fun, or better, perhaps delightful play, just like all music making. But it is not mindless diversion. that gives a church a break from the important stuff.

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It is not, as Mel suggests, singing verses 1 and 4. It is the sounding form of the body of Christ, with its own discipline and integrity, gathered and refined from the riches of the church's practice over centuries and laced with new things to be tried. That is no small matter. It symbolizes the serious tasks to which the church is called in our time and place and in other times and places.

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And it symbolizes it not only in music, for music and for hymnody, but for all things. I wish you well as you set your minds and hearts to the task. Thanks.